San Onofre nuclear power plant prohibited from restarting
Source: The Los Angeles Times
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, citing serious concerns about equipment failures at the San Onofre nuclear power plant, has prohibited Southern California Edison from restarting the plant until the problems are thoroughly understood and fixed.
The plant has been shut down for two months, the longest in San Onofre's history, after a tube leak in one of the plant's steam generators released a small amount of radioactive steam. Since then, unusual wear has been found on hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water.
Neither regulators nor Edison have said when they believe the plant will reopen. San Onofre is a major supplier of power for Southern California, producing about 2,200 megawatts of power, or enough electricity to serve 1.4 million households. It is Southern California's only nuclear power plant.
State officials are already working on contingency plans to avoid power outages during the summer months if the plant remains out of commission. They are considering transmission upgrades, bringing back retired generating units at a natural gas plant in Huntington Beach and launching new conservation efforts, including flex-alerts to encourage customers to use less energy.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0328-san-onofre-20120328,0,1692312.story
= new reply since forum marked as read
...in CA....or anywhere in the US....
If we dont wake up and learn the lessons from Fukushima, we will be destined to repeat the same..... 
And the system worked like it should, they found issues, shut the plant down, will evaluate and determine proper steps to take.
Good job guys! 
Let's decommission San Onofre and Diablo Canyon before an earthquake does it for us.
It would be far worse than Fukushima, since there is so much spent fuel on-site,
and the prevailing winds would blow the fallout into the most heavily populated parts of California.
long after the plant is shut down.
Nobody wants to move it, so it'll just sit there.
In Minnesota, we keep our spent fuel from Prairie Island in a shack out back on the Mississippi river flood plain.
Nope, don't see anything wrong with that. 
The NRC is a slave to the nuclear industry; it is a classic case of regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture is a theory associated with George Stigler, a Nobel laureate economist. It is the process by which regulatory agencies eventually come to be dominated by the very industries they were charged with regulating. Regulatory capture happens when a regulatory agency, formed to act in the public's interest, eventually acts in ways that benefit the industry it is supposed to be regulating, rather than the public.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp#axzz1qRzPl4qG
NIRS has obtained nearly 2,000 pages of documents on the Davis-Besse affair under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents show that despite receiving false statements from First Energy, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was aware that Davis-Besse was operating in violation of its license, yet still allowed the reactor to keep running.
Revelations into the near-miss accident at Davis-Besse go far beyond the reactor site perched on the shores of the Great Lakes near Toledo, Ohio. They warn of a dangerous gambit being played by atomic corporations in an increasingly competitive electricity market where public safety is sacrificed to ambitious production schedules. These revelations show that the NRC is willing to turn a blind eye on safety regulations to accommodate these same
In early March 2002, First Energy (FE), true to its name, revealed a policy to drive electricity production ahead of federal safety requirements. This official policy of mismanagement pushed its Davis-Besse nuclear plant to the brink of disaster. Moreover, senior engineers at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) realized a "high likelihood" that the reactor was so damaged that the risk of a nuclear accident grew greater with continued operation. Yet, federal officials were unable to issue an order to immediately shut the reactor for the necessary inspection and repair. Instead, the agency chose to ignore safety regulations and gamble with disaster to accommodate the financial interest of yet another corporate delinquent.
An NRC bulletin issued in August 2001 called for utilities operating pressurized water reactors (PWR) to inspect for dangerous cracks found in nozzles that penetrate the top of the reactor and house control rod drive mechanisms (CRDM). The NRC bulletin followed the discovery of cracks in Duke Power's Oconee reactor (see 553.5309, "US: NRC ignores widespread safety flaw for decade"
. Operators were instructed to look for "popcorn-like" traces of boron crystals as reactor coolant escaping from nozzle cracks. The bulletin warned that unchecked cracking in nozzles could grow to component failure, a loss-of- coolant-accident and reactor core damage. NRC required all operators to report inspection results to the agency by 31 December 2001.
However, Davis-Besse operators were eager to complete its two-year operating cycle scheduled for a refueling ...
http://www.klimaatkeuze.nl/wise/monitor/575/5448
More photos here:
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/kristopher/825
