The Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which sits on a cliff on California’s Central Coast, has been the subject of ceaseless protests and political battles since it was proposed in 1963.
Now, the plant is at the center of yet another major debate. After shuttering all the state’s other nuclear power plants in recent decades, California is considering extending Diablo’s life and lifting a moratorium on new reactors.
That these decisions are even on the table in California is a testament to the substantial change in public views of nuclear energy, which for decades has been reviled by the liberal lawmakers and environmental groups that wield tremendous power and influence in the state.
Many of its leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have expressed support for nuclear energy. The California Legislature last month passed a bill to commission a study on partly lifting the ban on new reactors.
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In before glowing rock fan-boys school us on some new design that will totally be cheaper after the 1000th reactor is built.
A major part of it is that nuclear hasn’t been allowed to be cheap.
There’s been active sabotage from the oil industry since the beginning, starting with the Rockefeller Foundation sponsoring fraudulent science via their employee, Herman Mueller. To the CEO of Atlantic oil funding the creation of an explicitly anti-nuclear environmentalist group called Friends Of The Earth in 1970 or so.
Which coincidentally was about the time that the Rockefeller Foundation started funneling money to another explicitly anti-nuclear environmentalist group called Greenpeace.
The political pressure from these groups, plus direct pressure from the oil companies, got extremely restrictive regulations passed, with the goal, and result, of making nuclear more expensive to build and operate.
Look up the double guillotine break, which is a nonsense requirement that nuclear engineers have to design around. Nonsense because the equipment required to prevent this impossible scenario make it harder to deal with the actual likely scenario, which is leak before break.
If you think it’s about the restrictive regulation being a result of lobbying and not the state taking over all the risk, you can try to find anyone willing to insure your private reactor (yes, very low chance of an accident but immensely constly) or make a business plan how you guarantee the save storage of waste for a few millenia.
My long term plan for the waste? Chuck it literally anywhere in its sarcophagus. An old salt mine, a random field, literally dump it in the ocean. Do that, and then sleep soundly knowing that whatever environmental impact you create from doing that with all waste ever created from nuclear power pales in comparison to what we currently do with a single year of coal plants.
The amount of waste from nuclear power is miniscule, and the radiation it gives off is not as high as people imagine. Like yes, it’s still dangerous, but not nearly to the levels decades of oil-industry fear mongering has led the public to believe.
Been there, done that. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine)
Sure… (https://www.earth.com/environment/scientists-found-200000-barrels-of-leaking-radioactive-waste/)
Good idea! (https://en.as.com/latest_news/in-1977-the-us-buried-120000-tons-of-radioactive-waste-in-a-pacific-nuclear-tomb-almost-50-years-later-the-ocean-is-threatening-to-expose-the-runit-dome-f202608-n-2/)
Any more ideas that are proven to not work without risk of contaminating the environment with uncalculable consequences?
The miniscule amount of 200,000 tons was already dumped into the ocean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste#History) leaking radioactivity there.
Wow look at that! We did all that and no one died! Nor have there been any significant negative effects! Looks like you’re proving my point.
You do know that Uranium oxide is water soluble right?
There are literally billions of tons of the stuff in the ocean already.
https://farmonaut.com/mining/amount-of-uranium-in-seawater-billions-of-tonnes-revealed
And the effects of all of it are easily calculable, because it’s been done.
I mean, the political sabotage has been out in the open?
https://reason.com/video/2024/03/05/the-political-sabotage-of-nuclear-power/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0009279723004544
https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/3376034
Also, Onkalo is a perfectly safe waste storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
But reprocessing it would be orders of magnitude better. Every single element produced in a reactor has a valid use, especially the short lived radioactive ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE