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Health & Fitness

Opinion: Where There's Smoke - There Could be Radiation

Smoke will show radioactive contamination path.

An interesting experiment is about to take place: .

It won't be a large one (hopefully), but it should produce enough smoke to at least give us locals a sense of where radiation would spread if an accident occured at San Onofre.

Keep this in mind over the weekend...

Find out what's happening in San Clementewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

If you can smell smoke, you would probably be one of the unlucky people that would need to "shelter in place" for weeks with no help from outsiders.

Your health and possessions would be compromised forever.

Find out what's happening in San Clementewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Interstate 5 would be useless, closing off traffic between San Diego and LA indefinitely.

Are you prepared to trade all of that for an unreliable source of electricity that we seem to be doing fine without?

What could cause such a disaster?

Take your pick: an earthquake, human error, flawed design work, aging infrastructure, fire, or terrorism.

Thank goodness it has been shut down for four months now. Let's not squander this opportunity.

Extremely dangerous fuel rods, which were their hottest when the radioactive steam leaked on January 31, have cooled considerably.

Although they can't be moved to safer Dry Cask storage for five years (a system which survived Fukushima), this is a good head start on the path to making over 8 million people safe from an unimaginable disaster.

We are overdue for a huge earthquake far exceeding the design basis of the plant.

Experts agree that there is 99 percent certainty that it will happen within thirty years. In geologic scale, this is a blink of the eye.

We are living on borrowed time.

Let's work together to keep it shutdown for good.

Write to gary@sanclementegreen.org for details on how you can act to protect your family and countless others right now.

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