Two nuclear reactors at the Diablo Canyon plant in California are being forced to shut down in 2024 and 2025. When nuclear reactors are taken off the grid, fossil fuel use and the emissions that go along with them consistently increase. Independent groups have estimated that California will emit an extra 15.5 million metric tons (MMT) of global warming emissions due to the retirement of Diablo Canyon. In an attempt to prevent that from happening this time, bill SB 1090 was passed in 2018 requiring Diablo Canyon electricity generation to be replaced with clean energy.
I don’t care how you do it, just do it.
Always a recipe for success.
And the politicians wonder why it’s NOT attracting business and investors…
From going to a reliable source to one unreliable.
Companies will suck up the subsidies and whatever else freebies from the government hands out but will NOT be attracting businesses of any worth as we’ve already seen what poor planning has already done in other countries.
Please, can we all quit pretending energy starvation isn’t their real intention?
Nailed it.
Similarly, Germany is replacing nuclear generated electricity with coal, of all things. Gangrene of the brain seems rampant there.
Funny how they also have a new Gas Pipeline coming on line too.
I guess North America are the only idiots going all out to get off fossil fuels.
Dumb ass politicians!
But that gas is coming from Russia and Nord Stream 2, as it’s called, bypasses Ukraine. That’s part of what’s causing a lot of fuss in western and central Europe at the moment.
Gang Green at work to wreck the West.
It really does not matter how much CO2 it in the atmosphere. Not one tiny single minute bit does it matter.
What global warming?
You didn’t know that the Lytton fire was caused by climate change?
https://rumble.com/vk75n2-investigation-could-a-church-arsonist-have-caused-the-lytton-b.c.-fire.html
Oh, and Mommy Gaia’s getting mad at us. Only Indians should be in charge because they’re the only “stewards of the earth”.
Unfortunately ideologues do not see reality but what they believe; and all others are in need of salvation. It’s the green cult but the Watermelons aren’t phased, the cult members provide cover for their communist lusts.
Heh. “… requiring Diablo Canyon electricity generation to be replaced with clean energy.” If they do want “clean” energy (meaning no CO2 production) then it’s a choice between nuclear or blackouts. But only for the little people. I’m sure that the cream of society will continue to have electricity (though many people will be shocked to find out that they, personally, are not in the lucky 0.5% who will have reliable energy.
It continues to amaze me how leftists think that anything they don’t understand must be easy.
The nuclear plants will be replaced by the cleanest energy possible: no energy at all…
And then they will be demanding an incredible amount of energy to fight the fires: water bombers, helicopters, BIG firetrucks which all consume a lot of petroleum.
What did socialists use before they used candles? Electric lights!
I like that California is going to be the poster child for pseudo-green energy and resultant poster child for unreliability and energy poverty. Ontario was Canada’s poster child for that but the Eloi apparently aren’t capable of such conceptual relationships.
Not even when they freeze in the dark for winter.
Well … Obama said that we “fat”, “content”, American CHRISTIANS need to “get off our high horse” … and “energy prices will necessarily increase”. So there you have it … Californians will pay a usurious price for unreliable … sometimes blacked-out … energy.
My PG&E bills have been steadily increasing as the utility … which invested all the ratepayer dollars in “green energy, instead of infrastructure maintenance … is settling ever larger lawsuits for burning down the State. I keep paying for PG&E’s and the CPUC’s eco-incompetence.
But Nevermind … because PG&E has a WOMYN CEO who was literally WEEPING this week as she announced the undergrounding of 10k miles of power lines. Yes … we will PAY $$$$ for it all with energy-impoverishment rates and fees.
Replace with “clean energy”? Wind, solar and compressed wood pellets are not clean energy. Hydro might be considered somewhat clean if loss of land use and sediment issues aren’t taken into account. On the flip side I recently talked to a nuclear engineer from France where most of their country’s electrical power is derived from fission. The engineer said the biggest concern they saw was how to properly dispose of waste. Fuel rods can be recycled once and their underground waste storage is seen as short term and in France the waste in kept in somewhat shallow shale formations. Also, Germany apparently stores their nuclear waste in salt caverns that I think might not be the best containment solution given how fractured the salt can be. The concerns over waste storage might be the main reason why Germany has moved away from nuclear energy. Canada is blessed with the hard granite practically impermeable Canadian Shield over much of Manitoba, northeast Saskatchewan and northwest Ontario. I believe that the now shut down nuclear research site at Pinawa had cut out a containment chamber in the shield to study long term containment potential (I forget the details but I thought the results were promising but the build costs at the time weren’t attractive due to the difficulty with removing granite). Ultimately I think a return to nuclear power is inevitable including in CA but long term waste disposal is still a bugaboo that needs to be tackled.
The disposal of spent fuel rods was the main reason I became a nuclear fission skeptic. Fusion, however, is a different matter, but that’s another story.
the question always is, is it an engineering problem or a political problem, and for the most part, spent fuel rods suffer from a political problem more than an engineering problem, current laws in the US have retarded the development of recycling processes that pull apart the fuel rods, and separate out the useful products from the rods from the actual waste products.
there will always be some sort of waste products from the process, but it would be a lot less of recycling was more allowed.
All used nuclear fuel can be turned into new fuel and used again. Disposal is not necessary except for the tiny fraction of fission fragments, all of which have either short half-lives or other uses. Reprocessed and converted into new fuel by fast reactors, the world’s existing nuclear reactor fuel in storage would be sufficient as a fuel supply for another 15,000 years approximately.
You can thank Jimmy Carter for the insanity of preventing fuel use and recycle. You can thank Barrack Obama for terminating the project to dispose safely of the radioactive fuel and military wastes of the United States. There seems to be a pattern here.
JD, you are entirely right. This is purely a political problem which is the product of our tendency to procrastinate indefinitely on anything that is not urgent.
Keep in mind that Carter at least had an idea of what he was talking about. He served on nuclear subs and was, apparently, selected by Adm. Hyman Rickover for the job.
Being an operator, which is what Carter may have been is a bit different that being an engineer concerned about life cycle of fuels…
Given that the entire world’s supply of spent fuel rods to date would fill one football field 10 metres high, its the biggest non-problem of any energy system. As with all other concerns with nuclear energy – take away the hysteria and it’s a no-brainer.
Exactly. Its pure bullshit and every swinging dick & chick will tell you the opposite because of decades of propaganda.
If I was King, we’d take all the world’s “nuclear waste”.
One of the problems facing the nuclear industry is leftover waste from the early days, going back to the Manhattan Project.
I’ve heard that on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, there are tanks of radioactive liquid waste, the contents of which haven’t been properly identified (something which was of lesser concern in those days), let alone a method of disposal being available. Some of those tanks are corroding, so the liquid is now in the surrounding soil. One concern is preventing that contaminated liquid from reaching any aquifers or streams.
BA Rupertslander, there’s a lot wrong with your last post. How is Hanford Reservation a problem for the nuclear industry? It’s a MILITARY project. The liquid tanks have been identified and characterized. What do you suppose the contractors have been doing for the past two decades at Hanford? Sitting on their thumbs?
The solution to all of it is converting it into solid waste and then glassification. A disposal site was to be prepared for this. But Obama killed that when he terminated Yucca Mountain.
Reply to MARTIN B — No No No The only reason Germany is closing down its Nuclear power plants is the because Empress MERKEL said so. After the tsunami of 2011 in Japan with 20,000 deaths most of them drowning, the Queen of Germany much to the delight of the Greens and leftist parties proclaimed the closing down of all plants by 2022.
Of the original 17 reactors 8 have up to now been closed down. Germany as an industrial nation has, as i am sure you agree a great need for high amounts of reliable electricity, so what to do after the other 9 reactors are gone ? well since the country is surrounded by countries all with an intact Nuclear industry ( France,Belgium,Poland) our future needs will be imported, just not for the present prices. And before i forget the German Bundeswehr (Army) has about 1,100 of its members helping France in Mali to protect their Uranium mining . the reason being ? you can work that out yourself
Francisco, I think the standing headline is “O, Sweet Saint of San Andreas”
It is, thought I’d put a twist on it.
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/1/11/jerry-browns-secret-war-on-clean-energy
I like to post this every once in a while. Its a bit of a long read from an ex greentard, but its an interesting take on California energy.
Kenji,
And in about 5-10-15 years the underground cables will be failing. Expect regular outages of about 12-48 hours when the underground lines fail. Why don’t they follow EPRI and FERC guidance to trim back vegetation, and actually fix the above ground lines, insulators, arresters and poles? It seems like Californicated Utilities are the only ones that are burning down their service territory and killing their own customers.
I wonder how much higher the losses are going to be using underground .vs. normal above ground HV Transmission Lines? Doesn’t sound very energy efficient does it?
What the weepy womyn PG&E CEO failed to announce is WHERE those 10,000 miles of wires will be undergrounded. I have this really bad feeling “she” (if that’s “her” chosen pronoun) is going to underground mostly residential neighborhood power lines. Trouble is … that’s NOT where the catastrophic PG&E are being sparked … but all residents want their unsightly power lines put underground.
PG&E is one massive politically-correct pile of a crap corporation. Add the extreme left wing CPUC to that … and the horrific results are as predictable as sunrise.
Many will find this interesting. I came across this article years ago.
Understanding E=mc2
https://fusion4freedom.com/understanding-e-mc2/
Quick excerpt:
One elementary source of comparison is to consider what it takes to refuel a coal plant as opposed to a nuclear reactor. A 1000-MW coal plant – our standard candle – is fed by a 110-car “unit train” arriving at the plant every 30 hours – 300 times a year. Each individual coal car weighs 100 tons and produces 20 minutes of electricity. We are currently straining the capacity of the railroad system moving all this coal around the country. (In China, it has completely broken down.)
A nuclear reactor, on the other hand, refuels when a fleet of six tractor-trailers arrives at the plant with a load of fuel rods once every eighteen months. The fuel rods are only mildly radioactive and can be handled with gloves. They will sit in the reactor for five years. After those five years, about six ounces of matter will be completely transformed into energy. Yet because of the power of E = mc2, the metamorphosis of six ounces of matter will be enough to power the city of San Francisco for five years.