40 Year History of Opposition to Nuclear Power in California

"A reactor trip causes all the control rods to insert into the reactor core, and shut down the plant in a very short time (about three seconds)."

That said, I think most of the people who actually do the work (e.g. linemen, reactor operators) are definitely ready to do the work. A lot of my family works for PG&E in various capacities and everyone from the civil engineer to my lineman uncle love their job. What they all complain about is the pressure to run it like the profit-motivated "business" that it is, i.e. screw everyone but the C-suite including the rate payers.

As much as people complain about the overreach of California's politics and how bloated it can be, I'd much rather have someone who is publicly accountable and can be removed by the voters as the head of PG&E. It's high time California eminent domain them to not serve up shoddy service to their constituents.

I just hope more lives aren't lost due to PG&E inaction in the future, only to have them issue some "we're vewy sowy" half-assed apology while barely admitting any wrongdoing (if at all).

The stewards of our current energy sources aren't very responsible, their have been a number of rather catastrophic and avoidable accidents. Seems like a pick your poison kind of situation. I pick nuclear. Radiation is just not that big of a deal

I still find this argument hard to believe. The physics involved is pretty simple, immerse the rods in water, bring them together, water boils, water turns turbine. It's the polar opposite of fusion.

What makes fission reactors cost money is the Government being involved from the first pen on paper, to the cutting of the ribbon and all the steps in between.

Allowing private companies to design and build them, the Government to regulate, only, should reduce the price dramatically. SMRs are a thing: https://www.energy.gov/ne/nuclear-reactor-technologies/small...

If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better

https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

Clean energy absorbed most of the growth and shrinkage of coal & nuclear in the years the transition happened. About 2/3rd of the nuclear capacity disappeared around 2010 and the combined growth of coal, gas, and brown coal is a fraction of that in that period. Rewewable growth around the same time on the other hand took most of that. And it didn't stop growing. At this point that dwarfs nuclear, coal, gas, browncoal combined (<40% together). Of those gas is pretty much the only thing that had some growth (beyond 2010 numbers); from the looks of it partially at the cost of black coal.

Brown coal has been more or less the same in recent history thanks to the CSU (mainly) lobbying hard for keeping that around for a few decades). But they might have to negotiate with the green party soonish and I doubt they'd agree to continue backing that.

Countries like Denmark, Sweden the UK, , come to mind as places that are closing in on (or over) 50% at this point and have ambitious targets of getting pretty much to 100% by next decade or so.

In many other markets (e.g. Germany, China, the US) renewables are either or both the fastest growing form of energy or the largest (by kwh) form of energy (typically displacing coal recently or in the near future). These will take longer but are probably going to close in on the 50% mark by the end of the decade nevertheless.

This is the core issue with nuclear: I don't really care about the factory or power station 1km from my house because if it burns down, it will be a small inconvenience to me. But a nuclear plant, even one 50km away, has the potential to kill me.

How do you manage that risk?

I worry that right now a lot of the push is basically an appeal to authority ("engineers know how to design reactors"). But those same authorieis are undermined by both their source of funding and their historic record. That's the real issue here: we used up our credibility and don't have any left and can't work without it.