Full title: Fukushima Aftermath: Diablo Nuclear Renaissance or Industry Meltdown?

The WikiBook About the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant: You Can Help to Edit Online!

This Wikibook is the first of an anticipated series on specific nuclear power plants such as Diablo Canyon (Nuclear) Power Plant and the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, both of which are in California. They are offered in conjunction with a Wikiversity course entitled [California Government and Citizen Participation] and the Wikibook of the same name. All policies of Wikibooks and Wikiversity apply and you are invited to read but also to write copy and edit existing copy. If you are reading this online, please familiarize yourself with Wikibooks protocols by clicking on the links to the left. All content herein is subject to the CCL 2 license which means that it is free for re-use with attribution in accordance with the CCL 2 guidelines.

Introduction to the subject matter

The nuclear incident at the Fukushima Diaichi nuclear station has sparked a renewed interest in evaluation of the risks posed by nuclear power plants worldwide, among them Diablo. (Some parties insist on referring to the plant as Diablo Canyon (Nuclear) Power Plant; consistent with our neutral point of view policy, we try to steer clear of that debate as much as possible, referring to the facility as "Diablo", the "plant" and so forth). As you can read in the Diablo Canyon Power Plant chapter, it was built in close proximity to numerous earthquake fault zones, and is a source of on-going, often heated, public policy debate.

According to Wikipedia, Diablo Canyon was originally designed to withstand a 6.75 magnitude earthquake, including the nearby San Andreas fault|San Andreas and Hosgri faults,^[1] but was later upgraded to withstand a 7.5 magnitude quake.^[2] Recent public disclosure of the existence of the Shoreline fault proximal to DC(N)PP has created renewed public interest in the current ongoing re-licensing^[3] application of DCPP, including calls for a suspension of the licensing process until the seismic studies are complete.^[4] Although the plant has redundant seismic monitoring and a safety system designed to shut it down promptly in the event of significant ground motion, there remains considerable public concern about safety.

A brief review of major nuclear accidents

The Devil Went Down to Fukushima...

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant

History of protest and policy debates

• Anti nuclear movement: Overview
• Overview of nuclear policy and issues in the US
• USA protests
• California protests
• Abalone Alliance
• Documentary film "Dark Circle"
• Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958-1978

The Diablo controversy after Fukushima

• NRC Finishes Safety Report
• NRC Responds to Pressure

Post-Fukushima response by non-government organizations

Appendices

Nuclear Regulatory Commission

• June 2011 NRC Safety Report

References

• Scholarly references

Acknowledgements

• The staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been very helpful at public forums at which they provided very learned answers to questions from the public.
• Dr. Norm Abrahamson of the University of California at Santa Barbara was the keynote speaker at a forum in November 2010 in San Luis Obispo and provided an excellent encapsulation of earthquake related issues at DCPP.
• Sandra S. Schulz and Robert E. Wallace authored material on the San Andreas Fault which was made available on a USGS dot-gov website.
• David Weisman and Rochelle Becker are principals in the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility and through their website and listserv made much information available which was not available through other sources.
• Administrators at Wikibooks have gone beyond the call of duty and gave generously of their time correcting errors and providing state of the art software tools. Particularly patient and helpful have been the administrators logging in as Adrignola and the aptly named Quite Unusual.

Afterword: Was the Fukushima event an Incident, disaster, or accident?

Appendix: Contributors

Attributions to material imported from Wikipedia are available by clicking History link. On certain pages, importing may have failed on numerous occasions. In those instances, every effort has been made to exceed the minimal CC-BY-SA 3.0 and GFDL licensing protocols.

Many people wrote Wikipedia articles which were imported to Wikibooks by Geof Bard with the aid of administrators Adrignola and Quite Unusual. Matisse and other users to be enumerated also provided assistance. The original introduction and many of the Wikipedia articles were written from scratch also by Geof. The article writers user names can be viewed by clicking View history. If you contribute and would like to be listed please add your name to this section.

Other Fukushima Aftermath Series Books

Fukushima Aftermath

Fukushima Aftermath: Whither the Indian Point Nuke?

Incident response and disaster preparedness at DCPP

Downwind health risks: fact or fiction?