Anti-Nuke Effort Employs New and Old Protest Methods

One hundred and twenty characters at a time, nuclear power opponents are taking aim at the .

Using everything from Twitter to placards, pamphlets, and websites, local and far-flung protesters have in preparation for a Sept. 27 informational meeting about lessons learned from Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster in Fukushima.

San Clemente Green, Residents Organized for a Safe Environment and the Coalition for Responsible and Ethical Environmental Decisions are the central players on the local scene working against the continued operation of . They've employed signs, placards and pamphlets at council meetings, and .

of San Clemente Green has linked local efforts with statewide and national campaigns to end nuclear power, connecting with organizations like and Friends of the Earth.

Headrick told the council this week that Friends of the Earth was willing to fly in its own scientists to sit in on the Sept. 27 meeting and make presentations with evidence that could contradict and supplement information from San Onofre and Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials, who are slated to be on the agenda.

The San Clemente groups have set up a website at Decommission.SanOnofre.com to centralize data and news reports about the plant with the ultimate goal of spreading their call for decommissioning the station.

Individual residents have also made themselves heard in the virtual world in the effort to shut down San Onofre.

Darin and Lisa McClure of San Clemente come from a social media marketing background and have used their expertise to add to live Twitter feeds from council meetings—@ClementePatch is the San Clemente Patch editor’s Twitter handle, whom often tweets back and forth with @DarinRMcClure and @LisaMcClure during these events.

Whereas San Clemente Patch’s Twitter feed is purely news-oriented with an eye to objectivity, the McClures are adding a new dimension to the more traditional methods of political protest with their tweets.

Twitter users often use hashtags as labels for tweets that make information streams easier to follow.

By searching hashtags like #sccouncil, #sanclemente, #NRC and #SONGS, Twitter users can find a constellation of people and links related to the fight to shut down power plants, general news and information on the industry.

Social media is a powerful tool in this effort; @ClementePatch uses #sccouncil to catalogue tweets from council meetings on various topics under discussion, as well as council vote results.

The McClures, however, use the hashtag almost exclusively for tweets and links related to their anti-nuke advocacy.

All together, tweets with the #sccouncil hashtag have been viewed almost 70,000 times by nearly 6,000 people, according to the analytics site TweetReach.com. Most of those impressions come from @DarinRMcClure.