The Diablo Blockade

This is the detailed Story of the Abalone Alliance’s historic 18 day blockade at Diablo Canyon. It is still the largest act of civil disobedience at a commercial US nuclear reactor when over 1900 arrests took place. Its being posted in remembrance of the 30th anniversary of the blockade’s September 10th, 1981 action.

The Alliance was formed in June of 1977 and at its peak was made up of groups from across California, with the goal of stopping Diablo Canyon from operating. On the last day of the blockade a newly hired 25 year old PG&E engineer discovered that the seismic supports were put in upside down. See the previous article for more details on this dramatic discovery!

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Diagram Goof Delays Diablo

Just as the Abalone Alliance’s historic 20 day blockade at Diablo Canyon was coming to an end, a 25 year old, newly hired engineer discovered that Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) had built seismic bracing for unit one upside down. The dramatic error took place after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had given the go ahead to load and start operation of Diablo Canyon unit one. It would force PG&E to do 3 more years of work and over $3 billion repairing the critical error and hundreds of more problems that were also found.

Here is the Abalone Alliance’s article of the design errors in its October 1981 Newsletter.

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PG&E’s Hole in the Head

This is a wonderful tale about PG&E’s attempt to build what would have been the largest nuclear complex in the world a short distance from the epicenter of the 1906 quake that devastated San Francisco. Maybe folks forget that it was PG&E and its newly formed company’s gas lines that burned the city down in 1906. But opposition to PG&E’s plans in 1958 would become the first anti-nuclear power campaign in US history.

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Cal Nukes on Faultlines: Shut Them Down Now!

The California Energy Commission (CEC) will be holding hearings on July 26th concerning the state’s long term power needs. Last spring the CEC sent out data requests to both Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE) concerning safety related issues at their nuclear facilities. The CEC list of questions was extensive. Both PG&E and SCE have replied to CEC’s data request and those documents were publicly made available for review on July 14th. It should be noted that PG&E did not respond to a single question, but instead submitted 36 seismic reports several hundred pages long.

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March 21st State of California Senate Nuclear Safety Hearings

Dan HirschOn March 21st and April 14th 2011 the California State Senate held two post Fukushima hearings on the safety of nuclear power in California. The first hearing in the days when Fukushima was still news generated major media in California while the 2nd hearing was nearly empty, not even our representatives showed. A promised hearing on emergency planning never took place.

This is a review of those hearings.

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Livermore Lab Caught Conducting Illegal Restricted Bio-Experiments

For more information, contact: Marylia Kelley, Tri-Valley CAREs, (925) 443-7148 For immediate release, Tuesday, May 26, 2009 Livermore Lab Caught Conducting Illegal Restricted Bio-Experiments Tri-Valley CAREs recently received documents that the group had long been seeking under the Freedom of … Continue reading