San Onfre update

Well, in an update to my blog stories published March 16th and May 1 of this year respectively, the damage at San Onfre is much, much worse than originally thought. According to this post on the Huffington Post's website they now say it contains at least 1,300 which carry wastewater in this plant are bad or otherwise unusable.

This news was released by Southern California Edison, the owners of said facility. But the question in my mind and it should be in everyone elses mind at the time also is whether or not we can believe the corporate power that own this facility. And of course I am alluding to the fact that BP grossly misreported their 2010 Deepwater/horizon oil leak, which makes me very, very skeptical of the numbers that they are now reporting for the San Onfre environmental disaster!

Each of the units are reported to have 10,000 tubes in each unit. But Southern California has said they are within tolerances for each of their units. Furthermore it is believed that the cracks in each of said tubes was caused from metal fatigue from vibration. And the company believes running it at less than 100% of its rated output will solve this problem.

I would have to question where they have deduced such hypothesis from. Have they known about this problem for awhile now, or did they just now learn of it. Additionally, what is the cause of such vibrations? Surely they must have a culprit in mind!

In a related statement a spokesman for said company has said, on record, that there is no timetable for restart and it is subject to change in a moments notice. Approval is required by the NRC or some other such agency before these units can be operated again. But all of this speaks to the greater problem of what is causing these stress fractures.