9 ms·
Such 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 th
by tims33 5y ago
Such 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.
- merlincorey 5y agoLoad Shedding is the planned rolling blackouts. People unexpectedly lost power for up to 2 days.
- Retric 5y agoPower loss for 2 days has nothing to do with insufficient generating capacity. When that happens they do rolling blackouts across large area to avoid people freezers melting etc. If nothing else demand varies over the course of the day so unless there is very widespread issues with generation like in Texas generation capacity should be sufficient at some point in the day.
- JBlue42 5y agoBoth planned and unplanned. Get a bit of rain or light wind in LA and you'll see brownouts at the very least throughout the city. The past two years hasn't been so bad but previous to that the only place I had been with more frequent outages was Albania and Kosovo in 2005.
- 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.