Anti-Nuclear Effort Barely Afloat

Their take on the facts is open to debate but their perseverance is beyond question.

Outnumbered and outflanked, a loosely knit group of environmentalists, community activists, outraged homeowners and unreconstructed peaceniks has spent most of the last decade fighting the Navy’s plan to bring nuclear-powered aircraft carriers to San Diego Bay.

They have few supporters among the local establishment. The Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce dismisses them as “a very, very small group that is very vocal.” The editorial page of the dominant local newspaper is against them. Most local politicians shun them.

When the group went to court, it lost. When its members seek information about the Navy’s record on nuclear safety and shipboard incidents, they often hit a stone wall called national security.

When the group commissioned a local artist to paint an outdoor mural showing a nuclear carrier beside a hooded death figure, the mural was mysteriously painted over within two hours.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and President Clinton, like President George Bush before him, are lined up on the other side.

Even Vice President Al Gore, environmentalist nonpareil, has expressed confidence in how the Navy has handled its shipboard nuclear reactors and kept radiation in check.

And when the secretary of the Navy was in San Diego recently, he refused to meet with the anti-nuclear activists and instead expressed annoyance that they refuse to go away.

Still, the Environmental Health Coalition, the group that has taken up the anti-nuclear Navy fight, soldiers on, undeterred, gathering information, peppering the Navy with questions and doubts and requests, besieging local officialdom and the press to keep the issue alive.

“What keeps me going is the fact that the powers that be in San Diego--the Union-Tribune, the mayor, the City Council, the Board of Supervisors, the elected officials in D.C.--just won’t take the issue on,” said coalition member Ernie McCray, principal of an elementary school across the bay from where three nuclear-powered carriers may someday be moored. “That’s what keeps me tilting at windmills. Somebody has to do it.”

Coalition members were there to protest when the first of the nuclear carriers, John C. Stennis, steamed grandly into the bay last summer--amid much civic hoopla--to make North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado its home port. The Navy has tentative plans to send two more nuclear-powered carriers, the Nimitz and the Ronald Reagan, within a decade.

To its critics, the Navy points out that its nuclear-powered ships have sailed 117 million miles without a nuclear accident since the world’s first nuclear ship, the submarine Nautilus, put to sea in 1955.

“It’s not clear to me, what would cause anybody to finally be satisfied with this issue,” said Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, who refused to meet with protesters picketing Navy headquarters here during his visit. “Are they waiting until we get to 120 million? I’m not sure.”

The Stennis is not the first nuclear-powered ship to call San Diego Bay home. For several years two nuclear-powered cruisers were home-ported here; nuclear-powered attack submarines have been based at Point Loma, on the San Diego side of the bay, for two decades.

A water and soil study by the EPA in 1997 found that the “nuclear-powered warship operations in San Diego Harbor have resulted in no increases in radioactivity causing significant population exposure or contamination of the environment.”

There is a gap, however, between “it hasn’t happened yet” and “it can never happen.” And when the issue is nuclear energy--and the specter is raised of meltdowns, radiation leaks and death by cancer--that gap can appear cavernous.

“I don’t think people have gotten to a comfort level that ‘it can’t happen,’ ” said Pamela Willis, interim city manager in Coronado. “The risk is probably very small but it’s never been quantified.”

The Coronado City Council, while expressing many of the same concerns as the Environmental Health Coalition, has opted to keep the group at arm’s length and always couches its own criticisms of the Navy in the context of the city’s long-standing support and admiration for the sea service.

Navy Insists Reactors Are Safe

Two main things irk the Coronado council and the Environmental Health Coalition:

* The Navy’s decision not to equip the surrounding civilian communities with radiation monitoring devices. (Some Coronado residents are buying their own.)

* The Navy’s refusal to disclose what might happen in case of a pier-side accident, including possible death tolls, environmental damage or even evacuation plans.

The Navy says that perimeter monitoring is not needed and that “some technical design and operational information” must be kept secret because it would be of military value to potential U.S. enemies.

In a statement to The Times, the Navy said: “Naval nuclear propulsion plants include redundant safety systems and are operated by highly trained crews using rigorously applied procedures. [The plants] are also designed to withstand battle damage, a feature that increases reactor safety during peacetime operations.”

The Navy adds that nuclear reactors are not in use or at very low power when the ships are docked.

If the Navy were a private company--say, an oceanographic exploration firm--the regulatory and legislative hurdles it would have to overcome to bring six low-power nuclear reactors--two per ship--to San Diego Bay would stretch from San Diego to Washington to Sacramento and back again.

Each hurdle would carry the risk--nay, the inevitability--of litigation.

Given the public’s wariness about nuclear energy since the Three Mile Island incident of 1979, the chances for approval of any privately owned reactor would seem to approximate those of a snowball in Borrego Springs in August. Not a single nuclear reactor has been approved for the U.S. civilian market in a generation.

But the Navy is not a private company and therefore operates under different rules.

The Navy needed permits to dredge the bay to accommodate the deeper drafts of the nuclear carriers compared to conventional carriers and to expand its hazardous waste storage at North Island. But no permits are needed to bring the carriers or to build a radioactive waste dump on base.

The Navy has issued a lengthy environmental impact statement about the carrier project and opened it up to public review and criticism (the Coronado government has provided a critique, but San Diego City Hall has not). The Navy retains the right to decide whether the statement satisfies federal law.

When the Environmental Health Coalition went to court to block the carriers on grounds the Navy had done an inadequate job of assessing the environmental damage, it got trounced. The Navy’s response is that its own safety standards are far beyond anything that a civilian agency would impose.

“You try to organize the community and all you hear is: ‘You can’t fight the Navy,’ ” said Environmental Health Coalition member Marilyn Field, who lives in Coronado.

A Major Force in San Diego

This is not a new phenomenon. The Navy has long been a major influence in shaping this sunny city--Pentagon spending in San Diego County tops $9 billion a year--and occasionally it flexes its muscles in a way that no private employer could.

In the early 1980s the City Council and a mayor named Pete Wilson resisted the Navy’s plan to condemn city property on the edge of Balboa Park to build a new hospital. The hospital was built anyway.

More recently, suburban homeowners filed a lawsuit to keep the Marine Corps from bringing noisy helicopters to the mid-city Miramar air base. The suit failed and the helicopters are now part of Miramar.

Even the most dedicated anti-nuclear activist concedes the odds are long and the days are short to stop the two additional nuclear carriers from coming to North Island.

As a fallback position, activists would like their continued opposition to influence the decision in Washington on whether the next generation of carriers will be nuclear or conventional powered.

The Navy asserts that nuclear-powered carriers are faster, less vulnerable to attack, and able to carry more jet fuel and ordnance so that U.S. warplanes can reach further and deliver a stronger punch at future enemies. The General Accounting Office, however, has doubts about whether nuclear carriers are worth the added cost.

“We’ve been defeated so far, but we’re unbowed and unintimidated,” said coalition member and Peace Resource Center Executive Director Carol Jahnkaw.

“You’ve got to be in this for the long term,” said coalition spokeswoman Laura Hunter.