BREAKING NEWS: IS NUCLEAR POWER DONE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA?

San Onofre nuclear power plant - ecowatch.org

Will there be no more nukes in Southern California? That now appears to be a very real possibility. It's been a year now since a radioactive steam leak lead to the closure of the two aging reactors at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), which is located between San Diego and Los Angeles. The power plant is not expected to reboot any time soon, if ever.

Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a Request for Additional Information to Southern California Edison, the plant's majority owner, for its review of the company’s restart idea, asking the utility to provide evidence that reactor Unit 2 can be operated safely. 

And this morning, the California Public Utilities Commission conference marks the opening of a proceeding that will determine whether San Onofre’s operator will be allowed to pass on to its customers the costs of the plant's faulty steam generators that led to the leak. 

“The PUC meeting could be the beginning of the end for San Onofre,” S. David Freeman, former head of the Los Angles Department of Water and Power, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, said in a statement. “The issue is not just the hundreds of millions of dollars squandered on badly designed equipment or the money Edison has spent trying to reopen the plant. What will be decided is the long-term cost-effectiveness of the plant: Does it still make economic sense to operate it?"

Meanwhile, a three-judge panel of the federal Atomic Safety and Licensing Board of the NRC will consider whether Edison is required to undergo a license amendment process given the state of the damaged steam generators and Edison's unpopular request to operate one its reactors at reduced power. 

The environmental group Friends of the Earth instigated this case and will be submitting its first evidence this Friday. This could lead to lengthy hearings and sworn testimony.

Edison's controversial plan to restart one of the reactors and run it at reduced power is strongly opposed by a large and growing coalition of environmental groups and surrounding California cities that believes it could lead to disaster. The plan may also violate terms of the plant’s operating license, potentially triggering formal hearings. 

In a story I wrote back in May for The Daily Beast, Bernadette Del Chiaro, director of the Clean Energy Program at Environment California, a citizen-funded environmental-advocacy organization, told me that reopening San Onofre any time soon, even at a reduced output, could be a “recipe for disaster. It’s hard to have anything but extreme concern, since they still don’t really know what’s going on. I’m very concerned with the overall stability of these steam generators.”

Kendra Ulrich of Friends of the Earth recently said in a statement, "This experimental restart plan is yet another example of Edison’s disregard for safety and attempts to sidestep NRC regulations in the interest of making money. Whether the crippled reactor can be safely operated is a crucial question that must be answered to ensure the safety of the 8 million Southern Californians who live within 50 miles of San Onofre.”

San Onofre’s steam generators were replaced as part of a $670 million overhaul in 2009 and 2010. Friends of the Earth contends that Edison irresponsibly installed hundreds more steam tubes than in the original generators in order to gain more power, and profit. But the new defective steam generator design caused the tubes to vibrate against their supports and each other, producing premature tube wear on a massive scale.

Southern Californians are watching all this closely. San Onofre provided San Diego County with as much as 20 percent of its power. But many cities near the nuclear power plant say its reopening could lead to an unthinkable accident. 

In San Clemente, the City Council voted in July to send the a letter regarding San Onofre safety, cost and reliability concerns to the California Public Utilities Commission. The council also sent a letter to the NRC expressing concerns about safety at the plant.

In a contentious meeting in Laguna Hills in November, Edison brought out one of its nuclear engineers to try to convince regulators they should restart the plant. But protesters reportedly booed and chanted throughout the meeting. 

Even folks in such conservative So-Cal enclaves as Irvine are evidently worried about the plant reopening. The Irvine City Council also voted last spring to send a letter to the NRC expressing concerns about the plant's operation.

Bottom line? It is very possible that nuclear power's days in Southern California are over. 

BREAKING NEWS: SUPREME COURT REJECTS HISTORIC LAWSUIT AGAINST GOVERNMENT

The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it will not hear arguments in an historic lawsuit filed by two veterans groups in 2007 against the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The lawsuit, Veterans for Common Sense v. Shinseki, demanded that the VA fix its broken mental health care system. 

Last May, a federal appeals court in California voted 10–1 to dismiss the case, ruling that only Congress or the president has the authority to direct changes on how veterans are treated. The decision overturned a 2–1 ruling in 2011 by the same court, which said that the department’s “unchecked incompetence has gone on long enough,” and permitted the plaintiffs to ask a federal judge to order changes in the VA. 

The VA appealed that ruling to the larger panel, which curiously reversed the original ruling.

In September, the two plaintiffs, Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) and Veterans United for Truth (VUFT), filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case. The Court declined that request late Friday without further comment.

Now that the suit has been dropped, veterans advocates say veterans will have no legal recourse when they are unable to get prompt mental health care or are unable to get their disability claims processed in a timely manner. 

"The Supreme Court declared that a corporation is a person, but when a suicidal veteran needs emergency health care, the VA can turn that veteran away and there's nothing the veteran can do about it," says Paul Sullivan, a veterans advocate who works at Bergmann & Moore, a law firm that assists disabled veterans with their VA claims. 

Sullivan, who once worked at VA and who was largely responsible for filing this lawsuit six years ago, says the Court’s decision is “very disappointing.”

Charles Sheehan-Miles, a Gulf War veteran and veterans advocate, explained on the VCS website that this lawsuit centered on one key issue: whether the Veterans Judicial Review Act allows veterans to challenge in federal court the systemic delays in VA’s provision of mental health care and death and disability compensation. The lawsuit was hugely significant because, had it been successful, it would have enabled veterans to challenge these delays for the first time in federal court.

As I reported for The Daily Beast last year, documents the two veterans groups presented during the original two-week non-jury trial in 2008 showed that it took the VA an average of nearly four and 1/2 years to review veterans' health-care claims, that more than 1,400 veterans who’d been denied coverage died in one six-month period while waiting for their claims to conclude, and that 18 veterans per day were committing suicide.

The plaintiffs also submitted emails between VA executives that they said confirmed the agency’s plan to suppress the number of attempted suicides by veterans who were receiving VA care.

"Shhh!" began a Feb. 13, 2008, email from Dr. Ira Katz, a VA deputy chief. "Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?"

In 2007, a year before that email, I initiated a Newsweek cover story that addressed the VA’s failure to properly treat ailing veterans because of a massive backlog of claims, lack of staff, and a bureaucracy that increased the stress many former troops already felt. Nearly six years later, despite sincere efforts by the Obama Administration, the situation for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans has evidently gotten worse in a number of vital areas.

For example, according to Sullivan, the backlog of compensation claims new exceeds 1 million. Waiting times are longer, too, Sullivan says.

The veterans groups that filed this groundbreaking lawsuit appeared on 60 Minutes four years ago discussing the long waits veterans face when seeking VA assistance. For years, VCS has led the fight for reform at the VA and was instrumental in getting the VA to streamline disability benefits for PTSD.

The veterans groups that filed this suit also pushed for the creation of the Suicide Prevention Hotline which has saved more than 23,000 veterans' lives. Also thanks largely to VCS and VUFT, veterans now get five years of free healthcare, and VA has shortened veterans' disability claim forms from 26 pages to six pages.

But the Supreme Court’s decision comes as a major disappointment to many veterans advocates. A statement just released by VCS said the following:

"VA remains mired in crisis, and veterans will continue fighting to reform VA so that no veteran waits for VA healthcare or benefits.  We are deeply disappointed the Court did not hear the urgent plea of suicidal Veterans who face delays of months, and often years, seeking VA assistance. Although significant improvements were made in some areas within VA, such as a suicide hotline set up after our lawsuit that rescued 23,000 distraught veterans, the nation’s second largest department remains in deep crisis due to decades of underfunding and a lack of significant Congressional oversight of VA’s $140 billion per year budget." 

Although veterans lost on a technicality, VCS states, "no one disputes the number of preventable veteran deaths associated with VA’s negligence. Last year, the families of nearly 20,000 veterans were paid disability benefits after the Veterans died. A shocking 18 veterans commit suicide every day. More than 12,000 veterans call VA for suicide prevention each month. During our nation’s worst economic disaster in 80 years, more than 1.1 million veterans still await VA disability claim decisions. Of those, 900,000 cases wait an average of nine months for a new or re-opened claim decision, plus an additional 250,000 cases wait four more years for an appealed claim decision. VA’s Inspector General reported in 2012 that VA makes errors in approximately 30 percent of VA’s claim decisions."  

While our veterans wait, VCS concludes, "they remain unable to pay their mortgage or rent, and face great challenges feeding their families. Let us hope VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and Congressional leaders make sure VA has the funding, staffing, laws, regulations, training, and oversight urgently needed so no more veterans die while waiting."