This Solstice we’re grateful for being able to contribute to "raising awareness to drive meaningful change."
Update on SOS At Work in the World
By Mary Beth Brangan By James Heddle - EON
“The difficulty with nuclear power is that it produces the worst industrial waste that’s ever been produced by any industry on earth. This stuff remains deadly for literally, millions of years!” - Gordon Edwards, President, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
“Your project is a remarkable example of cinema that seeks to raise awareness and drive meaningful change.” - Organizing Committee of the Festival Internacional de Cine Animal y Ambiental (FICAA).
Breaking the Nuclear Chains That Bind Us
Every phase of the nuclear chain - from uranium mining, uranium milling, uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, nuclear reactor fuel fissioning, irradiated fuel storage and reprocessing, and through all phases of weapons production, leaves its own intense contribution to a rapidly accumulating legacy of radioactive waste that will remain lethal to all living things for longer than human civilization has yet existed.
Irradiated nuclear fuel used in nuclear reactors is millions of times more radioactive than before use. Some radionuclides produced are deadly for millions, even billions of years!
There are hundreds of different radioisotopes produced in nuclear reactors that were never on the planet before humans first split the uranium atom.
The familiar internationally recognized distress signal ‘S.O.S. – based on the Morse code sequence of three dots and three dashes – seems vitally appropriate for what we have dubbed ‘the San Onofre Syndrome’, the tons of high-level radioactive waste being stored in unsafe short-term containers across the nation.
That is the long-lived poisonous ‘legacy’ referred to in the title of our recently released EON documentary, SOS, The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy. The film portrays San Onofre as a microcosm of a global problem - the mismanagement of lethal radioactive waste.
The informed and organized nuclear free movement that began in the middle of the 20th century accomplished much to be encouraged about in the last decades. That generation was able to thwart plans to produce a thousand nuclear power reactors nationally by passing laws in many states that required a permanent repository to be in place before any new nuclear power reactors were built.
The National Conference of State Legislatures reports,
“Twelve states currently have restrictions on the construction of new nuclear power facilities: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont.
“Minnesota has adopted an outright ban on the construction of new nuclear power facilities and New York has outlined a similar ban in a limited area of the state. Other states have set conditions on the construction of new nuclear power facilities. These conditions include requiring:
the identification a demonstrable technology or a means for high level waste disposal or reprocessing (California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine and Oregon)”…
Back then there was a much wider public understanding of the inseparable connection of the nuclear energy and weapons production sectors of the nuclear complex. Without pressure from a movement with that understanding, regulations of nuclear energy, and the international nuclear ban treaties that have since come into force might not have happened.
The folks in that movement, mostly in their 60’s to 80’s are now facing a renewed billion dollar propaganda onslaught from a desperate nuclear energy and weapons complex in decline.
Now the blocked Nixonian dream of a thousand U.S. nuclear power plants is being revived, and more than 20 countries from four continents have joined the push.
World Nuclear News reports that a total of 31 countries so far have now signed on to an international declaration in support of tripling global nuclear energy capacity by 2050.
Regenerating Informed Resistance
It’s time to hand on the torch of informed resistance to a succeeding generation of campaigners. Yet many members of that cohort have been bamboozled by the specious psyop claims that nuclear energy is necessary to save civilization from 'climate change' and to facilitate the proliferation of AI data centers that will transform our future world “for the better.”
Common Dreams reports that a public-private campaign by government and industry has mounted “a coordinated global effort to promote nuclear as a solution to climate change, despite ongoing concerns about radioactive waste, environmental risks, and the diversion of resources from renewable energy.”
Unfortunately the propaganda ignores the intrinsic necessary complementarity of nuclear power and nuclear weapons through both needing the same education of skilled workers, development of supply chains and massive industrial processes.
As French President Macron stated plainly in a 2020 speech, “One cannot exist without the other. Without civil nuclear power, there is no military nuclear power, and without military nuclear power, there is no civil nuclear power.”
This is why reaching out to university and college audiences is a key part of the SOS impact campaign with our excellent MocaMedia team.
Nuclear Situational Awareness
There are 54 operating commercial nuclear power stations with 94 nuclear power reactors in 28 states. Including already decommissioned reactors expands the number of these de facto nuclear dump sites. In October 2024 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission stated it licensed and oversees 79 nuclear waste sites in 39 states. This was in a slide presentation to woo Wyoming decision-makers into becoming a national “interim” nuclear waste site.
Currently there is no national deep geological radioactive waste repository built by the government who promised to remove the waste from nuclear utilities by 1998. Since there aren’t any permanent repositories anticipated to be built in the near future the tons of waste in the form of highly irradiated used nuclear fuel rods from nuclear power reactors is stranded on all those 79 sites indefinitely.
The government and industry, intending to produce much more waste with their proposed new ‘advanced’ reactors and Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) are pushing therefore, to build "Consolidated Interim Storage” sites. Wyoming is one such potential CIS. Texas and New Mexico have legally declared they don't want nuclear dump sites in their states despite being targeted by the industry and dumps already having been licensed by the NRC. (Industry’s legal challenges to Texas and New Mexico’s legal right to object based on a rule of law is now in the Supreme Court to be heard in 2025.)
Many caution Wyoming and other potential CIS sites that ‘interim” may turn into “permanent” without storage methods being designed for being permanent. According to Federal regulations asserted by the NRC, Wyoming would lose certain rights legally over water decisions and other land regulations. Wyoming might be devastated environmentally and economically through risk to its ranching and tourism industry by this proposal to absorb the nation’s increasing volume of high level radioactive waste.
Waste by Any Other Name…
By the way, high level waste is being re-named in HR 9786, a bill authored by Mike Levin (D) Orange County, where San Onofre sits alongside the sea. This renaming of what is now termed high level spent fuel waste, would allow for the reprocessing of this waste, a process that actually creates more waste that’s even more hideously hard to deal with than ‘ordinary’ high level waste and that encourages nuclear weapons proliferation.
HR 9786 also allows for the transport of hundreds of thousands of shipments of this hazardous waste across the country to wherever a CIS would be established. This would present huge transportation risks of contamination along the routes. Ultra heavy loads would pose enormous stress on our already failing infrastructure; highways, bridges, culverts, train tracks and would contaminate yet another site irreparably.
Usually the chosen site is in a less politically powerful area and would suffer from environmental injustice. All this risk would be taken to move the contaminating radwaste though the original site of generation will never be able to be completely cleaned of radioactivity and radioactive particles. So the contamination would be multiplied, not eliminated. Additionally, if ever a permanent repository is developed, it would require the insane risk of moving it again. However, this HR 9786 pretense of ‘dealing’ with the waste would allow even more of it to be produced and would mean moving thousands of shipments of intensely radioactive substances throughout our nation for decades.
The Power of Informed Dissent
This is the complex ‘syndrome’ our documentary dramatizes through the empowering stories of San Onofre area residents who became citizen experts. We follow them for 10 years as their research uncovers the truth about the nuclear dump in their midst.
They know that moving the waste is horribly fraught with technical, ethical and political difficulties. Despite this, in some cases, like San Onofre’s, the waste must be secured more responsibly to avoid catastrophe.
They stress the urgency of the situation pointing out that the tons of San Onofre’s high level waste is now in 5/8ths inch thin, gouged and likely corroding stainless steel canisters in concrete silos 108 feet from the rapidly rising ocean. Bluffs just north and south of the site have had landslides and recently crumbled. King tides and storm surges come seriously close to the canisters. These residents also point to what they see as the current best technology to use and highest ethical choices to be taken. And soon!
Cinema as Counter Narrative
Our film SOS is an international distress signal aimed at alerting the population that the existential risks from the conjoint nuclear energy and weapons complex and the tons of radioactive pollution and waste it produces every year.
The U.S. has the largest fleet of commercial nuclear power plants, with 104 having been operated or currently operating.
According to a 2012 Report from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, this has produced over 67 thousand Metric Tons of Heavy Metal (MTHM) of high-level nuclear waste. At the same time, the military weapons production reactors of the U.S. have output another 25 thousand MTHM bringing the national total to over 92 thousand MTHM. This inventory amounts to about half of all commercial power waste produced globally, but doesn’t include the deadly MTHM produced by other nuclear armed countries.
It consists of radioactive elements such as Plutonium 239 and Uranium 235 that will remain deadly to all living creatures for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years.
According to a 1957 Report by the US National Academy of Sciences, “Safe disposal means the waste shall not come in contact with any living thing.”
No storage facility meeting this stringent design criterion yet exists and may never do so.
Nevertheless, in containers too fragile to be safely moved, and with nowhere to be taken, the highly radioactive bundles of such used commercial reactor fuel rods are in effect stranded at the power plant site that produced them.
Pre-Positioned WMDs or Perpetual Stewardship?
That means every reactor site – operating or not – is a prepositioned weapon of mass destruction. Defenseless against accident, sabotage, natural impacts and war, they will threaten all future generations.
The best state-of-the-art approach to meeting this challenge currently available – and which SOS advocates - is the so-called Rolling Stewardship Program, a transgenerational containment system hopefully constantly improved over time.
The key elements of this approach are:
1. Thick-walled containment vessels in which the aging fuel rods can be monitored and inspected and, if necessary, repackaged over time as technology evolves.
2. To be stored in a hardened, secure, climate controlled building called a ‘dry cell’ or ‘hot cell’ in which the containment casks and fuel assemblies can be handled robotically in an oxygen-free environment.
3. In a facility located as close as possible to the point of generation.
Our intention in producing this film has been – as the FICAA Committee so aptly puts it in awarding SOS the winner in its Environmental Documentary Feature category - “to raise awareness and drive meaningful change.”
Competing Approaches
Rep. Mike Levin asserts that he has full support from the California legislators for his proposed HR 9786 - Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2024 that would seek to create a new federal agency called the “Nuclear Waste Administration”.
Nuclear responsibility advocates Sharon and Ace Hoffman warn that Levin’s Bill “… is a blatant attempt to circumvent the rules forbidding interim storage of nuclear waste until a permanent repository is established.”
The Hoffman’s continue,
“Levin’s bill ignores the fact that nobody, anywhere in the world, has a viable solution to storing nuclear waste for the millennia it will remain dangerous to living things. The only reasonable approach we’ve heard is rolling stewardship as described by Dr. Gordon Edwards:
1. Stop making more waste.
2. Store the existing waste in retrievable storage.
3. Plan to retrieve and repackage the waste on a regular basis.
4. When in doubt, refer back to #1.
Legislators who claim to support Mr. Levin’s proposed legislation have a responsibility to educate themselves about the precarious situation at San Onofre and the immense risks of transport.
On the other hand, another state bill is being developed that would direct the state of California to make a plan to deal with the short term, urgent needs to store the waste at San Onofre technologically and ethically in a way that will ensure survival of California and its economy, said to be the 5th or 6th largest in the world.
Ecological Options
We’re grateful that we now have a film to contribute to this historic discussion. SOS speaks of the urgent need for a dry handling facility to repackage and repair canisters, thick casks that meet American Manufacturing Standards to be monitorable, retrievable, stored as close as safely possible to the site of generation to minimize transportation risks and placed in reinforced, climate controlled buildings that are continually overseen by trained workers.
We’re pleased to report that our film, SOS, The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy by Mary Beth Brangan, Morgan Peterson and James Heddle, is making its way in California, nationally and internationally despite moving against this billion-dollar propaganda onslaught by pro-nuclear forces.
We’ve had screenings in Rio De Janeiro, Cape town, South Africa, Cape Cod, Albuquerque, Bolinas and Boston, among others. Dec. 13, the Mexican Film Festival gave us a major award. This makes 5 major awards won so far!
There's a screening Jan. 15 in Oceanside, CA at the Surf Museum. San Onofre is adjacent to a surfing area that’s internationally known.
This January 29th. we'll be having another screening of SOS in Laguna Beach, CA.
We'll be having another one in San Rafael, CA Jan. 22. Plus there are others scheduled in Spain.
So far in Feb., we'll be speaking after a screening at the Univ. of Oregon Feb. 5. and a screening is scheduled for Osaka University Feb. 6. We have more screenings in the works for the rest of 2025.
We’re working to get SOS seen in high schools, universities and libraries and have produced a study guide. The film is closed captioned and translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese with French about to be finished.
Check out what SOS viewers around the world are saying here:
Link to Visit Page: https://sanonofresyndrome.com/testimonials
Please visit our website SanOnofreSyndrome.com for more information and watch our film! It can now be streamed on many platforms.
We're also on Amazon's Prime Video. In fact, if you wouldn't mind giving a review for SOS on that platform, it would greatly help to get the algorithms to boost it.
Solstice and Holiday Blessings! May you all refresh yourselves in this darkness for this swing into more light and the next cycle!
With gratitude,
Mary Beth and Jim
Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle co-direct EON, the Ecological Options Network. The multi-award winning EON feature documentary SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy, was chosen as the opening film in the 13th annual Global Nonviolent Film Festival, where it also received the Organizers’ Award for ‘BEST ACTUALITY SUBJECT – Feature Documentary’. SOS has won awards in several other international festivals, and is available for viewing worldwide. The film was produced by Mary Beth Brangan and directed by Brangan, Heddle, and Morgan Peterson, who also served as editor. SOS is a transgenerational family co-creation of two senior filmmakers and a millennial mom with two young daughters. For information, please visit the SOS website.
Thanks Jim and Mary Beth for making the movie. I think it's really good, and not just because there is a clip of my husband, James Chambers speaking about the Safety Conscious Work Environment (SCWE) problem. This is a story that everyone needs to know. The problems with nuclear power have been in the shadows for too long! Thanks. Hopefully I will be able to see one of the SoCal screenings.