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."

Comments

Re:Guess they were not serious about climate chang

[plopez]

You sure about that? Germany's economy is larger than CA but using renewables they have more energy than they can use.

Not really

[rsilvergun]

Natural Gas is still a lot safer and solar is cheaper. That probably wouldn't be true if American's political climate wasn't so crazy. The mad rush to privatize things that shouldn't be privatized coupled with our bad habit of looking the other way on regulation means nuclear power is risky. Government run enterprises tend to be very, very efficient unless they're being run as pork. e.g. the DMV and Post Office both do amazing things (as long as you don't live in the South, where the DMV massively underfunded). That means there really isn't much profit to be had privatizing it without cutting corners on safety and, well, look at Fukushima. A completely preventable disaster that nearly destroyed a city...

And don't forget that we can't recycle the fuel because we're terrified some of it will get lost and turned into nukes. Not that it's ever stopped anyone from getting them (re: North Korea).

TLDR; Get Americans to stop privatizing dangerous things and allow the waste to be recycled and we'll put nuclear back in rotation.

Re: Morons

[Anonymous Coward]

A 3rd of this country's welfare recipients are in California. It is in the bottom 10 states in education results. It has been losing population for the last 20 years. More companies are leaving California while it is driving up taxes to shore up the state pension plan. Yeah. Good ole California.

Are YOU sure about that? GR 35% from renewables.

[SuperKendall]

Germany's economy is larger than CA but using renewables they have more energy than they can use.

Nope.

During brief times of year, that MAY be true, as with the headline you are thinking of where German power pricing was negative on Christmas day in December.

However most of the time Germans are importing power because they shut down all nuclear plants - they are currently producing about 35% of their power from renewables

But all that importing and expensive renewable power facilities means that Germans pay some of the highest power rates in the world. Even if on Christmas you do get a break because the office buildings are shut down...