The Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which sits on a cliff on California’s Central Coast, has been the subject of ceaseless protests and political battles since it was proposed in 1963.
Now, the plant is at the center of yet another major debate. After shuttering all the state’s other nuclear power plants in recent decades, California is considering extending Diablo’s life and lifting a moratorium on new reactors.
That these decisions are even on the table in California is a testament to the substantial change in public views of nuclear energy, which for decades has been reviled by the liberal lawmakers and environmental groups that wield tremendous power and influence in the state.
Many of its leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have expressed support for nuclear energy. The California Legislature last month passed a bill to commission a study on partly lifting the ban on new reactors.
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There is no reality in which nuclear is economically viable when solar, wind and hydro power as well as batteries exist, all with exponentially decreasing costs…
The answer is always the same: people wanting those juicy multi-billion subsidies and politicians paid by them and their lobbyists spend a lot of money (but not that much compared to the amount of taxes you can get with that grift) on desinformation and straight out brain-washing.
No disagreement with the first part, but I feel like shitting on nuclear, especially when it’s already built and generating power like the Diablo Canyon facility that’s the subject of the article, could be pushing that capacity to other non-renewables. If the question is whether to use X dollars to build renewable capacity or nuclear capacity, i fully agree to always go with the renewable, but if we can have more of a “yes, and” sort of approach that also replaces coal/oil/gas capacity with nuclear, i like the idea of replacing some of the world burning fuels with nuclear.
Oh, I totally agree with the sentiment of using already build nuclear power plants in the meantime to speed up decarbonisation.
But long-term nuclear and renewables just don’t go along well. Renewables need short-term storage (about the amount to shift production peak at noon to demand peak in the early evening) and seasonal long-term storage. Nuclear with it’s constant production (because dialing production down temporarily doesn’t save money making an already expensive producer even more so) can replace some of need for short-term storage. That’s it. And it’s much too expensive to compete batteries.
(If you want details: RTE, the French grind provider, did an extensive study about the future of nuclear and it’s economical perspective compared with renewables in lat 2021. With lots of scenarios modelled for comparison. Long story short: You don’t beat renewables plus storage. The niche nuclear can work in (and that really that’s more from an “we have nuclear, we want nuclear, how do we make it work”-perspective) is in a renewable system with power-to-gas and peak burners as a long-term storage concept where it makes electrolysis much more economical because it does not only run when there is access renewable power produced but also through the night when nuclear still produces without much demand.)
You’d think with all the mountains they’d be building pumped hydro instead of batteries
That’s another kind of storage, much more long-term. Even before battery prices dropped to rediculous levels, pumped hydro often had a battery system, too, because it was often more economical.
Pumped hydro is rapid power restoration. It takes no time to spin up and can deliver vast quantities of power. The original idea was that you used you baseline grid power to load it and then if your coal turbines blew up you started dropping the stored water to deliver emergency power. The more modern concept is that you use renewables to pump the water uphill while they are available and drop the water when they are not. It’s a more functional version of the concrete block tower storage that was banged on about a few years ago. It’s also proven tech, there are functional implementations of pumped hydro all over the place and they have been in place for decades.
Sadly it requires the right geography (it would become ridiculously expensive when you actually need to build the height difference instead). On the global scale that’s not a problem, but locally the distribution of beneficial features is varying widely, so the potential to upscale pumped hydro is often limited (see for example countries like Switzerland that could build 50 times their required storage easily compared to the Netherlands with their highest mountain just 300 meters over sea-level).
PS: There are well-scalable concepts for flat coastal areas (for example under sea reservoirs where water is pumped out of submerged tanks, creating power when left to fill up again), but for now mostly as proof-of-concept only.
That is true, I would have thought California would be ripe for it given its mountains.
The actually new concepts of physical power storage are pressurized containers in the sea (100m+)
How are they dealing with the issues of salt water basically rotting everything?
In before glowing rock fan-boys school us on some new design that will totally be cheaper after the 1000th reactor is built.
A major part of it is that nuclear hasn’t been allowed to be cheap.
There’s been active sabotage from the oil industry since the beginning, starting with the Rockefeller Foundation sponsoring fraudulent science via their employee, Herman Mueller. To the CEO of Atlantic oil funding the creation of an explicitly anti-nuclear environmentalist group called Friends Of The Earth in 1970 or so.
Which coincidentally was about the time that the Rockefeller Foundation started funneling money to another explicitly anti-nuclear environmentalist group called Greenpeace.
The political pressure from these groups, plus direct pressure from the oil companies, got extremely restrictive regulations passed, with the goal, and result, of making nuclear more expensive to build and operate.
Look up the double guillotine break, which is a nonsense requirement that nuclear engineers have to design around. Nonsense because the equipment required to prevent this impossible scenario make it harder to deal with the actual likely scenario, which is leak before break.
If you think it’s about the restrictive regulation being a result of lobbying and not the state taking over all the risk, you can try to find anyone willing to insure your private reactor (yes, very low chance of an accident but immensely constly) or make a business plan how you guarantee the save storage of waste for a few millenia.
My long term plan for the waste? Chuck it literally anywhere in its sarcophagus. An old salt mine, a random field, literally dump it in the ocean. Do that, and then sleep soundly knowing that whatever environmental impact you create from doing that with all waste ever created from nuclear power pales in comparison to what we currently do with a single year of coal plants.
The amount of waste from nuclear power is miniscule, and the radiation it gives off is not as high as people imagine. Like yes, it’s still dangerous, but not nearly to the levels decades of oil-industry fear mongering has led the public to believe.
Been there, done that. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine)
Sure… (https://www.earth.com/environment/scientists-found-200000-barrels-of-leaking-radioactive-waste/)
Good idea! (https://en.as.com/latest_news/in-1977-the-us-buried-120000-tons-of-radioactive-waste-in-a-pacific-nuclear-tomb-almost-50-years-later-the-ocean-is-threatening-to-expose-the-runit-dome-f202608-n-2/)
Any more ideas that are proven to not work without risk of contaminating the environment with uncalculable consequences?
The miniscule amount of 200,000 tons was already dumped into the ocean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste#History) leaking radioactivity there.
Wow look at that! We did all that and no one died! Nor have there been any significant negative effects! Looks like you’re proving my point.
You do know that Uranium oxide is water soluble right?
There are literally billions of tons of the stuff in the ocean already.
https://farmonaut.com/mining/amount-of-uranium-in-seawater-billions-of-tonnes-revealed
And the effects of all of it are easily calculable, because it’s been done.
I mean, the political sabotage has been out in the open?
https://reason.com/video/2024/03/05/the-political-sabotage-of-nuclear-power/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0009279723004544
https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/3376034
Also, Onkalo is a perfectly safe waste storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
But reprocessing it would be orders of magnitude better. Every single element produced in a reactor has a valid use, especially the short lived radioactive ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE
It is the only viable energy solution for space. Solar kind of works, but requires large, vulnerable panels, and loses effectiveness the further you get from the sun. Nuclear energy is the only viable energy source, we have to develop it.
Those are basically nuclear batteries, in the disposable reaction sense. It’s not fission, fission requires huge amounts of water. Fundamentally, even if you used another coolant and another way of turning the power to electricity, you need massive heat dissipation (which is very difficult in space)
Nuclear batteries are basically decay powered, they give a small amount of power for a really long time. Totally different technology