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California Will Close Its Last Nuclear Power Plant (sfchronicle.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the San Francisco Chronicle:
California's last nuclear power plant -- Diablo Canyon, whose contentious birth helped shape the modern environmental movement -- will close in 2025, state utility regulators decided Thursday. The unanimous vote by the California Public Utilities Commission will likely bring an end to nuclear energy's long history in the state. State law forbids building more nuclear plants in California until the federal government creates a long-term solution for dealing with their waste, a goal that remains elusive despite decades of effort.
The decision comes even as California expands its fight against global warming. Owned by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Diablo Canyon is the state's largest power plant, supplying 9 percent of California's electricity while producing no greenhouse gases. "With this decision, we chart a new energy future by phasing out nuclear power here in California," said commission President Michael Picker. "We've looked hard at all the arguments, and we agree the time has come."
The decision comes even as California expands its fight against global warming. Owned by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Diablo Canyon is the state's largest power plant, supplying 9 percent of California's electricity while producing no greenhouse gases. "With this decision, we chart a new energy future by phasing out nuclear power here in California," said commission President Michael Picker. "We've looked hard at all the arguments, and we agree the time has come."
California -- the only US state to experience rolling blackouts due to incompetent "central planning". More to be coming soon...
Are you referring to the market manipulation conducted by the energy traders empowered in the Bush years?
"Burn baby burn!" I still remember that recording. It sounded like a callow frat boy getting his first lap dance. But he had reason -- hundreds of millions were sucked out of the state but the combination of a fire and rigging the electricity supply.
Once the "free market" was brought under proper regulation we have had no rolling blackouts.
Diablo Canyon Power Plant is in San Luis Obispo County, on the beach, and near two different faults. Given recent seismic events in California they may just be deciding it is past time the plants are removed as a major ecological hazard in the event of seismic activities or a Fukushima Daiichi grade Tsunami.
Given that the plants are almost 50 years old and pressurized water reactors, it seems like there are a half dozen individual reasons worthy of shutting it down, and legislators have thankfully chosen to shut it down before fate takes the choice away from them. While I agree that the loss of 6 percent of the power supply in California is damaging, I think it will likely help spur future solar/wind/hydro/geo plants in California, while also offering the opportunity to consider battery backups for buffering peak loads and offering an alternative to fast ramps of power plants which often waste power and raise either emissions or maintenance costs when conducted.
With batteries and renewables a large quantity of power can be buffered, helping to reduce the loading of power generation facilities across the state and help ensure both California's future power independence as well as avoiding voltage and current irregularities that exist today.
Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
California does not have any coal fired power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Germany is not importing power.
We export about 1/3rd of our power generation.
We mostly are a transit country for exports into our neighbours, some charts show this as import, but they usulally have also transit charts or export charts.
Get a damn clue, moron.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No new coal plants are under construction or planned anywhere in America.
California energy will come from gas, wind, and solar, with a tiny contribution from geothermal.
Diablo canyon is down the road.
I've got nothing against nuclear. I toured the plant last year or the year before. Super impressive.
Anyway, it's my understanding that Diablo Canyon isn't being shut down by regulators so much as PG&E can't make a profit from it. Solar and Gas are too cheap for [heavily regulated] nuclear to be profitable.
Here's the story from 18 months ago:
http://beta.latimes.com/busine...
News?
The numbeds for power prices are wrong.
I doubt anyone pays more than 25cents, on a remote north sea island, perhaps.
I pay 18 cents, and could drop that perhaps to 18 or 14 if I was not to lazy to switch provider.
The average is hardly above 22 cents.
kW/h prices are hardly relevant anyway, relevant is the total amount you pay per month or the percentage of your income.
And in that regard Germany is quite low. I pay 100Euro a month for electricity AND natural gas.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Looking at 2017 (expand the timeline to the year) - it sure does look like they export most of the time - with a few blips of import. Looking over other graphs I saw them import from France but on the *same* day they were exporting 10 times that amount to other countries - so end result.... a power grid working as designed to move power from one spot to another - that sometimes results in imports that wouldn't be needed if the country was in isolation?
1. No, we aren't seeing blackouts in California due to a lack of power generation facilities. California has been quite proactive in planning its energy needs. The vast majority of blackouts in California are due to wildfires and weather events.
2. The site you reference is from the Institute for Energy Research, an organization started by Enron’s public policy analysis director. It is an advocacy organization and a fossil fuels lobbying organization. It has an agenda.
Reprocessing spend fuel just produces more waste, roughly a factor of ten. :)
Get a dams clue
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The Breitbart article has two links to the same census bureau report. The report is titled "Children of Foreign-Born Parents Generation More Likely to Be College-Educated Than Their Parents, Census Bureau Reports", and does not contain the info the Breitbart article says that it's citing. In fact, California isn't even mentioned in the report. Your other sources are not any more credible.
You sure about that? Germany's economy is larger than CA but using renewables they have more energy than they can use.
Great example. Germany's renewable energy generation capabilities stands at 33%. Last Saturday it produced precisely 0% of Germany's consumption with import running full steam from France for some of that wonderful nuclear goodness. They have had more energy than they could use precisely 2 days last year, and then only because their energy mix is so heavily geared towards base load and intermittent load with few peaking plants in between.
And they get all that for the privilege of paying some of the highest electricity costs in the world (almost 3x what Californians currently pay, those two windy days where they had excess energy being a notable exception)
Under high pressure from CA to convert the coal plants to NG. Cali is very opposed to coal.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
A 3rd of this country's welfare recipients are in California.
That's a nice little unsupported bogus made up statistic you have there. California does spend the most on welfare overall but since they are the state with the largest population (and a high cost of living) that's hardly shocking. Per capita they are high but not wildly out of the norm - with around 4% of the population receiving some sort of assistance. California is among the least federally dependent states in the US.
It has been losing population for the last 20 years
You must be talking about a different California than the one on the west coast of the US. Population growth there has been steadily growing with no sign of that changing any time soon.
Most of the welfare recipients are white people in red counties within CA, actually. It's weird how much you hate them.
Most of the states that depend most heavily on federal aid are strongly red states. Most of those that depend the least on the government are blue states. Make of that what you will but I think there is some irony in there somewhere.
If the Brietbart article links to the Census Bureau report, why didn't you link to the report directly? Let's click on it and see... Oh, it doesn't support the claim that 930k people left CA between the dates given in the Brietbart article!
Wikipedia is a better source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are multiple sources in that data, and you can see that the population did not fall.
Brietbart seems to have realized that it's easy for people to call bullshit on unsourced claims, so they started to throw in some sources that look authoritative but which don't actually support what they are saying. I guess their assumption is that most people won't bother to read the sources, they will just assume that they add credibility to the story.
CA is dead last (50th out of 50) in economic freedom.
Or put another way it has the best environmental and consumer protections.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeah, they get a lot power from the US's largest nuclear plant in AZ.
And those surrounding states (or more specifically the power plants built in them to service the CA demand) need the power they produce to be purchased by CA or the plants shut down and people lose their jobs. It's not just a matter of oh let's sell it to someone else. Usually they can't just send the power elsewhere.
Utah has one Large power plant I'm familiar with that produces exclusively for the CA markets, the Intermountain Power Plant (IPP). The high voltage transmission lines from the plant run to CA and nowhere else. They were flat out told to convert it or else and the conversion is on schedule to be completed by 2025. The plant currently has two coal fired units, the plan over time is to eventually bring on two additional units, the third one was supposed to be running by now but that was halted when LA, (the planned destination for the power from the unit) voted to go coal free in 2012.
So yes CA the buyer is able to pressure the producers because more and more of their utilities are refusing to buy power produced by coal. When the plants are built and focused on supplying the CA markets, the Transmissions lines lead to the CA markets and other power plants already meet the needs of the state where they reside, then yes CA is able to dictate to the suppliers.
Utah gets no power from the IPP.
Meanwhile Utah's coal industry has been forced to go looking overseas for buyers of our very clean anthracite coal.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Reprocessing spend fuel just produces more waste, roughly a factor of ten.
I'm sorry, what?
Taking the 'waste', stripping out the 3% that can't be re-used, then shoving the remaining 97% including the romg-ebil-plutonium back in the reactor to be burned, is increasing waste by a factor of ten?
You're one of those Pi=3.0 folks, aren't you.