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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."
Do we have any rails coming in from West Virginia?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
California is run by morons.
No way are they going to be able to replace all of the energy lost from that plant from renewables. It's going to come from some other state, spewing coal and sulfur... or possibly they simply will increase the brownouts, but it's OK because all of the large cash cows have learned to have their own generation facilities for anything important.
Nuclear energy is the cheapest form above all the others, it's a shame to see the world fold this away even as they scream the Earth needs saving. You were saving it friend, and now you are letting it go.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You sure about that? Germany's economy is larger than CA but using renewables they have more energy than they can use.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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/...
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?
California can just outlaw air conditioning.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
Would that link be pointing to the "Institute for Energy Research" that appears to be a PowerPoint propaganda outlet for the big fossil fuel companies, and where there's a conspicuous lack of mention of renewables...?
Just checking.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
Germany is not importing power.
Tell it to your own energy charts which showed quite a bit of import happening over the weekend. That's the thing about having intermittent energy sources. Germany is a net energy exporter but relies heavily on imports to keep the lights on when there's no wind. You imported 25TWh Jan-Oct last year.
Get a damn clue, moron
Learn to internet.
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.
California used to be 4th until the Democrats took over. Go ahead, prove me wrong.
You made the claim. It's up to you to back it up with facts.
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
Buildings can withstand very large earthquakes without any major problems these days. Look at Japan. The problems are mostly in places that don't have regular large earthquakes, because people get complacent.
For example, if you live in Japan you arrange your stuff so that when the house shakes it doesn't get trashed. You put your TV on isolation pads, you don't use heavy pendant lights, tall bookcases are screwed in to the wall etc. That's why they get hit with a magnitude 7 or 8 every now and again and few people are hurt, where as in other countries a magnitude 5 kills hundreds.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Are you talking about pre-1990 before German Reunification?
No, he is just talking out his ass. California has never been #4. Even before unification, the West German economy was far bigger than California's, and in addition to America, Japan, UK, France, and Italy, back in 1990 there was this one other economy ahead of California as well: the Soviet Union.
Links to Breitbart, Blogspot, and some Libertarian "institute". Why in the fuck is this modded "Insightful"? The fucking Breitbart link doesn't even support the claim the article is making.
This is just a massive amount of projection. California's policies under Jerry Brown have balanced the budget and moved onto a budget surplus. This has been in addition to paying down the state's debt incurred under previous administrations.
Oh no a state with high taxes is doing extremely well! Better pull out the bullshit to make ludicrous claims otherwise! Taxes R the devil and an affront to bootstrappiness everywhere! California has no economic freedom! Regulations are like slave collars for bootstrappy independents! How dare the guv'ment tell bootstrappers they can't dump toxic waste where they please or treat workers like indentured servants!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The red state vs. blue state comparison is flawed because there are no purely red or blue states.
Nobody argued to the contrary. But as long as presidential elections maintain an electoral college with a winner take all system there will remain such a thing as red states and blue states whether you like it or not and regardless of what the underlying demographics might be.
Democrats are TWICE as likely as Republicans to have taken food stamps.
Did you actually read the article you linked to? From your article: "But when the political lens shifts from partisanship to ideology, the participation gap vanishes. Self-described political conservatives were no more likely than liberals or moderates to have received food stamps (17% for each group),"
You complain that I'm ignoring underlying demographics and then you do the exact same thing. The gap you point to is entirely explained by the fact that it is MINORITIES (non-whites) and WOMEN who are more likely to receive assistance. These groups happen to generally vote Democrat. Again from TFA: "Beyond politics, equally large or larger gaps emerge in the participation rates of many core social and demographic groups. For example, women were about twice as likely as men (23% vs. 12%) to have received food stamps at some point in their lives. Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to have used this benefit during their lives (31% vs. 15%). Among Hispanics, about 22% say they have collected food stamps."
"California doesn't have big ones because it has lots of little one."
I can tell you don't live in California, especially southern California where there are four or five major fault lines. One goes, the others tend to resonate.
Hayward fault is due for a major slip soon, ditto Elsinore despite its reputation for being a relatively 'quiet' fault line. If they both go at roughly the same time, SoCal could be utterly fucked; depending upon where on the fault lines the quakes start, that might trigger Andreas, causing an even larger quake and possibly triggering a slip of the Newport-Inglewood fault line.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
Enron and California was a year 2000 thing, it finally fell apart in mid-2001. The big scandal was pre-Bush. Enron was a case of an unethical company choosing to use the power of Government for its own financial gains - and spread money around to lots of players on all sides to buy the influence needed to get what it wanted.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Not only are aircraft accidents acute, people who travel by plane will get more radiation exposure than people who live near nuclear power plants.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes