California is shutting down its last nuclear plant
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
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
Insufficient supply for rare peaks is a sign you lack peaking power plants.
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...
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.
People unexpectedly lost power for up to 2 days.
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.
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.
In short, AC demand is variable based on local weather conditions infrastructure however needs to be paid for every day.
"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?
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.
Then you find out that you don't have power when the cheap sources don't work...
No they don't. You can see California's energy supply here: 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.
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
> 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.
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.
Edit: Also, renewables in California are dominated by solar. Even if there were a local solar surplus during the day, which again I find pretty unlikely, they'd still need nuclear at night. Are you saying the nuclear plant is right next to an incredibly productive wind farm or something?
In other words the grid was unable to accept 5% of all solar power produced in 2020. https://solarenergytea.com/2021/09/08/solar-power-curtailmen...
Not nonviable just less viable. This power plant was already scheduled for decommissioning in 2024 so the specifics are only really relevant to it. It’s really constructing a replacement that’s non viable due to the very long time horizons involved. Back in 2018 only 2% of California’s solar was curtailed, by 2040 it might hit 30+%.
> about nuclear curtailment?
Keeping Nuclear at steady state it useful so it’s the last to be shut off. Frances nuclear was down at 70% capacity factor where US has generally stayed above 90%, but that doesn’t mean US nuclear is profitable every minute it’s operating. Solar curtailment is a sign of very low local spot electricity prices, thus even if your generating electricity during curtailment it’s likely below the average cost of production.
> no solar for half the day
Environmentally nuclear is a great nighttime source of electricity, but PG&E only care as about the economic question. As to solar, it’s displacing natural gas which can be used at night or on cloudy days. The economic break even point for solar vs natural gas is roughly 50% curtailment so these trends are going to continue.
> making nuclear unnecessary
It’s not about nuclear being needed or not as current infrastructure is needed as redundancy if nothing else. More generally PG&E is a legal monopoly with a poor reputation not some hip startup that needs publicity. Their simply not going to talk about complex topics most people on HN have trouble understanding let alone the general public.
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.
[edit: typo]
The cynic in me knowing that it is owned by PG&E thinks there are a few very expensive maintanence items coming up that the owner has decided it would be more feasible to just shut it down rather than doing the repairs to keep it going. The expense is what led to the decision and not public pressure, but since they won't admit to any of that, the pressure groups claim the victory.
The funny thing is when they finally "won", members of these same groups immediately started bleating about the massive amounts of lost tax revenue that are now looming large over local budgets.
The closure has nothing to do with maintenance. The steam generators still have tons of life in them, the reactors are fine, etc. The main driver is California's renewable policies that would mean the plant likely wouldn't be at 100% every day, which is where it needs to be to stay economically viable.
Fun fact: Diablo's "battery" is the Helms Pumped Storage Facility. It is extremely cool — a perfect Bond supervillain lair.
Putting 600,000 cars worth of carbon on the grid because some Yahoos are afraid of a thing that isn't real is fucking stupid, no matter how you look at it.
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> They are in California which, from time to time, has earthquakes.
This plant has been through four of them with no damage.
Stop bending over backwards searching for something to be afraid of
It's not your place to tell anybody how they sould feel. If someone has specific concerns, then that is for them to decide how they feel about them. For me personally, I am way more concerned because of who owns the facility much more than disaster porn scenarios. Due to the overall ineptness of the owner does make the disaster porn scenario much more likely though.
At the same time, it is a privately owned facility. If they want to close it that is up to them.
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> It's not your place to tell anybody how they sould feel.
Okay. Feel angry about that I said it, then.
You may be surprised to learn that I don't feel you get to tell me what my place is. You're just an anonymous stranger on the internet, trying to make rules for people who don't listen to them
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> For me personally, I am way more concerned
It's weird how I told you to stop bending over backwards to find things to be afraid of, and you responded with more things that you are afraid of, which are equally bereft of a single piece of supporting evidence.
PG&E has never had any deaths from nuclear. No American operator is. I'm not interested in your attempts to coin your fiction up into reality by calling it pornography.
The difference between pornography and cartoons is that pornography is a real thing that happened, whereas you're sitting here telling Aesop's Fables.
If America had ever had a single death from nuclear power, I'm sure you'd be trying to make it sound important right now.
Six hundred thousand deaths per year from air quality, climate change, and you're still struggling to make a half a bus accident look relevant.
Stop it, dude. You can't convince me. All you can convince is people to be anti-nuclear.
This display of trivia you're trying to do is really counterproductive.
Every time I tell you that, you seem to double down with more trivia and more unjustified fear, like maybe the problem is you weren't convincing enough, rather than that you're just doing the wrong thing
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> At the same time, it is a privately owned facility.
These decisions are made by a state board, not PG&E
Compared to alternatives, the cost per kWh is high once you take into account the initial capital investment, operation, retrofits, waste storage and decommissioning costs.
For places like California, wind/solar is not only cheaper, but easier to deal with from a planning and regulatory standpoint. When you have limited time and resources to add more generation capacity, there is usually a better option.
There is always the promise of a new generation of nuclear though. It will most certainly have to get used in places that have no alternatives.
A lot of people forget this. No matter what philosophical argument you make, economics always rules in the end.
Strangely PV is viable in california because of the PG&E regulatory capture setting a high price for electricity.
Folks routinely pay .21 to .40c/kwh for electricity in california, so PV economics works.
>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.
Not doing maintenance on a nuclear plant would amount to hoodwinking the regulator. Regulatory reports are not secrets. If the NRC had findings that the plant was in disrepair and was unsafe, they'd shut it down.
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.
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.
People with a bias towards alarmism on this topic imagine that alarmist messages and absolute statements will help to achieve the outcomes they seek, but the last 30 years make it clear that this doesn't work. A more realistic message, focusing on the most likely scenario from the IPCC rather than the worst-case scenario which the IPCC clearly states is to provide an upper bound and is highly unlikely. A straightforward presentation would be more nuanced and encourage the highest impact changes (a small tax that funded the replacement of coal plants with nuclear for instance) rather than proposing net-zero by 2050 which is almost certainly not going to happen based on the tradeoffs of doing so.
And yes that's a strong claim, but I see so many environmentalists promote things that make zero difference to the environment (straw ban for example), but annoy people.
Or things like Italy banning plastic packaging from produce, which makes the environmental worse (much more food waste), but they don't care because it annoys people.
Or even the truly dreadful: Being against nuclear power, and being against burning plastic for energy. These two positions actively harm the environment.
Sure at some point we won't burn oil, and then we can do something different (recycle the plastic), but we are decades away from that, so doing that now is harmful.
Of course, you can burn the plastic and make some change that makes people burn less oil. But if we are talking about government intervention, you will get much more return if you focus on reducing the fossil fuels usage alone and bury the plastic.
It's exactly this attitude that is causing the trouble.
Are you sure you are on the correct thread?
Now I have to hardly disagree, because we won't solve that problem without some amount of discomfort. And increasing the price of energy so the non-fossil sources can compete better is how can give up the least of it.
Anyway, the production of any of those is almost completely inelastic.
Correct. The atoms are the same, just in a different order. Although you may occasionally get chlorine which is not in oil, but it's not common in plastic (other than PVC).
>> Intuition tells me harmful chemicals would be released. Is it that the burning would be contained and the air filtered?
No need for much filtering, you just need proper incinerator that provides enough air. You will need to filter out chlorine, but that's so reactive it's very easy to filter.
The harmful chemicals from burning plastic are caused by incomplete combustion.
The vast vast majority of plastic is just carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Burn them fully and there's nothing harmful emitted.
The least discussed, biggest elephant in the room, holiest of all cows in the environmental discourse are the lifestyle changes required. Everyone's all green, unless it personally impacts my daily life in any perceivable way whatsoever.
I can't believe ruby red Tennessee is the only state to have finished a new Nuclear plant in almost three decades.
https://www.power-eng.com/nuclear/overcoming-delays-hot-func...
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.
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.
I do think we should be building a lot more nuclear power plants (safely away from fault lines).
The rest is all a smokescreen of one sort or another.
Nuclear is dead on arrival because of cost.
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.
That being said, decommissioning existing nuclear plants instead of doing whatever investment needed to keep them running is astonishing.
Capacity for renewables is as much as we want. We could cover the whole Southwest in solar panels and generate 10x more power than the world would ever need.
Nuclear is a backup power for when renewables fail. The wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine.
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.
If we assume nuclear has a gross profit margin of 10% like other utilities[2] then Fukushima's cleanup and compensation costs amounted to 1 year of all nuclear industry gross profits in 2021 (adjusting for the size of the industry in 2011, the various points in time when those costs were incurred, and inflation is too complex to go into here).
That's clearly a fuckton of money. Insuring against it is expensive. Blaming "regulations and tree-hugging environmentalists" for nuclear energy being expensive seems dishonest to me.
1. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210721005453/en/Nuc...
2. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/011915/what-average...
Do you know how much companies actually pay for private insurance in the US? I haven't been able to find details. But I did learn that private insurance caps out at $450m and the industry as a whole agrees to cover costs above that (out of their own policies) up to $12b or so. Above that, it's up to Congress to come up with the money.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
The debate is nuclear vs solar, wind, and hydro and how the case for nuclear is framed as "ack-chually, nuclear is better than renewables and would cost less if only those damned tree-hugging libs would get over their irrational fears"
My comment was more curiosity than disagreement
Just look at the Seabrook Station power plant in New Hampshire. "Two reactors were planned at Seabrook but the first unit didn't begin full operation until 1990, a full 14 years after the construction permit was granted, and the second unit was never built due to construction delays caused by protests, cost overruns, and troubles obtaining financing. The difficulties led to the bankruptcy of Seabrook's utility owner, PSNH."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabrook_Station_Nuclear_Power...
http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucle...
In 2030, people will still be against building new nuclear plants because it takes 10 years to build.
Opponents: "Yeah, in theory nuclear is better, but it's just too expensive and would take too long to scale up compared to the timetable of global warming, so it's not a viable option."
Also opponents: "Shut down existing plants, where that money/time cost has already been paid."
All valid points, and I'm less anti-nuclear now more than I am anti-20th Century Nuclear these days. Still, I too see the net benefit for renewables to increase it's ~33% Market share over the years in CA. It's incredibly foolish how little CA has spent in water reclamation and aggressively expanding renewable energy given it's ROI to the entire grid.
> That being said, decommissioning existing nuclear plants instead of doing whatever investment needed to keep them running is astonishing.
I's not astonishing, and you should really understand the nature of how corrupt, incompetent, and myopic the NRC are. Look no further than Mitsubishi's and SoCal Edison's handling of San Onofre Nuclear Power plant.
I lived through it and that along with how TEPCO/Nuclear Village/Edo Government poorly handled Fuksuhima in 2011 it became clear that this technology, while holding a great deal of promise is simply not regulated or managed properly and that in it's current state could not continue to be allowed to operate without posing an immense risk given it's location along the San Andrea's fault line. You know, that active seismic area that every Californian has been told will eventually create the next 'big one' that will make Northridge look like a Sunday picnic?
While I do not like the idea of activating more fossil fuel based plants, it's with the understanding that we will never be 100% on renewable as the challenges of storage and 24H capacity will always require to have a source for base load energy during inclement and unfavorable weather.
The goal is to keep the fossil fuel based plant active while renewable continue to grow.
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.
California imports 33% of its electricity from other states, which is mostly generated by coal and gas.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
How else can you explain humans turning their backs on the safest and cleanest form of energy per megawatt we have ever created?
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.
I'm convinced most people got confused with the Fukushima and the actual Tsunami damage to Japan at some subconscious level.
> 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.
This is a not a fair comparison if we are talking facts not perceptions. It ignores issues of storage that doesn't make the energy outputs commensurate. It ignores the constant polution and health issue stemming from fossil fuel power plants when nothing goes wrong --- since the ability to use solar and wind wihtout those is as-of-yet undemonstrated at scale.
And the alternative to nuclear at the moment isn't really solar or hydropower (most places aren't suitable for it) but rather coal and gas. And those are continually polluting the environment not just with CO2 but also carcinogens and other pollutants.
Of that list of accidents only Chernobyl is still uninhabitable, so it's hardly "literal millennia"
Three Mile Island didn't even kill anyone and many believe neither did Fukushima.
> The Kyshtym disaster, sometimes referred to as the Mayak disaster or Ozyorsk disaster in newer sources, was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant located in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 (now Ozyorsk) in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
So it's even less related to this nuclear power plant than Chernobyl. The only incident vaguely relatable is Fukushima, and guess what, they weren't really up to the required security standards and it took an enormous earthquake and tsunami to do actual damage, which is still very limited and resulted in less deaths than what, a month of a coal power plant?
> dam bursts the worst that can happen is a minor inconvenience
Seriously? Dam failures can be catastrophic and very deadly:
> minor inconvenience
Hmmm.
The real conspiracy, and it's not so much a conspiracy as confluence, is that the same powers that suggest that we need to take drastic action to curb climate change take little action in implementing real solutions. With all the hand waving around climate change, you'd think by now we would have an "Operation Warp Speed" for implementing more nuclear and developing large scale CO2 scrubbing. As far as I know, there's been little appreciable effort in that direction. But when it comes to actions that line pockets (electric cars serve not only car companies but fossil fuels and lithium mining), are adverse to civilization (intentional blackouts), and so on, America excels. The actual will to address climate change simply isn't there because modern regimes need crises to occur in order to maintain the illusion that they are even needed at the massive scale in which they currently exist. From corporate America to the depths of the federal government, in the back of our minds we know that most of us are excessive and therefore we need to manufacture reasons for our own existence. The concept of "bullshit jobs" has become popularized in recent years, but the same phenomenon happens at a much larger scale. Much of how countries like America operates is exactly like a bullshit corporate job. In fact, federal and state governments are the mass personification of flunkies, goons, box tickers, duct tapers, and taskmasters. Without crises, there's nothing for those bullshit job archetypes to do. Even the mainstream media addicts and zealots of either political party would have nothing to revere or resent.
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.