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After fighting San Onofre for 20 years. I had to put up with an awful lot of people
telling me the waste solution is going to be Yucca Mountain.
Of course, right now, they've just, today, reopened some of the Yucca Mountain plan,
but it's not very likely and there were a lot of scientific problems. It wasn't politics,
We heard from a number of pro-nuclear people here today, but I didn't hear them discussing
solutions to the waste problem. I heard them trying to discuss for example solutions to
the climate change problem, which of course is wind, wave solar, things like that, off-shore,
space-based solar power with large mirrors -- these things exist, they can be built,
there's no problem with it, thin film technology etc. etc., lots of fancy words that describe
things that are effective now.
So we need to get rid of this waste and until we closed San Onofre, I don't think anyone
here in this room was really very good a thinking about what to do with the waste. And now we've
got a room full of people who are very concerned about it. We had a seminar last month in which
we had our own experts come in, and one told us that a shaped charge missile or weapon
can go through three feet of steel. A dry cask is three feet of concrete and maybe two
inches of steel. These are vulnerable. A 747 is a very large airplane. If you put one next
to a dry cask it will dwarf it. The turbine shafts on those jets are going to go right
through those dry casks. The tsunamis we talked about -- we didn't even talk about what happens
if there's an offshore landslide like what happened in 2004 in Banda Ache, causing a
tsunami that is way, way bigger than any of these estimates that they have for a long,
long, far away tsunami wave finally getting to us, we can have a thousand-foot wave right
here. So we've got airplane strikes, we've got terrorists, we've got eight million people
here in this county who have no benefit whatsoever from this nuclear waste and yet we've got
it sitting here, and then, what to they want to do? They want to make a generic -- a generic
environmental impact statement, which means that anything unique about our situation,
-- such as, we don't have a reactor running -- is going to be ignored, and not only that,
but because it's generic, anything that doesn't get said now is going to be ignored, you're
not going to be able to change anything. And this is no way to run a country. This is no
way to run a problem that is the biggest problem this country has ever faced. It's bigger than
World War II. We have to get rid of -- "rid of" -- this waste, and of course, there's
nowhere to put it. So we have to think really hard about what we're going to do, and the
first thing we have to do is SHUT DOWN DIABLO CANYON.
Thank you very much.