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California is shutting down its last nuclear plant
- jcranberry 5y ago>On Friday, Sept. 10, the U.S. Department of Energy granted the state an emergency order to allow natural gas power plants to operate without pollution restrictions so that California can meet its energy obligations. The order is in effect until Nov. 9. This is crazy. Are they just going to buy more power after this or extend this order? Is there a plan to replace this with renewable energy sources?
- tims33 5y agoSuch a frustrating decision. Whether you like nuclear or not and no matter how bullish you are on renewables, I don't understand why they wouldn't wait until they'd shut down every other carbon emitting form of power generation. This plant is so reliable as a baseline power generator.
- Retric 5y agoBlame the free market. In 2020 5% of solar power produced in California was curtailed as in not supplied to the grid because it was unneeded. Baseline power is no longer desirable because California regularly has a large surplus of renewable energy which drops the spot price of electricity to ~zero. Reducing nuclear capacity factor almost 1:1 increases prices which means solar adoption kicks out nuclear very early without massive subsides. Even that’s a simplification they actually price things based on nodes due to limited transmission infrastructure. http://www.caiso.com/pricemap/Pages/default.aspx http://www.caiso.com/pricemap/Pages/default.aspx
- that_guy_iain 5y agoDoesn't California have blackouts on, what would be considered in Europe as, a fequent basis?
- bsagdiyev 5y agoAnd flex periods where it gets extremely expensive if you do use electricity. When my son was born we had no choice but to run the AC in a heat wave, during a flex period with rolling blackouts. That power bill sucked.
- Retric 5y agoThat’s a different issue. Base load power plants are supposed to produce maximum power as close to 24/7/365 days as possible. You don’t want a fully base load grid because demand isn’t constant. Insufficient supply for rare peaks is a sign you lack peaking power plants.
- jeffbee 5y agoCalifornia had a capacity-related blackout lasting less than an hour affecting fewer than 1% of customers, more than a year ago. So, no?
- merlincorey 5y ago> California had a capacity-related blackout lasting less than an hour affecting fewer than 1% of customers, more than a year ago. So, no? I'm not sure where you got your information, but last year more than 800,000 homes and businesses unexpectedly lost power for 2 days according to NBC[0]. This year, in order to prevent the unexpected loss of power, many people were subjected to Rolling Blackouts[1] where their power was scheduled to be turned off for hours at a time and they had no choice in the matter. [0] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-warned-brace-another-summer-energy-blackouts-n1268879 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-warned-brace... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout
- jeffbee 5y agoOddly enough I prefer primary sources over mainstream TV stations. http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid-August-2020-Extreme-Heat-Wave.pdf http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid... The characterization that anyone "lost power for 2 days" is totally wrong. The longest period of load shedding in August 2020 was 150 minutes affecting 300k customers. 500MW of load was disconnected, that's ~1% of the CAISO demand.
- dylan604 5y ago>California has a large surplus of renewable energy Yes, that's why CA has had rolling blackouts and public requests for citizens to lower their use during peak hours because all of this surplus.
- Retric 5y agoPeak demand doesn’t line up with peak solar + wind production. Look at an annual graph for spot prices for electricity at each of Californias nodes. In short, AC demand is variable based on local weather conditions infrastructure however needs to be paid for every day.
- mrestko 5y agoThe first line of the article: "California is not keeping up with the energy demands of its residents. In August 2020, hundreds of thousands of California residents experienced rolling electricity blackouts during a heat wave that maxed out the state’s energy grid." How can you say baseline power is not desirable?
- Retric 5y agoYou want peaking power for heat waves. Baseline is in theory cheaper because it’s running 24/7/365 however you don’t want to produce maximum heat wave energy 24/7/365 or your going to damage equipment when demand lowers.
- FredPret 5y agoYou’re not actually producing baseline capacity at all times. That’s why it is called capacity, and not output.
- Retric 5y agoThat’s not what base load is referring to. Nuclear designed for load following vs base load has real physical differences with base load being cheaper to construct as a trade off for being less flexible. At the extreme end it takes several hours if not days for some nuclear power plant designs to safely go from standby to full output. Peaking power on the other hand is designed to go for long periods without being used. They generally get paid for being standby capacity even when not in use. Similar to a generator at a hospital, they need to sit unused for months only be tuned on in at worst a few minutes. Peaking power is the economical option for heatwaves or other extreme power demands. At the extreme it might actually be a backup generator pulling double duty. So what if it’s running on diesel if it’s only tuned on for 100 hours a decade fuel costs aren’t that relevant.
- p_l 5y agoIt's an issue with naive free market electricity setup, which allows intermittent non-schedulable power source drop price of static ones. Then you find out that you don't have power when the cheap sources don't work...
- burkaman 5y ago> California has a large surplus of renewable energy No they don't. You can see California's energy supply here: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html. Pick a nice sunny day, and you'll see that they're still often using 10+GW of natural gas when renewables peak, and ~5GW of imports from much dirtier neighboring grids. When the sun is down, renewables (including batteries) are often around 10-20% of demand.
- Retric 5y agoIt’s not about every day it’s about cool days which lower demand for AC. Look at a long term graph for the spot price of electricity. Also, the grid not designed to move arbitrary power from any producer to any consumer. At times your throttling power from a wind farm while also importing electricity in other areas. The ISO wholesale power market prices electricity based on the cost of generating and delivering it from particular grid locations called nodes. http://www.caiso.com/pricemap/Pages/default.aspx http://www.caiso.com/pricemap/Pages/default.aspx
- burkaman 5y agoI understand how the grid works, but I'm not following your argument. > It’s not about every day it’s about cool days which lower demand for AC. There is not a single moment in the history of CAISO when renewables+nuclear was higher than demand. > At times your throttling power from a wind farm while also importing electricity in other areas. Right, so that makes even less likely that abundant wind or solar could make nuclear unprofitable.
- Retric 5y ago> There is not a single moment in the history of Your still thinking of the grid as a uniform entity. There are regular local surpluses with insufficient capacity to move that power to customers. > Right, so that makes even less likely that abundant wind or solar could make nuclear unprofitable. Again depends on location.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 5y agoThere's some decent reasons provided in the article, but you have to be willing to at least be empathetic to them. It's owned by PG&E, and the public trust in that company is extremely low. They do not maintain things, that lack of maintanence has caused fires and deaths. I would think that would translate into what could be happening at the nuclear plant as well. They are in California which, from time to time, has earthquakes. After the Fukishima incident, people have seen what kind of things can happen. Knowing who owns the plant should give pause when considering what could happen when those factors are added together.
- partiallypro 5y agoYeah, but the earth quake itself didn't cause the Fukishima issue, it was the tsunami after.
- sliken 5y agoWell the problem was politics, not technology. The ideal place for the plant was elsewhere, but politics got involved and the site was moved for political reasons. Then an engineer said, to be safe here we need a berm X meters high, and politics came in and said it's too expensive cut make it 4 times smaller.
- tims33 5y agoI get those points, but Fukushima was 10 years ago so clearly it couldn't have been that urgent. Really this has been about reducing carbon emissions. It is clear now that the full impact of natural gas is much larger than originally understood.
- artificial 5y agoCalifornia is also home to the Aliso Creek gas leak which was the largest in US history. Larger than the Deep Water Horizon event in the Gulf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak [edit: typo]
- vmchale 5y agoThe pro-blackout crowd lol.
- Ekaros 5y agoValid climate stance, greenest energy often is not used energy and not having it available is easiest way.
- s0rce 5y agoYou could just go around committing genocide, that would be similarly green...
- hcurtiss 5y agoI see these comments here and there and am always stunned. There's a strong nihilistic streak in the modern environmental movement.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thatguy0900 5y agoIs that surprising? The movement has largely failed and gets to watch all their predictions come true
- krrrh 5y agoThere have been no shortage of failed predictions. In the scientific valence this is totally fine because the wildest predictions are usually stated with low confidence, but the ‘environmental movement’ knows no such moderation.
- rossjudson 5y agoThe problem for anti-environmentalists is that the broad predictions about the environment (climate change, warming) have been accurate. Everything else is noise. And noise is the problem, on both sides of environment issues. When you say "no shortage of failed predictions", you are able to cherrypick whatever you like, define failure however you like, and produce whatever resulting number you want. That is noise. For environmentalists, straw bans? Stupid, spending valuable social "energy" on something irrelevant -- intentionally triggering the environmental equivalent of road rage in people whose cooperation you need. It's noise.
- NineStarPoint 5y agoRealistically, decommissioning a 4 decade old plant that has been neglected and is built in a earthquake prone location is probably the right choice. The real mistake is that over those 4 decades California didn't continue to build more Nuclear plants. They started decommissioning the plant a decade ago, long after climate change was known to the public, and at the very least at that point it should have been obvious that they should start to build more. I can't believe ruby red Tennessee is the only state to have finished a new Nuclear plant in almost three decades.
- samsolomon 5y agoWell, hot testing has started on reactor 3 at Vogtle in Georgia. I wasn't sure if the plant would ever be finished, but it seems like it is actually on track to start operating next year. https://www.power-eng.com/nuclear/overcoming-delays-hot-functional-testing-on-vogtle-nuclear-unit-3-progressing-successfully/ https://www.power-eng.com/nuclear/overcoming-delays-hot-func...
- aerostable_slug 5y agoDiablo Canyon Power Plant may be a lot of things, but neglected is not one of them. I've been onsite for pentests and not only did I feel safe then, I'm typing this from home, just a few miles from the plant's exclusion zone. Re: decommissioning, I believe you are conflating DCPP with San Onofre. I completely agree we should have started building more years ago. One interesting idea was (strong emphasis on was) adding units to DCPP. The site can take up to four more units (I've seen the drawings). The major problem with that was the fact that California would require the plant to switch from seawater cooling to cooling towers, which was financially difficult.
- tlocke 5y agoThe problem is that the operating costs are very high for nuclear (insurance alone is huge). Financially you're better off shutting down nuclear and putting the money into renewables.
- oliwarner 5y agoDiablo Canyon essentially sits atop multiple faults. PG&E think it's safe, but after Fukushima, why risk it? I get your argument, and broadly think we need nuclear especially as we drive away from fossil fuels for travel and heating, but there's a time and a place.
- ch4s3 5y agoFukushima wasn't done in by the earthquake, but by the tsunami that followed. I believe they're different reactor types, Fukushima having been a BWR reactor and this one being a PWR reactor. They have different failure modes. Not sure how much that matters.
- aerostable_slug 5y agoDCPP also sits on a tall bluff, and without getting into site details the generators are positioned in a way such that I really don't think anything like a Fukushima event is credible — except perhaps with a tsunami so big that we'd have bodies washing out to sea from California's major coastal cities, the delta levees would have broken and seawater flooded the Central Valley, etc. End Times stuff.
- brightball 5y agoI fully support nuclear power, but even I have to admit that the fault line concerns are valid. I do think we should be building a lot more nuclear power plants (safely away from fault lines).
- lamontcg 5y agoIt is being shut down due to economics because it is expensive and it can't be run 100% duty cycle any more which makes it unprofitable to run. The rest is all a smokescreen of one sort or another. Nuclear is dead on arrival because of cost.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoAfter "All carbon emitting forms" is too extreme, but they should shut it down after reducing large scale use of coal. But given there's a ten year lead time, and they havent even switched it off yet and won't for another 5 years, they seem pretty much bang on schedule.
- andyxor 5y agoNuclear is the only hope we have to fight climate change
- silexia 5y agoMy pet conspiracy theory: all of the anti-nuclear fear and activists are bankrolled by big oil. How else can you explain humans turning their backs on the safest and cleanest form of energy per megawatt we have ever created?
- vmchale 5y agoI'm pretty sure big oil supports solar/wind because they take the shine away from nuclear.
- new_guy 5y agoFukushima. Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Kyshtym. When a solar plant breaks down or a dam bursts the worst that can happen is a minor inconvenience. When you get a nuclear meltdown you get land uninhabitable for literal millennia and global contamination.
- standardUser 5y agoNot sure why anyone would downvote this. Legitimate or not, a lot of public fear about nuclear energy is due to the first three names on that list.
- sofixa 5y agoBecause it is not legitimate.
- standardUser 5y agoBut it is the correct answer to the question of why people have turned their back on nuclear energy.
- Ericson2314 5y agoBecause there is no major contamination from Fukushima and Three Mile Island. I'm convinced most people got confused with the Fukushima and the actual Tsunami damage to Japan at some subconscious level.
- sorenn111 5y agoPeople who decry climate change as a crisis but are not willing to confront the use of nuclear power lose large amounts of credibility in my opinion. Full stop.
- thehappypm 5y agoI am not bullish on new nuclear. It takes too long to get a plant up and running, and from a cost perspective renewables are cheaper today and will only continue to get cheaper over time. Plus, no risk of irradiating a city. That being said, decommissioning existing nuclear plants instead of doing whatever investment needed to keep them running is astonishing.
- hunterb123 5y agoIt only takes so long and costs so much because of the over regulation and red tape. Nuclear is a backup power for when renewables fail. The wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine.
- triceratops 5y agoPlease see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28774444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28774444 Tl;dr nuclear is safe. But if it goes wrong, the cleanup costs can wipe out decades of profits. That's why it's so expensive, and why private insurers refuse to touch it. Insuring it is the proverbial picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Downvoters: feel free to tell me why I'm wrong. I'd love to learn more. I have no axe to grind against nuclear.
- chucksta 5y agoIt would be interesting to compare the cost of all nuclear cleanup, vs the cleanup costs of all the oil spills
- triceratops 5y ago
- ambyra 5y agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2016/04/03/californias-growing-imported-electricity-problem/?sh=2b2941fa4469 https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2016/04/03/califor... California imports 33% of its electricity from other states, which is mostly generated by coal and gas.
- jeffbee 5y agoCalifornia imported about 30% of its energy in 2020 and only 19% of it was from coal and gas. California imports more wind than coal and gas together. Hydro is the other major import which makes sense because of Oregon. https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2020-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
- froggertoaster 5y ago> clean, reliable, safe energy that gets us further away from carbon fuel > shut those all down first anyways What grand conspiracy am I missing? How does a miss like this happen?
- Melting_Harps 5y ago> What grand conspiracy am I missing? How does a miss like this happen? The actual factual events and details? There was NOTHING safe about how SONGS and to a lesser extent Diablo Canyon operated. Violations, falsified safety reports, and continued maintenance costs for upkeep make it untenable to keep them open given the immense risk being taken for less than 9% of total power consumption in CA. I find Tech's view of Nuclear to be so childlike that I wonder if anyone has actually done more than watched some influencer de jour's hand waving podcast on it being the magic bullet to everything and actually taken the time to visit the areas in which these plants are and just look at the physical infrastructure bottle necks they create in the event of an evacuation since they are built along the coasts and more importantly the San Andrea's fault line. SONGS was built next to a Military base (which means it cannot be accessed by citizens) and one of the most congested freeways in all of SoCal, that means you seriously have no way of leaving without creating a massive amount of traffic. Which means that evacuation is impossible. Look at how people fled to higher ground during Fukushima's Tsunami, that would be impossible for most residents in the S. OC and N. San Diego areas in the case of such an event. It was simply bad city planning at a time when it was clear that profits > safety and Edison built these with reckless and headlong abandon. Personally speaking this is so typical of 20th Century thinking that if we have to start from scratch to get these new 'miracle' power plants up and running, or create an incentive for renewable to increase it's share than so be it. Personally speaking, I just wonder why rather than discussing an endless need to adding more power to the grid is never challenged and the thought about consuming less isn't discussed more. Then again, that is just another reason why I don't live in CA anymore, either. Nuance seems to be entirely lost on the most critical topics, be it energy, water, housing, homelessness etc...
- MrBuddyCasino 5y agoA majority of men support nuclear power, a majority of women opposes it: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3726846/morning-consult-nuclear-gender.png https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3726846/mo... I have a hard time interpreting this as anything else than being the result of greater female risk aversion and their increased influence in politics.
- Iwan-Zotow 5y agoMorons
- rllearneratwork 5y agoIntellectually being anti-nuclear is the same position as being anti-vaccines (talking not only about COVID here) and anti-GMO.
- RealityVoid 5y agoI group all those people as having blood on their hands. But this is only helping me vent and not really conductive to a better discussion.
- Ericson2314 5y agoWill it be possible to reverse this decision later? Or will they brick the plant completely in short order?
- aerostable_slug 5y agoThe die was cast a few years ago when the decision was made not to pursue relicensing. The dates when the units will be shut down have already been written on the calendar in ink. Actual decommissioning timelines are more uncertain, largely because PG&E could choose to sell the site to a company that specializes in decommissioning and remediating nuclear power plant sites in a profitable manner.
- Ericson2314 5y agoRight, but could we relicense a place whose license lapsed, if they didn't start physically decomissioning it?
- aerostable_slug 5y agoI suppose you could, but I'm pretty sure it would be financially ruinous. Relicensing is a multiyear process, and since it hasn't been started you'd have an enforced outage with both units for months to years. That would hemorrhage cash at an eye-watering rate. Even just having one unit down for an refueling outage is financially a big deal, which is why utilities bring in contract workers in droves to get as much work done as possible during the scheduled outage. If a nuke plant isn't running at 100% you're almost certainly going to lose money, which when combined with California's renewables policy is the biggest region PG&E is closing the plant.
- aoeusnth1 5y agoWhat a travesty. Sounds from the article that the consumer purchase agreements are largely to blame?
- jeffbee 5y agoExtremely weird slant on this article. First, I don't get the negativity around flex alerts. They just ask people to conserve and that actually works. Conservation should be our #1 tool, so what's wrong with this? It's literally a few hours per year. Second, it's not like Diablo Canyon is out there heroically preventing rolling blackouts. The last time California had capacity-related blackouts it was because Diablo Canyon had both reactors offline. The reliability of these specific reactors has been atrocious.
- throwawaysea 5y agoI've been really disappointed by the politics around nuclear energy and renewables. The two should not be treated as opposing choices. In all likelihood, we need a diversified strategy. There are downsides to renewables as well (https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/finally-they-admit-renewables-are https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/finally-they-adm...), like peppering our lands and natural marine environments with solar panels or giant turbines. The fears around nuclear energy are overblown, particularly with the newest generation reactors. We need to move quickly to make them at least just a part of our overall energy strategy. The window is closing quickly, since all signs point to America and European nations losing the ability to construct such complex things entirely from the collapse of the nuclear industry.
- gibsonf1 5y agoAs power becomes increasingly unreliable in California, even more businesses and people will leave in the growing exodus. (I bought a generator last time)
- aeturnum 5y agoI am personally bullish on nuclear power, especially gen 3+ reactors. I also think that nuclear advocates really shoot themselves in the foot when they say things like "it's just people being worried about scaremongering." It's true that many people over-rate the risk of health impacts and there is a real history of facilities becoming burdens for their sited communities. They become burdens both because of overblown fear and industry incompetence and poor lifecycle planning, but the history is real. You don't have to believe any FUD about nuclear disasters to see the graveyards of plants that were not financially sustainable. I get that you need to use different tools to solve public perception problems, but they can sink an engineering project just like technical problems and I think we need to grapple with that reality if we want nuclear power to be at the center of our climate solution.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoYou could easily skip over the bits where people say it's too expensive in amongst the verbiage that's so confused about why the plant is being shut down.
- reducesuffering 5y agoGrids should be what, 80% renewables and 20% nuclear base load? It should not matter if renewables are cheaper than nuclear, because 20% base load isn't fungible for renewables to be swapped in. The natural gas / coal base load is not pricing in it's externalities. The only way nuclear should be going away is if the cost of burning fossil fuels as base load AND capturing 100% of it's emissions is less than nuclear... That or massive grid scale batteries, which doesn't seem plausible anytime in the next couple decades.
- wazoox 5y agoSee this graph: https://i.redd.it/943wmdyx3zr71.png https://i.redd.it/943wmdyx3zr71.png If you include fuels in the picture, resources for gas and coal fired plants are of course dwarfed by fuel consumption; but NOT nuclear. In a resource-constrained environment, nuclear is the best energy source by an incredibly large margin. Renewables IMO simply are unworkable. A pipe dream. They never will represent a large part of our energy. They simply can't.