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Why California May Go Nuclear
- searine 7y agoI don't think I'll ever forgive the environmental movement for turning their back on nuclear technology. Yes, there are safety concerns but the price of inaction was the climate. I would take an accident or two over climate change any day.
- ixtli 7y agoThe really grim reality is that many environmentalists who correctly point the finger at unaccountable capitalists are themselves doing extreme harm by demonizing the only technology that can really help us in the next 10 years.
- ozborn 7y ago"demonizing the only technology" Really, the only technology? Not inshore wind turbines? Not hydrochlorofluorocarbon elimination? "that can really help us in the next 10 years." I doubt California could build a nuclear power plant in 10 years, and even if they did it would be crazy expensive and still take several years before it became operational. There are better ways to reduce and remove CO2 for the money. Having said that, I (and probably many environmentalists) would still keep Diablo Canyon given the sunk costs and benefits. However it doesn't mean I think we should be spending money building more nuclear power plants.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoAnd more plants could have meant decommissioning dangerous older plants, sooner. Could have saved accidents.
- Krasnol 7y agoYou could still decommission them for safety reasons and not just go on ignoring or hiding it. Maybe that would give back some of the lost faith in the technology. Meanwhile humans doing stupid stuff are still a problem with nuclear. Recently we had this guy with his Bitcoin mining rig and whatever happened in Russia.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoYou can't take any power generator offline for any length of time, without tremendous political backlash. People need their air conditioners! But new ones often dwarf the previous ones, and when they come online, then you can take an old, small one offline.
- Krasnol 7y agoIt's not like lifetime of those plants has been something that just came up recently. You have to plan for that and if you didn't, you need to buy power elsewhere and pay the price for your negligence. This would be the way to go if you care for safety. If you don't, you shouldn't build even more of those reactors because this technology is obviously nothing for you.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoBond issue, rate raising - all up to the public. And the public says "No more nuclear!"
- Krasnol 7y agoYeah, I mean, I say that too. The tech is dangerous, humans are irresponsible greedy idiots who should not handle it and we have no space for the waste from production and from decommission. Also: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-nuclearpower-astrid/france-drops-plans-to-build-sodium-cooled-nuclear-reactor-idUSKCN1VK0MC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-nuclearpower-astri...
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoAll contrary to how modern reactors work. No human intervention required; waste not the issue. Its FUD like that, that keeps accidents happening. Because we can't decommission old reactors by building new ones.
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- ashleyn 7y agoThree Mile Island and Chernobyl were practically PR disasters for the nuclear industry and all within ten years.
- ixtli 7y agoConservationists need to really make peace with the fact that the only way out of climate change involves building a very, very strong nuclear energy portfolio. This is difficult for people because it requires engaging in politics because these things are only as safe as they are well maintained. But actually, we do a surprisingly good job in America at keeping our nuclear plants running rather well, and we should be investing in many, many more.
- option 7y agoWe absolutely need nuclear energy. 1) Nuclear is the safest form of energy generation (measured in death/per mwatt) 2) Once operational it is always on and will substitute for solar/wind when those are unavailable 3) Energy conservation long term is not an option - quality of life correlates with amount of energy consumed 4) imagine, what if, energy were so cheap that desalination is profitable in CA.
- sprafa 7y agoSomeone pointed out recently that nuclear is only as safe as its operator - the Us Navy has never had a reactor accident for instance. Still the dangers are Chernobyl and Fukushima - uninhabitable areas where no one can go for generations.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoTurns out, Chernobyl is pretty safe right now. Could be cleaned up with a Troop of Scouts with trash bags. Its the FUD surrounding 'nuclear' that keeps people out.
- sprafa 7y agoHave you watched the show? The effort that was made to clear that are up was above and beyond what most people would consider reasonable.
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- merpnderp 7y agoIf people are terrified of global warming, going nuclear is winning the politics on easy mode.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mlacks 7y agoI really want to push for something similar in my state (Hawai’i). Where do I start?
- siffland 7y agoWe need more support for nuclear, especially research for Thorium-based reactors. I am all for green energy, but until that can become a reality worldwide we need something that can generate a lot of electicity with as little waste as possible.
- danschumann 7y agoCan we shoot the waste into space? Also, if you could slow down a nuclear explosion, could you use for rocket fuel?
- overcast 7y agoSure, until that rocket fails, distributing nuclear waste over a large area.
- danschumann 7y agoMitigate risks while emphasising benefits. What if we could make it safe? What if it was better than anything we could make otherwise?
- eloff 7y agoRockets have a disturbing tendency to blow up on a regular basis. Russia just tried this experiment with a nuclear cruise missile, which blew up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyonoksa_radiation_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyonoksa_radiation_accident
- overcast 7y agoThere is nothing safe about controlled explosions, ever. Burying waste in a mountain sounds like a much more controlled disposal plan.
- inscionent 7y agoSpace elevator?
- andbberger 7y ago"shoot it into the sun" is a common meme but ultimately a terrible idea for a whole host of reasons. Nuclear rockets are real and work [1]. You can also just shove tiny nukes out the bottom of your ship [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
- option 7y agoI am a California voter. Whom do I call/write to express my support for this?
- rconti 7y agoProbably the Governor himself; the article makes it sound like he'll be the ultimate decider (or, at least, COULD decide it on his own).
- envornment 7y agoThat plant definately shouldn't be closed. The Bay Area people, who keep on advocating nuclear should have skin in the game, a few plants among themselves. Ideally a couple of new nuclear plants would be build close to San Francisco, YIMBY style.
- MichaelMoser123 7y agoI hope they dont put it in a seismically active area, Fukushima used to be in one.
- i_am_proteus 7y agoDiablo Canyon is in an area that's moderately seismically active. It's easy to see the only lesson from Fukushima the meltdown of the Daichi reactors, but that was due to not being designed for the tsunami (or rather, the combination of earthquake and tsunami). The earthquake protections of other reactors (Fukushima Daini) worked as designed. Modern reactors are safer than older reactors.
- cameldrv 7y agoThe full story of Fukushima has not really been comprehensively told, at least in English language media. I'm not really sure that new reactors would necessarily be safer than Fukushima Daichi unit 1, because that unit had an isolation condenser system. The IC is exactly the type of passive safety system that is touted with new designs -- it can keep the reactor cool for a couple of days just by turning a couple of valves, and it can operate indefinitely if its water supply is topped off by, for example, a firetruck. Supposedly the system automatically activated, but then was manually deactivated by reactor personnel before the tsunami arrived to avoid shock cooling the reactor. After the tsunami arrived, the system was not turned back on again apparently out of confusion, but exactly what happened is still mysterious to me. All of that said I still think that nuclear is the safest and least environmentally damaging method of power generation we've yet invented. Like air travel, due to radiation's mysteriousness, it's held to a much higher standard of safety and environmental impact than other forms of power generation, and that has led to gross distortions in perception and regulation that lead us to have less safety and a worse environment.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoStill, it took 2000 people some four days to get all four reactors at Fukushima Daini to cold shutdown. In July 2019 a decision was made to decommission Fukushima Daini in response to local demands for a decision. It will take more than 40 years to decommission the plant.
- adventured 7y ago> Diablo generates 9% of California’s electricity and 20% of its clean, carbon-free electricity. It's remarkable that one nuclear plant generates 9% of the electricity for the entire state of California, and that they would have ever considered closing it (unless absolutely necessary). Build a few more of those over time and California has no power concerns for the next 50-60 years combined with the expansion of other renewables. Even being conservative with their current budget they could safely put a few billion dollars per year into building new nuclear power plants. Even better, build to surplus and begin exporting that green nuclear energy to other states.
- coredog64 7y agoCalifornia also buys something like half of the output of the Palo Verde plant outside of Phoenix.
- fattire 7y agoOn the other hand... https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/ https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/
- mdorazio 7y agoThe problem is multi-fold. 1) A good size chunk of California is seismically active, which is generally a bad idea for nuclear power plant placement. 2) Nuclear power plants require large water sources nearby for cooling. Large chunks of California where power is actually needed are essentially deserts without lakes or reservoirs that can be easily used for this without environmental concerns. You could place them on the coast, but this brings its own set of environmental problems and potential dangers. 3) Nuclear power plants are not quick to build. We're talking 5+ years to get one up and running, even in the ridiculously optimistic estimates from industry proponents. So you need to make the case that in 5 years when one is running it will be better than if we had built more solar + wind + battery over the same period of time (a solar farm can be constructed in a few months, battery storage can be installed in weeks). 4) Nuclear waste is not a solved problem, no matter what proponents tell you. The solution right now is to just kind of keep it hanging around mostly secured locations and hope for the best. Long-term storage proposals have still not gone anywhere, so you're basically just hoping that nothing terrible happens until there's political and financial will to do something about it. 5) Power requirements per capita have been mostly flat or dropping for years in the US, and this is expected to accelerate as homeowners continue to install their own supplemental power systems. Building more gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants is a huge investment with a questionable ROI given this fact. To me, nuclear power is a solution whose time has likely already passed. It just doesn't make much sense to install more baseload power via nuclear these days when we have non-coal alternatives available and dropping power requirements overall. Continued pushes for efficiency improvements, green buildings, residential solar+battery installs, and grid-scale renewable installs are cheaper, faster, and have less risks.
- williesleg 7y agoI hear solar is pretty good. But you need lots of sun. Does California have that?
- mikeger 7y agoNuclear is renewable? Not great, not terrible.
- ajross 7y ago> “But we can’t make a serious dent in slowing the warming trend in the world without investment in nuclear power.” That's... not really true. Cost to build out nuclear power capacity remains much (seriously, MUCH) higher than for solar or wind. It's true that nuclear is carbon free, really quite safe, and very useful. You certainly don't want to be deliberately decomissioning reactors in a world where we're still trying to get legacy coal plants off the grid. But if you're going to spend $100M on new capacity, I want to see numbers that say this is actually better than buying a bunch of windmill blades. It's a similar situation to hydro power. Dams are clean in a carbon sense but "bad" in lots of other ecological ways. No one is pushing for new dams, even if we all tolerate the ones that are already there.
- MBCook 7y agoWindmills can’t provide steady base load power all the time. They need to be paired with some sort of storage technology.
- ajross 7y agoThen show numbers for why we need nuclear for peaking capacity instead of just using existing gas and hydro while we wait for new technologies to arrive. Again, the problem isn't that the alternatives are perfect or that nuclear doesn't work, it's that nuclear power is outrageously expensive. And no amount of internet argumentation or industry-driven legislation is going to change that fact. Make it cheaper, then come back and evangelize. In the mean time, stop getting in the way of building out cheap green power, please.
- lenkite 7y agoIt's difficult to provide concrete numbers here. A lot of independent research is needed on data. All one can point is examples. For example, it is acknowledged by many that Germany made a mistake in shutting down their nuclear power plants since all they have done is simply increase their reliance on coal plants. Also, their renewables share of 36% quoted by several folks on HN also includes biomass! https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-climate-change-green-energy-shift-is-more-fizzle-than-sizzle/ https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-climate-change-green... https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/06/the-reason-renewables-cant-power-modern-civilization-is-because-they-were-never-meant-to/#3e6e8213ea2b https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/06...
- mrweasel 7y agoIsn’t this 20 year to late? Even if you “just” want 50% of Californias electicity to come from nuclear you’d need 4 or 5 new plant built, ideally built yesterday. New plants will be at least 10 years away and that’s being really optimistic.
- JackPoach 7y agoHighly unlikely. US is no longer able to build nuclear plans on time or within budget. California has difficult geology and climate is highly favorable toward other renewable sources. Why do something that's more difficult and expensive?
- dev_dull 7y agoI’ve really come around to nuclear power. I’d like to invite other HN readers to check out the comments of acid urnNSA[1] who describes himself as “Nuclear reactor physicist in Seattle” > Recall that the beauty of nuclear energy is energy density: there is 2 million times more energy in a uranium nucleus than in any chemical's electron shell. An average american can get 100% of their total primary energy for an entire 88 year lifetime and only use 300 grams of nuclear fuel. At that kind of fuel/waste footprint, it's relatively easy to have a low carbon footprint. And the data is in. The number is 12 gCO2-eq/kWh.” 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=acidburnNSA https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=acidburnNSA
- rconti 7y ago> As for California’s climate and environmental record, it is not nearly as strong as it appears. Much of the state's emissions reductions owe to a switch from coal to natural gas in the electricity the state imports, and from keeping population low by blocking new home building, a problem which has worsened under the governor. Well, this is the first time I've seen it suggested that blocking new home building is "keeping population low" (or, keeping population growth in check) in the Golden State.
- simmanian 7y agoI get that nuclear is effective, but the worst case scenario for nuclear seems vastly worse than the worst case for any other method of generating energy. Fukushima plant has gathered 1 million tons of radioactive water they now plan on just dumping into the ocean, and has rendered a pretty sizable area uninhabitable. We still don't know the long term health effects of living in areas that had been evacuated. Coupling this with all the radioactive waste we may never know what to do with makes me personally feel that fission is a bandaid more than a permanent solution.
- RickJWagner 7y agoA compelling argument for more nuclear power. I'm a believer.