8 ms·

Is nuclear part of the bill? It is clean but I don't see any mention of it either way in the article other than in the graph of current sources.

RobLach 8y ago
Whenever I ride around Berkeley, CA I see a sea of "nuclear-free zone" signs on roads filled with Prius traffic. It's not so easy to understand the real agendas here.
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  Funny enough, there is a solution for more safely disposing of nuclear waste that is coming out of Berkeley. http://www.deepisolation.com http://www.deepisolation.com They are a company to pay attention to IMHO.
  - nickik 8y ago
    Nuclear waste is not an actual problem and the only reason there is no 'solution' is because it has turned into a political shit show. Worrying about nuclear waste at the beginning of the nuclear age when most of that waste is actually valuable fuel is downright idiotic.
    - Alex3917 8y ago
      > Nuclear waste is not an actual problem If you're comfortable eating food grown in the soil grown around uranium processing plants then by all means go ahead.
      - sannee 8y ago
        I am fully comfortable with that (not parent though) and have even done so on several occasions. You do realize we can detect contamination by radioactive elements in quatities many orders of magnitude lower than could conceivably cause any harm right? On the other hand, I live in Europe and our local government has yet to produce a complete environment monitoring fail such as the Flint incident in the USA.
        jtuente 8y ago
        I would consider Flint to be an infrastructure crisis rather than environmental. Lead piping and insufficient water treatment are due to infrastructure that is inadequate.
        dublin 8y ago
        It's worth keeping in mind that Flint was the result of more than a half-century of embedded Democratic corruption. This was a failure of accountability and integrity in local, not a national, or even state politics. Sadly, Flint is still under the same corrupt politicians that led to this in the first place, so don't expect anything to change...
      - hueving 8y ago
        Appeal to irrational fear. Are you comfortable with radio towers blasting you with radiation?
        Alex3917 8y ago
        > Are you comfortable with radio towers blasting you with radiation? Nope. I always keep my phone in airplane mode when I'm not using it.
        drewmol 8y ago
        But how do you turn off the towers?
        Alex3917 8y ago
        > But how do you turn off the towers? You vote for Jill Stein.
        mitchty 8y ago
        That doesn't change the amount of energy you receive from a radio tower at all... You should be more worried about wearing sunscreen every day than the amount of energy you get from any wireless antenna. The sun puts out vastly more electromagnetic radiation than any wireless device ever will per cubic foot/meter/whatever.
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      No, it actually is a problem. It has to be stored for millennia, and in a way that does not leak/contaminate surroundings (including ground water). Very little technology /materials can meet those requirements[0], and the current situation is a damn mess[1]. 0. http://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/reports/synopsis-of-board-report-on-management-and-disposal-of-doe-snf.pdf http://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/reports/synopsis-of... 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/09/tunnel-collapses-at-hanford-nuclear-waste-site-in-washington-state-reports-say/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/0...
      - village-idiot 8y ago
        Only if you don't use it. The intelligent thing would be to burn in in a subcritical reactor[0]. This would let you produce more electricity from nuclear "waste", turning it into different material that's safer to dispose of. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor
      - seiferteric 8y ago
        Isn't that mostly because we don't reprocess waste here like they do in France and elsewhere?
      - opo 8y ago
        Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. (The same can't be said for coal waste - like just about everything else associated with burning coal, coal waste is an environmental diaster.)
    - hodgesrm 8y ago
      You can't dismiss the waste problem out of hand given the environmental problems at places like Hanford [0] and the costs of safely decommissioning old plants, especially damaged ones like Fukushima [1]. There's abundant evidence that it's a costly, poisonous mess if done badly. Personally I don't think this is the biggest problem with nuclear power, and it's certainly not in and of itself a reason to switch to alternatives. But it's not an issue to ignore either. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site [1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/03/24/national/estimated-taxpayer-cost-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-balloons-%C2%A5218-2-billion/#.W4g7Q5NKgUE https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/03/24/national/estima...
      - garmaine 8y ago
        The output of a nuclear reactor isn’t waste, it is fuel for a different kind of reactor. If we built those reactors (called a breeder reactor) then we could safely and economically use that fuel, recycling so much that the actual waste would go from tons of material filling Olympic class swimming pools, to a few barrels. Nuclear power, done properly, is the cleanest source of energy we have. Why don’t we? Politics and the lack of military uses.
        toyg 8y ago
        > the lack of military uses As opposed to all those military uses of dams and wind turbines. Right. And of course, I wonder what the fuss is all about with Iran, then... The reason nuclear is in decline is the track record of spectacular disasters: Three Mile, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima. Get at least a generation without massive failures, and people might be willing to give nuclear a chance; but there have been 3 in my lifetime alone! (Plus, in any country not as big and isolated as the US, any plant is a massive weakness from a defense perspective...)
        village-idiot 8y ago
        I mean, if you want to talk about safety records of power production, I'd like to point out that fossil fuels kill about 3 million a year, and biofuel (wood, dung) kills about 4.3 million a year. Those estimates are from 2012. Nuclear is nowhere close to that over the past half century of use, even if you toss in fatalities caused by nuclear weapons, which is a whole different category. Realistically, installation of solar and wind is actually more dangerous than Nuclear, because of falls.
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      You'd think fossil fuels would have taught us the value of foresight wouldn't you? Even if you were aware of the consequence of excessive CO2 from the advent of the era, it could easily have been dismissed. 'Worrying about a bit of extra CO2 at the beginning of the industrial age is downright idiotic. There's a lot of atmosphere around our planet, and a bit of extra CO2 is good for the plants anyhow!' There's a huge difference in nuclear going from a small chunk of our present day power generation to eras where some see it as being the primary generator for whatever exponential increases in energy we'll be using in the future. This change in scale really should affect how you look at things. Nuclear in particular has some pretty catastrophic fail scenarios, major decommissioning issues, and other problems. These can kind of be hand-waved away at current levels, but can't when you start talking about increasing operations on the order of magnitudes. And when you start talking about things like this you're also implicitly alluding to breeder reactors, salt-water extraction, and other technologies that not only add substantial complexity (and side issues) but also greatly increase the costs relative to present day nuclear, which poses even more issues in terms of sustainability. For all intents and purposes solar is pretty much a flawless method of energy production. The one issue is night time production, but there are countless ways to store energy even if we ignore more utopic scenarios like global high energy direct current lines constantly transiting energy to where it needs to go. Given the practically unlimited generation possibilities the loss of energy involved in either storage or transit are not really that big of a deal, and would not affect expected pricing the same way as dealing with nuclear's practical problems of scale will.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - andromeduck 8y ago
    that's an old idea
- jaredhansen 8y ago
  > It's not so easy to understand the real agendas here. The real agenda has a lot more to do with impressing your neighbors with how eco-conscious you are (ideally via cheap signals like signs and bumper stickers) than it does with costly and difficult initiatives like figuring out how to meet the world's energy requirements in a sustainable way.
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    I have a prius and I don't care about my neighbor's opinions. It was just available cheap to em used and doesn't use as much gas. How have you decided you can speak for all prius owners? If people ARE trying to "keep up with the Joneses" by buying priuses instead of SUVs and Corvettes that would be a great agenda.
    - stretchwithme 8y ago
      Who said they are speaking for all prius owners?
  - WalterGR 8y ago
    The real agenda has a lot more to do with impressing your neighbors with how eco-conscious you are (ideally via cheap signals like signs and bumper stickers) This tired bullshit again? Yes, we understand that everyone could be doing more to help some cause, and that some people care more about appearances than improving the world, and some people do legitimately good deeds for ‘selfish’ reasons like increased self-esteem. The “virtue-signaling” “every decent action in the world is done just to impress one’s tribe” meme is getting old.
    - x220 8y ago
      If you say you support something, but don't want to take actions that demonstrably promote what you are supporting, you are virtue signalling. It's quite simple, and it's maddening.
      - s73v3r_ 8y ago
- mistrial9 8y ago
  Berkeley is a long-standing home to nuclear physics practitioners, and there are nuclear-you-know-whats designed in the national labs.. its not a settled thing
urda 8y ago
California is actually in the middle of shutting down the last nuclear source they have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#Closure_in_2024%E2%80%932025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#Clos...
- gricardo99 8y ago
  The sooner it shuts down the better, given the design and risks of the plant[1] 1 - https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-accidents/diablo-canyon-earthquake-seismic-risk https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-accidents...
  - nickik 8y ago
    Absolute bullshit. Its one of the best run and safest nuclear plants in the world. Union of concerned scientists is nothing but an anti-nuclear lobbying group the same as Greenpeace and others. All they do is spread FUD or outright lies.
    - adrr 8y ago
      I am pro-nuclear and agree that it needs to be shut down. Any nuclear power plant that wasn't built this century needs to go away, we should not be running any pressurized water reactors. The latest generation of nuclear power plants are very safe and have passive nuclear safety which requires no active measures to shut down a reactor safely which significantly reduces the risk of a meltdown. The biggest problem with nuclear power is old generation power plants that fail and cause negative sentiment towards nuclear power. I really hope we invest in generation IV nuclear power plants which deal with reducing nuclear waste and adds even more safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
      - nickik 8y ago
        Its insane to shut down something liek 20% of the nations power supply that is zero carbon. The current generation has its problems but shutting down before end of life is a absolutely insane idea in every possible way. You can't magically replace 20% of the nations energy production with GenIV reactors. That not how technology works. GenIV reactors are great and the companies building them will hopefully do it in the 2020 but to even then, the focus should be on replacing coal not existing nuclear.
_rpd 8y ago
60% has to be wind and solar, the remaining 40% may be hydro and nuclear.
radicalbyte 8y ago
Until recently I was extremely pro nuclear, but in the past months I've been researching renewable energy and have changed my mind. I hope not. For a similar cost you can actually turn coal power into massive carbon storage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_captu... This is actually pretty ingenious, if it works at industrial scale then it's better than even wind and solar power.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > and have changed my mind. > I hope not. Care to explain why you have changed your mind?
  - radicalbyte 8y ago
    The alternatives are better. Nuclear is expensive even before you factor in the decommissioning costs. With those costs factored in it just doesn't make any sense. Invest that money in geothermal, hydro, solar, wind and eventually tidal power and you get far more bang-for-your-buck. Convert coal plants to burn biomass combined with carbon capture and geological storage and you get power which - whilst more expensive - removes carbon from the air. The more you use it the more carbon it removes. Given these developments, why build new nuclear plants? Closing down plants which are still viable on the other hand seems like pure madness. If (when?) we can design nuclear plants which are both economical, safe and don't have the externalized decommissioning costs then it would also be foolish not to include them in the mix.
    - hueving 8y ago
      Nuclear is only expensive because the current climate from anti-nuclear movements buries each plant in red tape and makes them all one off designs. Windmills would be extremely expensive as well if each one was designed with a custom generator and custom blades.
    - SllX 8y ago
      Geothrenal is limited geographically. Iceland has plenty but a tiny population. California has a lot but it’s largely tapped out and what we do have is sufficient only for the communities nearby to the plants. Your hypothetical biomass burning coal plants are still that: hypothetical. If they work at scale, add that to the list. Damming up rivers has its own problems, but this is largely moot: the majority of lakes in California are dam lakes and damn near every river with good capacity in the State is already dammed up. Tidal power is likely to have other environmental concerns. If mitigating these concerns still makes it cheaper than nuclear plants, fine, but I’m not going to support the installation of any new tech that screws with coastal ecosystems the same way we screwed up prior river and lake ecosystems.
SllX 8y ago
New construction of nuclear plants is constitutionally limited in California and has been since well before I was born. Existing capacity is just leftover from before that era.
- _rpd 8y ago
  There may be some imports of nuclear-sourced power from Arizona and Washington state.
  - SllX 8y ago
    That might be a possibility, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that it is actually pretty pathetic we have to import power to make up our energy needs at all. When I last looked at the stats a few years ago we were importing about 30% of our power from other States and it was trending upwards.
    - _rpd 8y ago
      The Californian regulatory environment is very costly. It is natural for power producers to build new capacity elsewhere.
garmaine 8y ago
There is only one nuclear power plant in California (Diablo Canyon) and it is scheduled to be decommissioned without a replacement.
bsder 8y ago
It's sad, but no. At this point, people have, apparently rightly, concluded that the need for profit is fundamentally incompatible with running a nuclear reactor. San Onofre is a good example. It has been plagued by operational and mechanical problems over the years simply because nobody is willing to spend enough money to do it right. Given that, shutting it down is pretty much the only option.

RobLach 8y ago

Whenever I ride around Berkeley, CA I see a sea of "nuclear-free zone" signs on roads filled with Prius traffic. It's not so easy to understand the real agendas here.

godzillabrennus 8y ago
Funny enough, there is a solution for more safely disposing of nuclear waste that is coming out of Berkeley. http://www.deepisolation.com http://www.deepisolation.com They are a company to pay attention to IMHO.
- nickik 8y ago
  Nuclear waste is not an actual problem and the only reason there is no 'solution' is because it has turned into a political shit show. Worrying about nuclear waste at the beginning of the nuclear age when most of that waste is actually valuable fuel is downright idiotic.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    > Nuclear waste is not an actual problem If you're comfortable eating food grown in the soil grown around uranium processing plants then by all means go ahead.
    - sannee 8y ago
      I am fully comfortable with that (not parent though) and have even done so on several occasions. You do realize we can detect contamination by radioactive elements in quatities many orders of magnitude lower than could conceivably cause any harm right? On the other hand, I live in Europe and our local government has yet to produce a complete environment monitoring fail such as the Flint incident in the USA.
      - jtuente 8y ago
        I would consider Flint to be an infrastructure crisis rather than environmental. Lead piping and insufficient water treatment are due to infrastructure that is inadequate.
      - dublin 8y ago
        It's worth keeping in mind that Flint was the result of more than a half-century of embedded Democratic corruption. This was a failure of accountability and integrity in local, not a national, or even state politics. Sadly, Flint is still under the same corrupt politicians that led to this in the first place, so don't expect anything to change...
    - hueving 8y ago
      Appeal to irrational fear. Are you comfortable with radio towers blasting you with radiation?
      - Alex3917 8y ago
        > Are you comfortable with radio towers blasting you with radiation? Nope. I always keep my phone in airplane mode when I'm not using it.
        drewmol 8y ago
        But how do you turn off the towers?
        Alex3917 8y ago
        > But how do you turn off the towers? You vote for Jill Stein.
        mitchty 8y ago
        That doesn't change the amount of energy you receive from a radio tower at all... You should be more worried about wearing sunscreen every day than the amount of energy you get from any wireless antenna. The sun puts out vastly more electromagnetic radiation than any wireless device ever will per cubic foot/meter/whatever.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    No, it actually is a problem. It has to be stored for millennia, and in a way that does not leak/contaminate surroundings (including ground water). Very little technology /materials can meet those requirements[0], and the current situation is a damn mess[1]. 0. http://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/reports/synopsis-of-board-report-on-management-and-disposal-of-doe-snf.pdf http://www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/reports/synopsis-of... 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/09/tunnel-collapses-at-hanford-nuclear-waste-site-in-washington-state-reports-say/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/0...
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      Only if you don't use it. The intelligent thing would be to burn in in a subcritical reactor[0]. This would let you produce more electricity from nuclear "waste", turning it into different material that's safer to dispose of. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor
    - seiferteric 8y ago
      Isn't that mostly because we don't reprocess waste here like they do in France and elsewhere?
    - opo 8y ago
      Right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. (The same can't be said for coal waste - like just about everything else associated with burning coal, coal waste is an environmental diaster.)
  - hodgesrm 8y ago
    You can't dismiss the waste problem out of hand given the environmental problems at places like Hanford [0] and the costs of safely decommissioning old plants, especially damaged ones like Fukushima [1]. There's abundant evidence that it's a costly, poisonous mess if done badly. Personally I don't think this is the biggest problem with nuclear power, and it's certainly not in and of itself a reason to switch to alternatives. But it's not an issue to ignore either. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site [1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/03/24/national/estimated-taxpayer-cost-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-balloons-%C2%A5218-2-billion/#.W4g7Q5NKgUE https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/03/24/national/estima...
    - garmaine 8y ago
      The output of a nuclear reactor isn’t waste, it is fuel for a different kind of reactor. If we built those reactors (called a breeder reactor) then we could safely and economically use that fuel, recycling so much that the actual waste would go from tons of material filling Olympic class swimming pools, to a few barrels. Nuclear power, done properly, is the cleanest source of energy we have. Why don’t we? Politics and the lack of military uses.
      - toyg 8y ago
        > the lack of military uses As opposed to all those military uses of dams and wind turbines. Right. And of course, I wonder what the fuss is all about with Iran, then... The reason nuclear is in decline is the track record of spectacular disasters: Three Mile, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima. Get at least a generation without massive failures, and people might be willing to give nuclear a chance; but there have been 3 in my lifetime alone! (Plus, in any country not as big and isolated as the US, any plant is a massive weakness from a defense perspective...)
        village-idiot 8y ago
        I mean, if you want to talk about safety records of power production, I'd like to point out that fossil fuels kill about 3 million a year, and biofuel (wood, dung) kills about 4.3 million a year. Those estimates are from 2012. Nuclear is nowhere close to that over the past half century of use, even if you toss in fatalities caused by nuclear weapons, which is a whole different category. Realistically, installation of solar and wind is actually more dangerous than Nuclear, because of falls.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    You'd think fossil fuels would have taught us the value of foresight wouldn't you? Even if you were aware of the consequence of excessive CO2 from the advent of the era, it could easily have been dismissed. 'Worrying about a bit of extra CO2 at the beginning of the industrial age is downright idiotic. There's a lot of atmosphere around our planet, and a bit of extra CO2 is good for the plants anyhow!' There's a huge difference in nuclear going from a small chunk of our present day power generation to eras where some see it as being the primary generator for whatever exponential increases in energy we'll be using in the future. This change in scale really should affect how you look at things. Nuclear in particular has some pretty catastrophic fail scenarios, major decommissioning issues, and other problems. These can kind of be hand-waved away at current levels, but can't when you start talking about increasing operations on the order of magnitudes. And when you start talking about things like this you're also implicitly alluding to breeder reactors, salt-water extraction, and other technologies that not only add substantial complexity (and side issues) but also greatly increase the costs relative to present day nuclear, which poses even more issues in terms of sustainability. For all intents and purposes solar is pretty much a flawless method of energy production. The one issue is night time production, but there are countless ways to store energy even if we ignore more utopic scenarios like global high energy direct current lines constantly transiting energy to where it needs to go. Given the practically unlimited generation possibilities the loss of energy involved in either storage or transit are not really that big of a deal, and would not affect expected pricing the same way as dealing with nuclear's practical problems of scale will.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- andromeduck 8y ago
  that's an old idea
jaredhansen 8y ago
> It's not so easy to understand the real agendas here. The real agenda has a lot more to do with impressing your neighbors with how eco-conscious you are (ideally via cheap signals like signs and bumper stickers) than it does with costly and difficult initiatives like figuring out how to meet the world's energy requirements in a sustainable way.
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  I have a prius and I don't care about my neighbor's opinions. It was just available cheap to em used and doesn't use as much gas. How have you decided you can speak for all prius owners? If people ARE trying to "keep up with the Joneses" by buying priuses instead of SUVs and Corvettes that would be a great agenda.
  - stretchwithme 8y ago
    Who said they are speaking for all prius owners?
- WalterGR 8y ago
  The real agenda has a lot more to do with impressing your neighbors with how eco-conscious you are (ideally via cheap signals like signs and bumper stickers) This tired bullshit again? Yes, we understand that everyone could be doing more to help some cause, and that some people care more about appearances than improving the world, and some people do legitimately good deeds for ‘selfish’ reasons like increased self-esteem. The “virtue-signaling” “every decent action in the world is done just to impress one’s tribe” meme is getting old.
  - x220 8y ago
    If you say you support something, but don't want to take actions that demonstrably promote what you are supporting, you are virtue signalling. It's quite simple, and it's maddening.
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
mistrial9 8y ago
Berkeley is a long-standing home to nuclear physics practitioners, and there are nuclear-you-know-whats designed in the national labs.. its not a settled thing

urda 8y ago

California is actually in the middle of shutting down the last nuclear source they have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#Closure_in_2024%E2%80%932025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#Clos...

gricardo99 8y ago
The sooner it shuts down the better, given the design and risks of the plant[1] 1 - https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-accidents/diablo-canyon-earthquake-seismic-risk https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-accidents...
- nickik 8y ago
  Absolute bullshit. Its one of the best run and safest nuclear plants in the world. Union of concerned scientists is nothing but an anti-nuclear lobbying group the same as Greenpeace and others. All they do is spread FUD or outright lies.
  - adrr 8y ago
    I am pro-nuclear and agree that it needs to be shut down. Any nuclear power plant that wasn't built this century needs to go away, we should not be running any pressurized water reactors. The latest generation of nuclear power plants are very safe and have passive nuclear safety which requires no active measures to shut down a reactor safely which significantly reduces the risk of a meltdown. The biggest problem with nuclear power is old generation power plants that fail and cause negative sentiment towards nuclear power. I really hope we invest in generation IV nuclear power plants which deal with reducing nuclear waste and adds even more safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
    - nickik 8y ago
      Its insane to shut down something liek 20% of the nations power supply that is zero carbon. The current generation has its problems but shutting down before end of life is a absolutely insane idea in every possible way. You can't magically replace 20% of the nations energy production with GenIV reactors. That not how technology works. GenIV reactors are great and the companies building them will hopefully do it in the 2020 but to even then, the focus should be on replacing coal not existing nuclear.

_rpd 8y ago

60% has to be wind and solar, the remaining 40% may be hydro and nuclear.

radicalbyte 8y ago

Until recently I was extremely pro nuclear, but in the past months I've been researching renewable energy and have changed my mind. I hope not. For a similar cost you can actually turn coal power into massive carbon storage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_captu... This is actually pretty ingenious, if it works at industrial scale then it's better than even wind and solar power.

craftyguy 8y ago
> and have changed my mind. > I hope not. Care to explain why you have changed your mind?
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  The alternatives are better. Nuclear is expensive even before you factor in the decommissioning costs. With those costs factored in it just doesn't make any sense. Invest that money in geothermal, hydro, solar, wind and eventually tidal power and you get far more bang-for-your-buck. Convert coal plants to burn biomass combined with carbon capture and geological storage and you get power which - whilst more expensive - removes carbon from the air. The more you use it the more carbon it removes. Given these developments, why build new nuclear plants? Closing down plants which are still viable on the other hand seems like pure madness. If (when?) we can design nuclear plants which are both economical, safe and don't have the externalized decommissioning costs then it would also be foolish not to include them in the mix.
  - hueving 8y ago
    Nuclear is only expensive because the current climate from anti-nuclear movements buries each plant in red tape and makes them all one off designs. Windmills would be extremely expensive as well if each one was designed with a custom generator and custom blades.
  - SllX 8y ago
    Geothrenal is limited geographically. Iceland has plenty but a tiny population. California has a lot but it’s largely tapped out and what we do have is sufficient only for the communities nearby to the plants. Your hypothetical biomass burning coal plants are still that: hypothetical. If they work at scale, add that to the list. Damming up rivers has its own problems, but this is largely moot: the majority of lakes in California are dam lakes and damn near every river with good capacity in the State is already dammed up. Tidal power is likely to have other environmental concerns. If mitigating these concerns still makes it cheaper than nuclear plants, fine, but I’m not going to support the installation of any new tech that screws with coastal ecosystems the same way we screwed up prior river and lake ecosystems.

SllX 8y ago

New construction of nuclear plants is constitutionally limited in California and has been since well before I was born. Existing capacity is just leftover from before that era.

_rpd 8y ago
There may be some imports of nuclear-sourced power from Arizona and Washington state.
- SllX 8y ago
  That might be a possibility, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that it is actually pretty pathetic we have to import power to make up our energy needs at all. When I last looked at the stats a few years ago we were importing about 30% of our power from other States and it was trending upwards.
  - _rpd 8y ago
    The Californian regulatory environment is very costly. It is natural for power producers to build new capacity elsewhere.

garmaine 8y ago

There is only one nuclear power plant in California (Diablo Canyon) and it is scheduled to be decommissioned without a replacement.

bsder 8y ago

It's sad, but no. At this point, people have, apparently rightly, concluded that the need for profit is fundamentally incompatible with running a nuclear reactor. San Onofre is a good example. It has been plagued by operational and mechanical problems over the years simply because nobody is willing to spend enough money to do it right. Given that, shutting it down is pretty much the only option.