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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Nuclear power is cheap and clean but sadly it is burdened by the public’s misunderstanding and fear of radiation.
Nuclear power is cheap
🤣
It is. It’s ridiculously cheap. It’s only the regulations and bureaucracy surrounding it that make it so expensive. It goes beyond safety and into unreasonable requirements spawned by decades of attempts to appease NIMBYS whos entire knowledge of “nuclear” is restricted bombs and Chernobyl. There are also the countless officials and agencies who created needless red tape to benefit themselves, or had a vested interest in seeing nuclear fail.
Let me be ABUNDANTLY clear: safety regulations and red tape ARE good. Holy shit, please do not think I am arguing against them wholesale. But regulations on nuclear plants go so far beyond what is actually needed that it balloons costs and time-frames to multitudes of what they should be.
It feels completely disingenuous to use those excess costs to argue that nuclear is expensive, because they are entirely our own fault that they’re there. It’s like saying running a mile is too painful, but then it turns out you shoot yourself in the leg every time before you try. The issue isn’t running the mile, it’s that you choose to shoot yourself in the leg. You shouldn’t be able to use that to argue against running a mile.
I will add context to your factual statement with the existence of regulations requiring safety systems to deal with what is called a Double Ended Guillotine break in the primary coolant line. In over 70 years, with reactors in 35 countries, there has never been a Double Ended Guillotine break in the primary coolant line, because it’s physically impossible. Pipes don’t break like that, they just can’t break like that.
The actual (still extremely rare) failure condition is called Leak Before Break.
The safety systems required to prevent the imaginary Double Ended Guillotine break cost millions of dollars per unit and actually make it harder to implement safety systems for Leak Before Break.
Nuclear is far from cheap or clean. Upfront costs are massive and mining uranium is not cheap or clean. Lemmy is pushing building more nuclear everywhere, but when all these proposed plants in China and elsewhere get built, we don’t have enough uranium to fuel them. Estimates right now are under 90 years of uranium left on the whole planet, that will get cut to 30 years when all those Chinese reactors go online.
The 90 year estimate was only for conventional mining of identified reserves. It doesn’t account for the total terrestrial values which increases the number to 200 years.
Adding seawater extraction it increases to 60,000 years. Adding fast breeder technology on top of that increases it to BILLIONS of years.
And this doesn’t even account for the advancements in switching to thorium, which with current identified supplies would last thousands of years.
increases the number to 200 years.
We have no idea what the actual amount is. 200 years even assumes Chinese reactors don’t come online.
Adding seawater extraction it increases to 60,000 years
Which makes it the most expensive fuel source.
this doesn’t even account for the advancements in switching to thorium
Sure, sure, …maybe we can switch to dilithium while we are talking science fiction. I’ve been listening to the promise of thorium for decades longer than the promise of fusion. And, no one “switches” to thorium, you would need trillions to build new reactors.
Even as someone who is a proponent of expanding Nuclear power, California is not where I’d expect it to be needed. They’re in a tropical climate, on a coast, and have mountainous terrain - practically the best possible conditions for renewables. At the same time the region is prone to earthquakes and (from my understanding) in desperate need for new power generation fast, which the current state of nuclear in the USA doesn’t allow for. Is there a reason they’re choosing to expand nuclear over renewables?
California is not a tropical climate. Solar resources in the winter can actually be quite poor in most areas due to low sun angle and high cloud cover. Of course the summer is the opposite but we do need power year-round.
Most analyses show the cheapest way to fully decarbonize will include some baseline sources like nuclear. I’m skeptical with CA’s bureaucracy challenges and its political unpopularity it will pencil out to be nuclear but we’ll see. I think all options should be on the table in a climate emergency.
Keeping the existing plant is a no-brainer though.
Most analyses show the cheapest way to fully decarbonize will include some baseline sources like nuclear.
Show me a single serious one pls…
The whole concept of baseline production is obsolete. I was the idea of having a steady, cheap base load producer (mostly coal) with a quickly reacting, more expensive peaker (oil or gas) to cover the actual demand.
But coal isn’t cheap anymore, neither do we actually want to burn more of it even if it was. And nuclear can’t fullfill either role. It’s useless as traditional base load in the actual sense of the concept as it’s not cheap. It’s useless as a peaker.
And renewables plus batteries (both having seen exponentially drops in costs for years now) can actually already cover that base load concept. Get enough capacity to shift the production peak at noon to the demand peak in early evening and you are set (that is in fact what California is already doing).
The actual route to full decarbonisation is that renewables+short-term storage and some long-term storage. And a big part of that long-term storage is power-to-gas (from excess renewable production at peaks) and gas-peakers.
Nuclear can play a role in reducing some of the demand for short-term storage (flattening the curve by always producing at some level) and make electrolysis more economical (not only running with renewable excess power in the day but also at night when demand drops and nuclear still produces). But this is mostly from a perspective of already having nuclear, wanting nuclear for geopolitical reasons and then finding a niche were is can work in the renewable/storage system.
(For reference: RTE, the French grid provider –they have the higher share of nuclear after all–, did a big study about the future of nuclear up to 2050in 2021), modeling a lot of scenarios… Long story short: Renewables, batteries and power-to-gas with peakers is the way to go. Nuclear can work in this setup (at about 35%, 65% renewables) when that’s politically demanded.)
These studies generally take a high level approach, but coming from a technical side I fail to see where the grid forming generators will come from: wind & solar cannot be grid forming, I don’t think there is enough water to maintain a stable grid. The only way I can see the renewable only setup working in the near future is to change transmission to DC, which has much larger technical limitations than a few nuclear plants. I skimmed the PDF, I didn’t see anything addressing that issue, if I missed it please point me in its direction.
Solar and wind are not intrinsically grid forming like traditional power plants. However, grid forming inverters are a solved problem at this point. If grid operators want a large solar or wind farm to be grid forming, it is a relatively low cost to make it so.
tropical climate
Damn, didn’t realize California was that baja.
There is no reality in which nuclear is economically viable when solar, wind and hydro power as well as batteries exist, all with exponentially decreasing costs…
The answer is always the same: people wanting those juicy multi-billion subsidies and politicians paid by them and their lobbyists spend a lot of money (but not that much compared to the amount of taxes you can get with that grift) on desinformation and straight out brain-washing.
It is the only viable energy solution for space. Solar kind of works, but requires large, vulnerable panels, and loses effectiveness the further you get from the sun. Nuclear energy is the only viable energy source, we have to develop it.
Those are basically nuclear batteries, in the disposable reaction sense. It’s not fission, fission requires huge amounts of water. Fundamentally, even if you used another coolant and another way of turning the power to electricity, you need massive heat dissipation (which is very difficult in space)
Nuclear batteries are basically decay powered, they give a small amount of power for a really long time. Totally different technology
No disagreement with the first part, but I feel like shitting on nuclear, especially when it’s already built and generating power like the Diablo Canyon facility that’s the subject of the article, could be pushing that capacity to other non-renewables. If the question is whether to use X dollars to build renewable capacity or nuclear capacity, i fully agree to always go with the renewable, but if we can have more of a “yes, and” sort of approach that also replaces coal/oil/gas capacity with nuclear, i like the idea of replacing some of the world burning fuels with nuclear.
Oh, I totally agree with the sentiment of using already build nuclear power plants in the meantime to speed up decarbonisation.
But long-term nuclear and renewables just don’t go along well. Renewables need short-term storage (about the amount to shift production peak at noon to demand peak in the early evening) and seasonal long-term storage. Nuclear with it’s constant production (because dialing production down temporarily doesn’t save money making an already expensive producer even more so) can replace some of need for short-term storage. That’s it. And it’s much too expensive to compete batteries.
(If you want details: RTE, the French grind provider, did an extensive study about the future of nuclear and it’s economical perspective compared with renewables in lat 2021. With lots of scenarios modelled for comparison. Long story short: You don’t beat renewables plus storage. The niche nuclear can work in (and that really that’s more from an “we have nuclear, we want nuclear, how do we make it work”-perspective) is in a renewable system with power-to-gas and peak burners as a long-term storage concept where it makes electrolysis much more economical because it does not only run when there is access renewable power produced but also through the night when nuclear still produces without much demand.)
You’d think with all the mountains they’d be building pumped hydro instead of batteries
That’s another kind of storage, much more long-term. Even before battery prices dropped to rediculous levels, pumped hydro often had a battery system, too, because it was often more economical.
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.
An old salt mine
Been there, done that. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine)
dump it in the ocean
Sure… (https://www.earth.com/environment/scientists-found-200000-barrels-of-leaking-radioactive-waste/)
literally anywhere in its sarcophagus
Any more ideas that are proven to not work without risk of contaminating the environment with uncalculable consequences?
The amount of waste from nuclear power is miniscule
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.
