Letter: Not comforted after PG&E Diablo safety report
To the editor:
Unbelievable. Somehow I don’t feel any comfort in PG& E’s confirmation that Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant can withstand a worse-case scenario earthquake on multiple faults surrounding the plant.
This plant was designed in the 60’s and has been licensed since 1982. It is old. The original engineering, planning and building of the plant on multiple faults is unsettling – pun intended.
But this is no joking matter. Fukushima Daiichi was lauded as being the safest plant in the world – then the 9.1 earthquake and tsunami shook it to the ground and below. To this day, four years later the devastation is still taking place to the ocean, land, people and animals. Fukushima was like San Luis Obispo – a place of bucolic beauty, farms, homesteads – a place where people from Tokyo and other urban areas would go to relax and enjoy the countryside. Now it is uninhabitable – a dead zone.
California falls into the highest seismic risk category in the nation, the frequency of earthquakes is 10 times higher than the world as a whole. Recent studies on faults connecting and causing greater ground movement has made the decades old design basis of Diablo Canyon antiquated. PG&E bypassed the Independent Peer Review Panel’s assessment of their study and went ahead to proclaim stability.
No one knows the worse case scenario – learn from Fukushima.
By Marty Brown of Atascadero
