| Update, September 23, 2021: The good guys lost. A Superior Court Judge has ruled that the California Coastal Commission acted properly when it issued a 2019 permit to destroy the spent nuclear fuel pools at the failed San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS). |  Get the lawsuit here. |
This lawsuit, and the problem of stranded nuclear waste at the defunct San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in northern San Diego County, was highlighted on Lawrence O’Donnell’s Last Word on MSNBC in a nationally televised interview with San Diego congressman Mike Levin regarding the lawsuit by the Samuel Lawrence Foundation is in Los Angeles Superior Court court.
Throughout the interview O’Donnel referred to the SONGS location as “Earthquake Bay.” Coincidentally, this is also the title of Public Watchdogs first whitepaper on the geology of the San Onofre Nuclear Waste Dump.
Get a copy of Earthquake Bay here.
According to the Los Angeles Times “The public interest is at risk, based on [the commission’s] decision,” said Chelsi Sparti, associate director of the Samuel Lawrence Foundation, “The waste is located right next to the ocean, [and] the economy, transportation, the environmental and natural resources that we have are at risk from the long-term storage of stranded radioactive waste.”
“We need the ability to replace storage canisters as they degrade from age or damage,” foundation president Bart Ziegler said in a statement. “The only available facility is the spent fuel pool and the Coastal Commission is permitting the utility to destroy it.”
SONGS stopped generating electricity in January, 2012, after its replacement steam generators leaked a plume of radioactive steam into the environment. The failure left millions of pounds of deadly radioactive waste stranded at the facility. The radioactive waste, which is in solid form as “used-up nuclear fuel” is deadly for at least 250,000 years. It is being stored in containers that are only guaranteed to last 25 years.
In a separate legal action, Public Watchdogs filed legal documents requesting a hearing before the Supreme Court of the United States of America.