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Comment by NikolaeVarius | Hacker News Reader

> PG&E announced that it plans to close the two Diablo Canyon reactors in 2024 and 2025, stating that because California's energy regulations give renewables priority over nuclear, the plant would likely only run half-time, making it uneconomical.

> In 2020, experts at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) warned that when the plant closes the state will reach a "critical inflection point", which will create a significant challenge to ensure reliability of the grid without resorting to more fossil fuel usage, and could jeopardize California's greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Good stuff, shooting yourself in the foot because ideology versus reality

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Yeah, this seems really stupid. I can see an argument for prioritizing renewables for new capacity (and can also see the argument for not), buy if the nuclear plants are already built, why de-prioritize dispatching their power now?

Because Diablo canyon is also built on an earthquake fault.

Diablo Canyon is designed to withstand an earthquake of shaking amplitude ten times larger than that which the Shoreline fault is capable of triggering, based on an analysis by plant owner Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_earthquake_vul...

Plants owners will always say that they analyzed their own plant being safe...

NRC's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Diablo Canyon was 1 in 23,810 according to an NRC study published in August 2010.

Indeed. This sort of thing should be called "toilet ducking", in recognition of the (Dutch) brand whose ads poked fun at this very idea in the 90s. "Therefore, we of Toilet Duck recommend ... Toilet Duck!" ("Toilet duck" is a transliteration of their name.)

Moreover, it sounds suitably silly to be used for such silly nonsense.

Toilet Duck is sold as such in the US.

And that is before they start storing spent fuels on site.

Just note that PG&E is the entity who has stated the Shoreline fault is only capable of a 6.5 magnitude earthquake - while the plant is designed to be capable of handling [after post-construction updates] an earthquake up to 7.5 magnitude (10X since it's a log scale).

Also note, the linked page states there are four "nearby" faults -- it doesn't state the distance to them, but included is the San Andreas fault, and I'm relatively confident we know it's capable of producing >= 7.5 magnitude earthquakes.

I don't know, nor claim to know, much of anything about how susceptible [or not] this plant is to seismic events -- and I'm generally quite pro-nuclear -- but it's worth noting that there are other seismic concerns here, and potentially some questionable incentives for PG&E who is the one attesting to the capabilities of the area & this specific plant.

The first part of what you say is not valid: outside groups have estimated the capabilities of the close Shoreline fault. The rest of your comment I agree with. Although I would point out that if San Andreas quaked at (eg) 8, it would not be 8 when it reached Diablo Canyon.

According to USGS seismologist, Jeanne L. Hardebeck, the Shoreline Fault has potential to trigger an earthquake of 6.4–6.8 magnitude

Your point is clear enough, but both the parent & grandparent comments are misuing the terminology.

Earthquake sizes are usually expressed via Richter scale or Moment Magnitude Scale values, which both attempt to quantify the total energy released by the quake. These scales do NOT quantify the force experienced at any particular location, which depends heavily on distance from the epicenter and local geology. For that kind of quantity, you would use a seismic intensity scale (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_intensity_scales).

So it's wrong to say that a quake "...would not be 8 when it reaches Diablo Canyon" because the value '8' is an MMS or Richter value. Instead, you could say that "...the damage potential would be reduced by the distance to Diablo Canyon."

Keep in mind that one mistake made in the Fukushima design, and which might be happening here, is whether these estimates are based only on past historical data or not.

If they're based on historical data, on the worst known past earthquake/s in the region, then they may be effectively black-swan blind. Eg, they may be failing to take into account that the worst past events always exceeded the prior worst event before it, and therefore prior worst events were not, and are not, a reliable measure for future ones.

Building earthquake-proof nuclear reactors requires, at minimum, taking the worst past earthquake nearby, and assuming the next will be worse yet, and building for that one (or the one after, etc).

Or better yet, just don't build nuclear plants on top of fault lines, regardless of what historical data shows about it.

Do you trust pg&e after the whole French laundry lobbyist thing? https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/abc10-originals/new...

No, I would definitely support an audit of their claims. With my comment, I intended to point out that a seismically active location may not be game over for a nuclear plant if proper consideration is taken.

The same PG&E also fell behind on maintenance of vegetation around power lines, causing wildfires. As well as gas pipe infrastructure, causing a neighborhood scale explosion.

On the other hand, distributed, statewide maintenance (vegetation, gas pipelines) is very different than centralized maintenance (nuclear power plant).

It doesn't speak well to their competence, but "inspect and maintain 1,000s of miles of line" is different than "inspect and maintain 1,000 items in one place."

If the risks were equivalent, but it’s maintain many more than 1000 items to at a tolerance 1000 times more sensitive with a outcome 1000 times worse than a wildfire or gas explosion.

Probably because they're not. It's just the offer cost of nuke in the market is substantially higher than the juggernaut of solar, so the "invisible hand" is pushing it's capacity factor (how often it runs) down considerably to where it can't make enough money to stay in business.

Of course this isn't 100% due to free markets as the subsidies of renewables allow them to offer in extremely cheaply, but it exacerbates the problem. Even without the subsidies, this would happen with current designs. Now of course there is "resiliency" value to having a nuke plant (example: when the sun doesn't shine) that is a value by itself, but it isn't being priced and paid for.

I mean, the quote and the article disagree with what you're saying - it's not the "invisible hand of the market", it's a policy choice by California to prioritize buying from renewables over "dirty" power. Oil and coal can eat that because they have lower operating costs and fill a different need than nuclear does. Implying that this is due to the superiority of "the juggernaut of solar" seems incorrect to me.

I get there's this utopian vision of solar, and the gains in the industry have been impressive, but those gains are backed by some really deep market subsidies and policy choices - which, to be fair, were needed to get the technology off the ground. However, it's not there yet, and it didn't get there under its own power. What we're seeing here is a repercussion of those policy choices, not the a market stabilization in favour of a superior player.

It's sad really.

There is an alternative reality where anti nuclear activist [1] never succeeded and we continued to make great progress on reactors. Ultimately, reducing fossil fuel use and corresponding GHG levels.

One of the very things the environmental groups fought against was one of the things that could have saved us.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement

Yes, this country should be covered in nuclear plants that provide the majority of our electricity. Energy should be too cheap to meter. Whatever problems we as a society may have, it will take energy to address those problems, and the core of our energy production has to be stable and reliable.

I had a conversation with a co-worker who used to work for Toshiba heavy industries on their nuclear stuff - he made the interesting point that there's only so much accessible uranium on the planet, to the point where we'd use up all of it in ~75 years if we were running the entire planet on nuclear. The only way around this is to use breeder reactors, which is a huge no-no from an international relations perspective because those are the same types of reactors used to make nuclear grade fissile materials.

This is an interesting point. Is there some data to use as a reference for it? Would other forms of nuclear fuel replace uranium in larger quantities?

I feel like this has been absent in many pro-nuclear arguments (I always assumed we had much more)

There's "uranium in the planet" - lots! - and "uranium accessible to humans" - not so much.

The other fuel used would be plutonium and thorium, I believe. My understanding (not a nuclear scientist) is that there's a cycle of enrichment and decay that produces more fissile materials than it consumes.

Interestingly, from my perusal of wikipedia, it seems like you effectively can recycle the uranium isotopes indefinitely in such a reactor, as well as generating fissile plutonium and thorium.

Again, the problem is that generating fissile plutonium is how you make a bomb

I think China is testing a thorium reactor now. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02459-w

China is leading the way, both in terms of adding coal capacity right now to address the power outages while also building out nuclear capacity for the future.

The ability to act rationally like this when popular movements turn irrational is one advantage of an authoritarian system. No doubt many in the west are looking somewhat enviously at China.

Except coal has gotten super duper expensive, and most Chinese coal plants are designed to burn high grade coal such as produced in Australia. Many can’t run at all on the much more common lower grade coal that they can find inside of China, or they can’t run effectively on it.

So, the Chinese are spending way more money than they should on building super duper expensive coal plants that can’t effectively run on the kind of coal that they can get. And they have a coal embargo against Australia, so they can’t import the stuff that they could actually burn effectively.

Meanwhile, solar panels have continued to get progressively less expensive, so that even in China, it is now cheaper to run solar panels than it is to burn coal.

The more uranium is used, the more it will increase in price, allocating more resources to exploring for new sources.

Increased uranium prices will not significantly affect energy cost, as fuel price is very small fraction of nuclear plant operation.

These days there are ways of getting uranium from sea water [1], basically making the supply practically limitless. This way is currently un-economical, but as current reserves are depleting, it will become viable option as well. (Along with researching for more reserves)

So yes, it was totally possible to decarbonise electricity production long ago.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

It's wrong.

Breeder reactors can make fuel during use.

We only need enough fuel for one reactor.

Honestly that seems like a more easily solvable problem than what to do with ~30 billion solar panels and the corresponding battery capacity that would need to be built up if we tried to get the bulk of the world's energy from solar. Of course when someone points out that there isn't enough raw material to make all those batteries and panels, the standard answer is "we'll mine more", but strangely that's not supposed to be an option with mining uranium -- so I am generally skeptical of the "peak uranium" theories. It's not even a matter of needing to turn to breeder reactors, although that's certainly a possibility, but rather it's just a question of mining more, and that always happens as technology improves and demand for a metal increases.

But sure, nuclear power is not something that would work for every nation on earth. But it would certainly work well for North America and the EU, as well as China, India, Australia, and Japan, which together account for the majority of the world's energy needs.

Your co-worker may be mistaken. ~75 would only make sense if he was saying of known deposits. And even then, there is about 50 million tons of known deposits, and the currently open mines only account for about a tenth of that... I'm not sure we'd need to burn through the resulting refined product of 50 million tons of pitchblende to run the entire planet for 75 years.

This also ignores the rest of the intended refinement chain: thorium and other reactor fuel sources.

The uranium deposits are a long way from 1:1 with fuel grade uranium. Natural ore is generally under 20% uranium, and that uranium is 90.3% U238, and 0.7% U235. Reactors want ~5% U235 but depleted uranium is still 0.2% to 0.3% U235. Which means your produce less than 10% fuel grade uranium from every ton of natural uranium. Ex: Cigar Lake with ~217 million pounds (99,000 t) of ore at 18% uranium is only going to produce ~1,700t of reactor grade uranium. As you very roughly get 1GW for 1 year from 1t of reactor grade fuel that’s only 23GW for 75 years.

Aka, those 50m t of ore globally work out to around 0.5-1m t of fuel though we’re extracting the cheapest stuff first so expect prices to rise well before you extract all of it. There are also options to extract vastly more energy from that same ore, but again they all make nuclear more expensive.

Hmm, that might be right then. I was doing the fuzzy math in my head on what we can do, not what is worth doing right this moment due to market influence.

> Reactors want ~5% U235

Light-water reactors, which are the more/most prevalent design. Heavy-water reactors, like CANDUs, can use non-processed uranium in 'natural' concentrations:

* https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/CANDU_reactor

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor#Purpose_of_using...

The heavy-water is deuterium oxide, where there "hydrogen" atom has one proton and one neutron, whereas the far more common hydrogen has no neutrons in the nucleus:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water

Current CANDU reactors are significantly more expensive to operate and have had relatively low capacity factors. Which is why they have had little success outside of Canada. China for example only uses 2 and has abandoned the design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

They do use up to 30% less mined uranium as your link points out, but also produce a lot more high level nuclear waste.

I believe Russia runs the only 2 breeder reactors known to be operational? So if they can get away with it, seems like major nuclear powers could agree to produce fissile material for energy purposes, keeping public record of how much is made and selling some limited quantity to poor countries for running small plants. Require public audits by an agreed upon body created for such a purpose and representing equally each major nuclear power. There can be solutions made.

It's a fair point. The US or Russia having more bomb-grade fissile material isn't such a shift in geopolitical reality.

> 75 years if we were running the entire planet on nuclear

That seems like plenty of time to

a) build renewables

b) figure out fusion

c) discover/make accessible more uranium just like we did with oil

d) Ramp up population to 20B people.

Conventional reactors also produce plutonium; in fact, there's a suspicion that one reason Chernobyl was so poorly designed (e.g. lacking a containment dome) was that they were extracting warhead fuel from it. About a third of the energy in US reactors is actually from fissioning plutonium, but they do that inefficiently so plutonium and other transuranics make up most of the long-term radioactivity in high-level nuclear waste.

On the other hand, breeder reactors don't necessarily make weapons-grade material. The Integral Fast Reactor in the US produced a mix of four plutonium isotopes, which was totally unsuitable for weapons, and harder to enrich to weapons-grade than natural uranium.

Using breeders multiplies the energy from uranium ore by a factor of a hundred. With such low fuel consumption, it also makes seawater extraction pretty easy, which extends our fuel supply to many millions of years.

There are 4 billion tons of uranium dissolved in the oceans [1]. That's about 80000 times the worldwide annual production.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/materials/Fishing-uranium-ocean-spider-s...

It's hard to believe that someone from the nuclear industry doesn't know about breeder reactors.

Nuclear fuel can increase during use. Running out isn't required, the way it is with consumable fuel

Exactly, it's a man-made, not a technical issue - breeder reactors are the solution.

It's not a technical problem (solution is well known), it's a policy problem.

That's not how electricity markets work such as the CAISO market.

Generators bid in their short run marginal cost for energy and the cost to provide certain reserve services and the unit commitment and economic dispatch algorithms choose which resources to turn on and what level they run at based on some cost minimization function.

Before markets, the incumbent utility would run all their nukes and coal as base load. Now with regional markets you have lots of utilities and private entities competing. Once massive amounts of cheap renewables (armed with subsidies to boot) entered the supply mix, it pushed out the most expensive generation to where instead of running ~24/7, they began running far less. Go look at any nuke plants capacity factor (percentage of the year running) in the US by year (you can Google it). You'll see a rather sharp drop. It can only go so low before the plant has to be retired as the cost to run it is greater than the break even point. CAISO operators obviously don't want that, but absent some kind of side payment from the state (unpopular with economists), it's the inevitable outcome.

I just wanted to make the distinction that the entity running the market and making sure the grid doesn't blackout usually doesn't make any decisions regarding what the rate payers at the retail level pay for. Even if they know a plant is required for reliability, it's a difficult process to figure out how to accommodate the plant outside the market. It could be argued that these markets in the US need to figure out how to better quantify the risk from losing these nukes and reflect that as part of the price (as well as other technologies). So far that hasn't occurred. Some areas have long-term capacity markets (example: PJM), but California does not (I don't think). Even then, the capacity markets have had many issues.

> Now with regional markets you have lots of utilities and private entities competing. Once massive amounts of cheap renewables (armed with subsidies to boot) entered the supply mix, it pushed out the most expensive generation to where instead of running ~24/7, they began running far less.

What this really means is that their cost function is broken.

Power plants really have three types of costs.

The first is the construction cost. This is a sunk cost for anything that already exists.

The second is fixed operating costs. This is things like property tax and security and maintenance, which you could save if you shut down the plant permanently, but you don't save at all by having it run at e.g. 50% capacity.

The third is variable operating costs. The cost of generating the incremental MWh, given that the plant is operational. For fossil fuel plants this is dominated by fuel. For nuclear plants (and renewables) this is basically zero.

Only the second and third should be a factor in whether a plant that already exists gets shut down. But more importantly, only the third should be a factor in where you buy power.

If you have a nuclear power plant which you're paying to keep operational but not consuming 100% of its output, you did the math wrong. (Or your electricity prices are regularly zero or negative.)

Electricity markets have been exhaustively researched for ~2 decades (the type we have in the US) and even longer for economic power systems in general.

All that to say the way things are done are not perfect, but they have had a lot of brilliant people looking into them for a long time. There is a lot of economic theory out there on the usage of short run marginal costs for offers and renewables are insanely cheap in comparison to most other technologies.

When you talk about paying for a nuke plant, but not consuming 100% of it's output, that's not exactly what I'm talking about. I would guess that many nukes simply have to run and can't be committed/decommitted like many other conventional technologies. They essentially become a price taker at that point and whatever they are making is likely not enough to cover what they need to stay in business. I hope that's more clear.

Also, zero or negative prices are indeed becoming increasingly common in certain parts of the US.

Edit: the capacity factors I saw posted publicly for nukes in 2020 weren't near as bad as I thought. Regardless, there are still a lot of planned retirements as I understand it, in the next few years. With Southern Company's Vogtle way over budget and behind schedule, I can't imagine another nuke being built in the US of that kind anytime soon either.

> Electricity markets have been exhaustively researched for ~2 decades (the type we have in the US) and even longer for economic power systems in general.

Do you think these cost functions properly price disruptions? I'm saying this because the US is an order of magnitude less reliable than in Europe, and most of these costs are pushed onto consumers. E.g. When the power goes out and I have to throw away food or lose a day of work, PG&E has never compensated me for that. It's externalized. Now imagine a scenario where lots of people rely on the grid to charge their cars.

I'm really skeptical of the obsessive hyper-optimization that's going on. If you have a situation where there is an extremely cheap energy provider that is highly unreliable, it could drive out of business the more expensive, reliable provider, and that needs to be taken into account. The zero or negative spot prices that were common in Texas as a result of windpower look to be an example of that pathology at work.

They do have "scarcity pricing" which comes up when energy is either deficit or the required reserves are. ERCOT in particular has something like $9000/MWh.

So let's go with this number. A price is the result of optimizing some cost function, so let's see if the underlying cost function correctly measures the cost of a disruption. 9K/MWh would attribute 1 day of electricity as being worth $108 (assuming standard per-capita usage of 12kW).

So for a single living alone, that's a bad deal, as suffering a power outage for 1 day and then being given $108 will not make them whole -- it wont even pay for the spoiled food, let alone the inconvenience of being without AC or internet for a day.

For a household of 2.5, they would get $270, which would pay for the spoiled food and inconvenience of buying it and maybe get $30 left over for the inconvenience of no A.C., cell phone running out, not being able to use your computer or internet, do your laundry, perhaps not being able to use your mobile phone, etc. And we aren't even assuming PEV or people working from home. Then they would also lose 1 day of wages.

So it would seem to me that just to make someone whole you should probably double or triple that, say to 20K/MWh, but then this is supposed to be a penalty rate, so it should cost more than what it would take to make a household whole, because we don't want the utility to be indifferent between making the household whole and providing the electricity, we want the utility to be heavily incentivized to avoid the disruption.

These are wholesale prices, not retail, but yes the two are linked.

$9000/MWh isn't crazy for a few intervals once a year, but if a generator clears 200 MW for each hour of the day for a day in the day ahead market and then has issues and can't provide that power in the real time market, it has to buy back that power at the spot price. That can get insanely expensive fast. Now imagine the owner of that generator has other generators in the same boat and it just stacks. These aren't trivial prices. Similarly, the load serving entities have to buy power at that spot price if they don't have it locked in at a lower price in the forward market (hard to do when events occur over multiple days). A little googling will turn up some chatter about many of those companies nearly defaulting from the ERCOT scarcity pricing during the February event.

>$9000/MWh isn't crazy for a few intervals once a year, but if a generator clears 200 MW for each hour of the day for a day in the day ahead market and then has issues and can't provide that power in the real time market, it has to buy back that power at the spot price. That can get insanely expensive fast.

Exactly! And it should be 30K, not 9K, due to my arguments above. You are pointing out that renewables, while unreliable, are so cheap they are driving the reliable electricity out of business. That means something isn't being correctly priced, because we as a nation require reliability. So I propose to put a price on that reliability, and you point out it can drive the unreliable provider out of business, which is kinda the point -- that unreliable provider will need to purchase insurance from the reliable provider to cover them, or "side payments" as you call it, in case something goes wrong. This puts a price on having the nuclear provider available in case the wind doesn't blow, and creates payments to that provider, but via market mechanisms. If the wind provider is confident in their battery storage they don't need to purchase insurance from the nuclear provider. But the point is to stop externalizing the costs of unreliable power. This is to end up in a situation where we as a nation are able to fund reliable sources of electricity rather than everyone switching to wind and the nation going dark when the wind stops blowing, throwing up it's hands and saying "oops", or "wow, I can't afford this. Gonna declare bankruptcy now, see you on the other side with more cheap spot prices". That's how you do it with the market mechanisms - by putting much bigger penalties on unreliability than we have now and requiring proof of insurance for being able to handle those payments.

> These are wholesale prices, not retail

Of course, because we are talking about how much to penalize providers for disrupting the lives of households - remember we are trying to price reliability. The providers pay wholesale, so that is the relevant cost function to target, not retail.

Seems like they could essentially reserve a block of capacity (provided by the nukes) as being outside of the market, no? If the nuke plant has a planned or unplanned outage of some or all capacity, that reserve capacity could temporarily be reduced to give a larger slice to the market. Seems like a fairly straightforward way to accommodate the need to ensure for reliability.

Easy to do on paper, but probably hard in reality. If you do that, pretty soon you don't have a market. It can also suppress prices as well by having too much capacity online I think. There's a lot of moving parts.

One question to ask yourself is who is going to pay for this block of nuke capacity? It would be very expensive to pay for that on a 24/7 basis "just in case". The market already clears reserves for a variety of contingency events and it's certainly a balancing act to ensure you have enough without over paying for something you'll only need in ultra rare occasions.

Part of the market philosophy is also not to signal out any one technology. You put in some requirements and let the economics find the cheapest solution. So you could ask for more reserves, but they probably wouldn't just come from nuke.

"it didn't get there under its own power"

Existing power infrastructure has already paid its capital costs, meaning they have a massive incumbent advantage. Coal and gas power also haven't historically had to pay for their externalities, which is another distortion in their favor. This means that without extra incentives, you're stuck with coal until the plants need to be replaced, which essentially means until something truly magical happens or forever, whichever comes first.

So, you can look at the subsidies for solar as offsets for the incumbent advantages and externality subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the LCOE of solar has improved exponentially with scale and semiconductor improvements, which gets close to the 'something magical.'

Are not all forms of generation heavily subsidized? I feel if you could generate electricity by killing kittens and baby seals you would instantly get a subsides

the electricity market equivalent of HOAs are not the invisible hand

Nuclear is heavily subsidized itself. Without guaranteed prices for energy for decades nuclear plants would be far less attractive to build.

Shutting an existing plant without having an alternative in sight is just plain stupid even if it was coal powered power plant. Higher energy prices and lack of energy also kills people and damages environment. Do you really want people to run diesel generators in their backyard when power goes off ? Do you really prefer people to buy gas powered gadgets or cars because they don't trust electric grid ? In the absence of reliably grid electricity, people might opt for alternatives that are much more damaging.

My local solar company advertises itself as "alternative to unreliable PG&E", it is expensive and not many can afford it but I can see why some people might spend their healthcare or education budget on buying those expensive solar panels.

Diablo Canyon was commissioned in 1985 with a planned decommission date of 2015. 36 years is on the upper end for how long nuclear power plants last. The alternative is to buy/import electrical power. Of course, the power grid needs upgrading.

https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/29402043133.pdf

> ideology versus reality

It works until it doesn't. I don't think it's common knowledge today that ideology is a luxury, and doesn't put gas in the tank of a functioning society, now that we've generally taken a functioning society for granted.

Disasters created by ideology are the normal pathway to vaccinate the general population against memetic viruses. Were education may fail, a winter with rolling black-outs, may not.

Sometimes you need a forcing function.

There’s probably a theory in there that any technological or social system is doomed to have periodic major preventable failures as a function of human life span and attention. If people aren’t reminded of failure they will inevitably neglect the system until it happens.

There’s a follow up whereby it might be optimal to design systems explicitly to allow somewhat frequent non catastrophic failures to keep people on their toes. Attempts at “perfect” safety seeming to only build up to less frequent but bigger disasters.

The theory you may be looking for is [1] Chesterton's Fence

[1] https://thereaderwiki.com/en/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

Cliodynamics is this, but for the miseries of industrial war.

The tradeoff is one failure for another

Much the same is happening in Texas but in the opposite direction. [1]

"“I’m very disappointed,” Nichols said, taking issue with a provision in the new law that lets gas companies easily skirt weatherization requirements as long as they don’t declare themselves to be “critical infrastructure” with the state."

[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/...

This could almost be a good thing. If they shut this plant down and immediately start experiencing grid reliability issues it could get some press coverage and be a wakeup call

Negative press coverage doesn't seem to phase PG&E

or the california government

This entire recall election for the governor seemed to stem from press coverage that sparked a limited movement. Considering the result seemed too close for comfort throughout much of the campaign process, I wouldn’t exactly consider the government immune to negative press.

Maybe not, but PG&E sure seems to be immune. It's not a great look when you both have very high electricity prices [0] and you're also frequently starting fires and killing people. But good news, shareholders, it turns out that actually being convicted of crimes [1] as a corporation is no big deal, so much so that they're pleading guilty to manslaughter ten years later [2]. And even better, there's regulatory capture that makes it extremely hard for municipalities to stand up their own services to provide safer and cheaper power to residents [3].

[0] 0.26/KWh if you're a saint and use almost nothing to $0.41/KWh if you use a normal-or-more amount of electricity. See https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/pge-ordered-develop-com...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pg-e-pleads-guilty-manslaughter...

[3] https://www.desertsun.com/story/tech/science/energy/2018/10/...

> because California's energy regulations give renewables priority over nuclear

Hack to solve this: classify nuclear as renewable?

Or just repeal a bad law instead of trying to fill the law books with hacks.

It's effectively renewable because (1) there's essentially no pollution and (2) with no prospect of new plants, mining of fuel is not going to add up to much impact.

I agree with your viewpoint in general.

Nah I don’t think you can take linguistic shortcuts on this. As much as I’m a proponent of nuclear power, I’m a bigger proponent of repealing bad laws rather than accommodating them with poorly thought out extensions and calling nuclear something it’s not doesn’t sit well with me when it stands fine on its own merits.

I think we’re agreeing directionally at least.

Yeah, that's fair. Admittedly I posted that comment because it amused me.

This is happening in Europe! "Finland has joined France, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic in lobbying the European Union to categorize nuclear power as sustainable."

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/14479635067377049...

Facts don't matter only feelings do - One of the California politicians.

When people say X must be treated and utility and politicians must control it, I show them PG&E as a glorious example of California's corruption and overall incompetence.

... because activism trumps intelligence.

nuclear isn't profitable for lobbyist because of the regulations around it, can't outsource production of panels to China and reap massive profit margins from subsidies. Same thing for wind turbines. I know executives with power companies who built out massive wind farms only because of the subsidies, those wind mills have about a 20 year life time and can't be recycled or reused

Should we get rid of subsidies for oil production too?

This has been in the works since 2016.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/End-of-an-atomic-era...

If only reality would listen to reason.

Reason working its will on reality is the definition of progress.

Yes, this the motto on our state flag I believe

Solar has become dramatically cheaper in the past decade but the policymakers don't seem capable of realizing it's still not enough for America's energy needs on its own, doubly so drought-ridden California.

How are droughts creating problems for solar?

They aren't, they're creating weird issues with the power grid due to lack of investment there for which Californians are now on the hook to address through higher utility bills.

https://www.pge.com/en_US/about-pge/company-information/regu...

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