Remove Nuclear Waste, Close La Pata Gap, San Clemente Officials Urge

The San Clemente City Council will push for the removal of waste from the San Onofre nuclear plant and the completition of the Avenida La Pata connection to San Juan Capistrano.

The decision comes after months of informational meetings and pressure from environmental factions in town and the region. The earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan in March led to a groundswell of concern among some residents that a similar accident could happen in San Clemente.

The council, which has virtually no jursidiction over the plant, unanimously decided to focus its lobbying efforts on the removal of spent fuel waste from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station site. Additionally, it wants to speed along

Council members said Tuesday night that they hope to recruit other city governments and the the Orange County Board of Supervisors in pressuring Washington for solutions.

Permanent waste storage has been a political football nationwide, and there is no permanent storage solution on the horizon for the several thousand pounds of radioactive waste stored at the San Onofre site.

Mayor Lori Donchak said she will be traveling to Washington, D.C. within the next several days, in part to ask for funds for the La Pata project.

Council members more or less agreed that safety at the San Onofre plant was already a priority with workers and managers there, but that it was necessary to get involved in making sure that atmosphere continued and to address the waste issue.

"We have to be vigilant, we have to be safety-conscious, but we can't be alarmist," said Councilman Tim Brown. "Many of the dire predictions were exagerrated, and sometimes wildly so."

He was referring to presentations by some experts brought in for at the behest of the San Clemente Green-led coalition opposing the nuclear plant's continued operation. One expert called nuclear plants "cancer factories that happen to make electricity."

Councilman Jim Dahl said that some of the safety culture issues at the plant reported to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been a little overblown because of conflicts between some trade and professional employees there. More than 2,000 people are employed at San Onofre, but various contractors for the and routine refueling shutdowns sometimes swell the number of workers to 5,000.

The Tuesday meeting had a fairly even split between nuclear detractors and people in favor of continued operation of the plant—many of them plant workers and a few representing business interests, like the and the . This was a departure from the last couple meetings, which

, thanked council for providing a forum for open dialog and reiterated the plant's message that officials there were studying the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi and working to learn from it.

"Our approach is not to say, 'this couldn't happen at San Onofre,'" he said. "Our approach is, 'What if?' and, 'How do we cope?'"

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