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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

There'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.

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I 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.

California 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

[edit: typo]

This video referenced in this wiki article (footnote [25]) shows a methane cloud in the area more than a month after the incident. I know nothing of how gases move around in the atmosphere, but I would not have expected it to behave like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Fyevj25-o

That video was taken during the leak. It lasted for months, finally being capped in February of 2016

I totally misread the dates. Makes more sense now.

How long do you think it takes to put enough pressure to get a change like this going? It's not overnight. To me, 10 years seems pretty fast for something like this.

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.

Growing up in San Luis Obispo, I can say firsthand that pressure has been on PG&E to close the plant since ~1969. Mothers for Peace, the Abalone Alliance, and a bunch of other groups have been at war with DCPP for decades.

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.

Plant might be owned by PG&E, but it's regulated by the US NRC. PG&E might be able to hoodwink California, but it's a good stretch harder to hoodwink the federals.

Who said anything about the hoodwinking? Regulators could have come in with a report saying X amount of changes are required costing Y amount of money. It is not beyond the realm of possibiity the owners realize it would be cheaper to shut it down than to make the repairs. No hoodwinking required.

You did.

>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.

I think you are trying to twist what I said, but I will grant it could be read that way if you really want it. From one inspection to another, things wear down. It could be a note in one report, a concern in one following, and even a must repair in a future report. Again, no hoodwinking necessary. Corp says that they are not going to do anything at a recommended status, and only consider things indicated as required. For example, the recent Texas debacle where the plants were recommended to weather proof their facilities but elected not to do it for something they felt the costs were not justified.

Public confidence in PG&E is eroded, maybe rightly so, because the California (state) regulator let them get away with deferred safety-critical maintenance. Whether that's on California or the utility or both, I don't know, but PG&E just can't pull those kinds of shenanigans with the NRC. If there's a safety-critical problem with the plant, it gets fixed.

Yeah, but the earth quake itself didn't cause the Fukishima issue, it was the tsunami after.

Well 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.

There have been no safety problems at Diablo Canyon.

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.

> 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

I'm reading this as the royal you and not directed to me directly.

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.

> I'm reading this as the royal you and not directed to me directly. That's incorrect. My quote telling you to stop bending over backwards searching for things to be afraid of was definitely aimed at you personally.

> 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

> 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

> At the same time, it is a privately owned facility.

These decisions are made by a state board, not PG&E

Maintaining existing plants can make a lot of sense in many cases, but the problem with nuclear energy has always been cost.

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.

The thing I've always liked about nuclear was its reliability of not fluctuating based on the weather outside. Wind/Sun power is fine, but we need storage of that power for use later when wind/sun is not available. I always liked the idea of water resovoir batteries using wind/solar to pump the water so that it could be used for hydro generating. However, California seems to be a bad location for hydro like that as there's no water.

The output of nuclear plants is also affected by the weather, few years ago the Finnish nuclear plants had to reduce output in the summer due to the Baltic Sea warming up too much. Heating it even more from cooling water would damage the ecosystem.

> the problem with nuclear energy has always been cost.

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.

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