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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Nuclear power is cheap and clean but sadly it is burdened by the public’s misunderstanding and fear of radiation.
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It is. It’s ridiculously cheap. It’s only the regulations and bureaucracy surrounding it that make it so expensive. It goes beyond safety and into unreasonable requirements spawned by decades of attempts to appease NIMBYS whos entire knowledge of “nuclear” is restricted bombs and Chernobyl. There are also the countless officials and agencies who created needless red tape to benefit themselves, or had a vested interest in seeing nuclear fail.
Let me be ABUNDANTLY clear: safety regulations and red tape ARE good. Holy shit, please do not think I am arguing against them wholesale. But regulations on nuclear plants go so far beyond what is actually needed that it balloons costs and time-frames to multitudes of what they should be.
It feels completely disingenuous to use those excess costs to argue that nuclear is expensive, because they are entirely our own fault that they’re there. It’s like saying running a mile is too painful, but then it turns out you shoot yourself in the leg every time before you try. The issue isn’t running the mile, it’s that you choose to shoot yourself in the leg. You shouldn’t be able to use that to argue against running a mile.
I will add context to your factual statement with the existence of regulations requiring safety systems to deal with what is called a Double Ended Guillotine break in the primary coolant line. In over 70 years, with reactors in 35 countries, there has never been a Double Ended Guillotine break in the primary coolant line, because it’s physically impossible. Pipes don’t break like that, they just can’t break like that.
The actual (still extremely rare) failure condition is called Leak Before Break.
The safety systems required to prevent the imaginary Double Ended Guillotine break cost millions of dollars per unit and actually make it harder to implement safety systems for Leak Before Break.
Nuclear is far from cheap or clean. Upfront costs are massive and mining uranium is not cheap or clean. Lemmy is pushing building more nuclear everywhere, but when all these proposed plants in China and elsewhere get built, we don’t have enough uranium to fuel them. Estimates right now are under 90 years of uranium left on the whole planet, that will get cut to 30 years when all those Chinese reactors go online.
The 90 year estimate was only for conventional mining of identified reserves. It doesn’t account for the total terrestrial values which increases the number to 200 years.
Adding seawater extraction it increases to 60,000 years. Adding fast breeder technology on top of that increases it to BILLIONS of years.
And this doesn’t even account for the advancements in switching to thorium, which with current identified supplies would last thousands of years.
We have no idea what the actual amount is. 200 years even assumes Chinese reactors don’t come online.
Which makes it the most expensive fuel source.
Sure, sure, …maybe we can switch to dilithium while we are talking science fiction. I’ve been listening to the promise of thorium for decades longer than the promise of fusion. And, no one “switches” to thorium, you would need trillions to build new reactors.