5 ms·

I'm not saying I completely agree with closing the plant, but to be fair to the argument they make, the agreement does seem to spell out that the plant will be

• xyzzyz 6y ago
  They are expensive and take long to construct because of political and environmental requirements on them. This is not an inherent property of nuclear, and can be solved with a single stroke of the pen. This is not going to happen, though, because people tend to think that if something is "environmental", then it must be good.
  • Spooky23 6y ago
    That’s pretty naive. Companies will always put off big capital expenses as long as possible, especially if someone else holds the risk.
    • xyzzyz 6y ago
      No, companies are extremely happy to make huge capital expenses, if they expect to make a good profit on them. For example, California's PG&E is planning to spend a whopping $40B in investment over next 5 years, because California government guarantees 10% annual return on investment.
      • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Wtf is the point of sourcing market investment if you are going to guarantee profits? All the usual market mechanisms to ensure efficiency don't work, you are just handing out free money at the expence of the taxpayer. You might as well just issue bonds and invest money directly.
        • Spooky23 6y ago
          Or having a municipality just build and operate the resource. There’s a reason roads aren’t private.
          • xyzzyz 6y ago
            It is by no means clear that if “municipality” built it, it would be any cheaper. Experience suggests the opposite.
            • Spooky23 6y ago
              Maybe in California. In Plattsburgh, NY, electric rates are 75% less than the state average. Pretty sure the other municipal utilities are similar. (About 30 in NY) With civil service employees, management overhead costs are usually way lower. Corporate management usually gets overpaid.
            • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
              I you want to use 'free market', then use it properly. If the state guarantees profit, you get the worst of both worlds.
              • xyzzyz 6y ago
                Right. There are many things the government could possibly do, and it could theoretically do them as well as private sector does, and in many case even better than private sector (as governments enjoy many privileges that private companies don't). However, this is upper bound of what we could get from governments running things. Most of us need to settle with governments as they actually exist, and the actual outcomes. The track record does not seem encouraging, and arguments of the sort "this time it will be different, we'll just put our people in charge, who are better than people who were previously in charge" aren't particularly appealing.
                • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
                  You are missing the point entirely, the state or the market are fine, each approach has it's strengths. Deals like this one are unacceptable because they are a Frankenstein monster - state guarantees profit, so the state bears all the risk. The normal market mechanisms don't work, inefficiencies and wastefulness is not punished, but profits are still private. It encourages the worst possible behaviour.
      • Spooky23 6y ago
        Well duh, the state absorbed the risk. I’d borrow at 3% to yield 10% too. Where that doesn’t happen and regulation doesn’t exist, utilities will happily operate a 100 year old depreciated coal plant forever.
• vondur 6y ago
  I'm not sure about that goal, California currently imports around 32% of its power now. That number will likely increase if we shut down all of the remaining nuclear.
  • toomuchtodo 6y ago
    California can import clean solar from Arizona and Nevada (which have enormous solar potential), as well as hydro and wind from the pacific northwest.
    • tialaramex 6y ago
      How much night time solar can Arizona and Nevada give them, today, or in say ten years? Serious question. The nice thing about Nuclear is that it's boringly reliable. You buy a 500MW nuclear power plant, you're getting ~500MW from that maybe 80-90% of the time. Own a half dozen of those (3GW nameplate capacity) and you can have 2GW or more pretty much always. You buy 3GW of solar panels obviously they don't do anything for a big portion of every day because the sun is on the far side of the planet, so then either you're also buying a lot of storage and more panels, or you don't have a replacement for the nuke plant. Now, if you have 3GW of molten salt concentrated solar maybe you can hit that 80-90% reliability on the individual units and replace the nuke plant, but do Nevada and Arizona have any of those today? Are they expected to build a California nuke plant's worth any time soon?
      • epistasis 6y ago
        Serious answer: as much nigh time solar as you want, via battery storage, at cost competitive prices. Here's a three year old project in Arizona for solar plus storage at less than $45/MWh: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-can-tucson-electric-get-solar-storage-for-45kwh/443715/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-can-tucson-electric-get... Since then, the public bidding processes in Nevada and Colorado have revealed many more projects at similar costs. Since utility planning is typically on a five year timeline, bids are expected to be at the cost of storage at the time of delivery, and since the cost of storage is falling 20% per year, outsiders think that these projects are taking future cost drops into account. But if a three year old project is so affordable, anything delivered in the next six months will be pretty equivalent.