The Radiation Readings At San Onofre Are Very High

This week Stab was forwarded an alarming email that indicates that radiation levels in the storage facility where the spent fuel and waste from Reactor 1 is being housed are well above anything normal.

The containers, built by the French company Areva, were originally installed in 2001 when Reactor 1 was decommissioned. In total, 51 canisters were filled and have been stored on site since for the past 17 years.

The email that Stab received indicated that a San Clemente resident named Darin McClure recently toured the plant wearing a Bgeigie–a handheld radiation monitor, which allowed him to measure radiation levels wherever he went.

In total, he took over 1,000 readings.

“We were at the vents of almost all of the spent fuel containments. This data comes from the Bgeigie at my waist,” reported McClure.

The findings proved to be startling.

“Highest reading over 2000 CPM, 6.06 µSv/h at oldest Areva canister near the inlet air vent,” indicated the report from McClure’s endeavor.

Here at Stab, we don’t profess to be nuclear engineers, but we can tell you that from what we could discern, those readings are well above average. 

Whatever that measurement means in technical and scientific terms, the fact is, that out at sea, McClure’s device measured the atmosphere at 50 CPM. In the heart of the Areva storage facility, the reading was 2,000 CPM. That’s 40 times higher.

“Areva canisters may already be leaking,” speculated one thread in the email chain.

At this point in time, Southern California Edison, which operates the plant and is overseeing its decommissioning, does not have any real-time monitoring onsite. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission mandates that they only take readings once a quarter and file a report annually.

This comes on the heels of a whistleblower coming forward about a near miss with the loading of a new canister from the decommissioning of Reactor 2.

According to Public Watchdogs executive director, Charles Langley, “Somebody at the NRC should have been fired for allowing Edison to install experimental nuclear equipment without the required design review. That didn't happen. Instead the NRC covered up its own malfeasance.”

“On August 3, 2018, workers at the USA’s largest privately-operated beachfront nuclear waste dump nearly dropped a canister filled with a 105,000-pound payload of deadly nuclear waste,” continued Langley.

“In the wake of a near-miss nuclear disaster at San Onofre, and public admissions that the canisters being used to store deadly nuclear waste have defective components, an embattled Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is refusing to allow independent observers at SONGS, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. We are deeply concerned that this new inspection is just another coverup of the NRC's failure to regulate recidivist utilities.”

And you thought a three-day longboard comp at Lowers was bad...