San Onofre shutdown will mean tight electricity supplies

[AtheistCrusader]

71. There have been, and there is risk of tsunami much taller than 14' hitting the west coast.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/tsunami/

(That was the 15' when it hit WA coastline, that I mentioned earlier)

There is a lot of fairly recent work to understand just how high and how often we actually get hit here.

"While the Pacific Ocean is prime tsunami territory, researchers had long believed that the U.S. coast was relatively safe from the threat of serious devastation. New evidence now suggests that a major tsunami may strike the West Coast every 300 to 500 years. Current thinking is that the Cascadia subduction zone, an area off the Pacific Northwest coast where a crustal plate carrying part of the ocean dives under the continent, last had an earthquake in the 1700s, which generated a giant and deadly tsunami.

"We guess it was about 30 meters high," says Eisner, explaining how marine sand deposits have been found in Oregon, evidence of this great event. "All along the Oregon coast, you see these swamps full of dead trees," he continues, "and these trees have been core-dated. They all died in the 1700s, correlating with the dates of the sand deposits, which were carried by powerful waves up onto the coastal bluffs."" (Richard Eisner)

Recorded human history isn't very old in this region. We mostly have to rely on geological record to infer what has happened, how big, and how often. I don't believe the evidence is encouraging. SONGS may be somewhat sheltered by the shape of the coastline from Alaska, but there are other potential sources of tsunami, even subduction zones, in the Pacific.