The Orange County Register l FRED SWEGLES  Oct. 12, 2011

A nuclear calamity of the intensity that struck Japan on March 11 could happen at San Onofre, a series of speakers told San Clemente's elected leaders at a nearly five-hour community meeting Tuesday night.

It might never happen or it might happen tomorrow, said Daniel Hirsch, a lecturer on Nuclear Policy at UC Santa Cruz. "If that happened tomorrow," he said, "most of us would not be surprised."

More than 200 people from all over Southern California gathered in the San Clemente Community Center for the second of three meetings in which the San Clemente City Council is addressing lessons learned from Japan's Fukushima disaster. At a community meeting two weeks ago, the council heard from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Southern California Edison and an Interjurisdictional Planning Committee that would coordinate an evacuation of San Clemente if that were ever necessary...

...Dr. Helen Caldicott, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, said via a live video feed that "it was gross malfeasance" to build two nuclear reactors next to an earthquake fault. She said that in a worst-case nuclear plant scenario – which she sees as possible at San Onofre – 10 million people could be at risk in a nuclear release, depending on the wind direction....

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