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Comment by TheDudeMan | Hacker News Reader

California is prematurely closing its perfectly good nuclear reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#Clos...

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What I don't understand from these groups is why they don't go after nuclear _after_ coal, natural gas, and oil are gone from the grid. There are arguments against nuclear, but they aren't that great when there are still fossil fuel plants operating.

Also, a pet peeve of mine is when people say "replacing nuclear with zero-carbon sources" (as per the wiki article). That doesn't exist. There's energy sources that have zero operating emissions, but nuclear is one of them. But if we talk about lifetime then there's nothing that fits this criteria. So I don't get why this is in opposition.

Because the anti-nuclear groups are heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1392/robert-anderson-antinu...

There are no arguments against nuclear that stand up to scrutiny beyond emotional knee-jerk reactions.

Nuclear is safe, cheap and most importantly reliable.

Renewables are not reliable. Baseload renewables is a pipe dream that has been disproven repeatedly. Hence why jurisdictions that have dived into a heavy renewables energy mix are building gas peaking plants, utilising diesel generators in emergencies or adding batteries to the grid powered by child slaves in the Congo.

Even some of the more reliable renewable solutions like hydro occasionally have lulls that wipe out literally years of the benefit of running them.

As an example, the state of Tasmania in Australia runs on close to 100% hydro power year round, except when rare drought hits. When hydro didn't produce enough power one year, the Tasmania government flew in diesel generators to power the state and ran them for months, wiping out years of progress (diesel is worse than coal).

Except, it is not cheap at all: lately, in the US, you spend tens of billions of dollars for ten years or more, and get exactly zero watt-hours out, ever. $30B for zero watts of generating capacity is not a good value.

No arguments other than price and time to build. But most nuclear proponents will claim nuclear is perfectly safe, while simultaneously saying we should cut through the legislation and "red tape" in order to build it more cheaply. The very things which would make it safe in the first place.

Shoot, Germany's Energiewende was designed as a denuclearization from the start. It was the primary goal. Climate concerns came later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende#The_term_Energiew...

Russia essentially has Europe right where it wants it with natural gas because Europe is closing all their coal plants. I really don't want that in the USA. I want us to be domestic energy only, nuclear, solar, and wind mix makes the most sense by far until real Fusion comes along if we are really serious about the climate.

There are lots of good arguments for nuclear, but considering that the US is the number one producer of natural gas (by, like, 50%) this isn't one of them.

North America has achieved full fossil fuel independence via shale. You don’t need all the fossil fuels, you only need enough to be able to cap the price. We have enough.

It's near two fault lines...

"Though it was built less than a mile from the Shoreline fault line, which was not known to exist at the time of construction, and is located less than three miles from the Hosgri fault,"

So it probably wasn't constructed with proximity to a fault in mind. Still, just about everyplace in California is near a fault line.

Anybody who is a fan of nuclear power should be against operating them in earthquake zones. Just look at how much Fukushima set back nuclear power.

That was careless lack of protection against flooding. The quake itself didn't threaten containment.

In hindsight Fukushima should not have been operating in a tsunami zone, and in foresight no nuclear power should operate in earthquake zones or next to volcanoes or in general in any place prone to high-energy natural disasters.

The problem with high-energy natural disasters is that you generally don't get a nice upper bound on the energy, rather you get an exponential falloff in probability of a disaster happening of higher and higher energies. So it's basically impossible to guarantee that the plant will survive, you can only make probabilistic arguments. That isn't good enough.

Why take the risk if you have plenty of land area available that isn't on a fault line?

Thanks to the "Friends of the Earth" and "Natural Resources Defense Council" for pushing us to coal, natural gas, and blackouts... Also raising rates to pay for the premature decomissioning.

' https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-el...

The blackouts are because of fire-risk from transmission lines, and this is largely because PGE paid out bonuses instead of paying for needed repairs to the transmission system.

This group of corrupt execs are the same people entrusted to make safety and maintenance decisions for Diablo Canyon.

While it's true that the bonus scandal is a thing, that's about trimming trees in urban areas near powerlines, and is unrelated to the problem of how one can run lines through millions of acres of forests that should never exist in California.

The state has ~150 million dead trees ready to ignite, and needs to reduce the size of its forests by roughly the size of Maine in order to get back to a safer fire risk. That is just irresponsible forest management.

When you are in that situation, needing to run power lines across a tinderbox that should have never been allowed to exist, then you're not going to be able to have reliable power no matter the bonus scandal.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/corporations/pacific-gas-el...

"PG&E paid top execs $17 million in bonuses from 2012 to 2017"

You really think 17 million would have made a difference? Is that enough money to even bury 1 mile of transmission lines at Californian's exorbitant infrastructure cost?

Why bury when all those lines needed was replacement of worn parts? Burying power cables is expensive and increases maintenance costs an order of magnitude.

Much cheaper to replace hooks that are worn through so the cables don’t fall off the tower and start a fire.

Should probably also add ground fault interruption as a protection measure too. I saw a quite-impressive video of some hardware that was going in on parts of the Australian grid that managed to turn off super-quick as the cable arced to the earth, limiting the heating energy tremendously.

Your reliance on the far-right WSJ as a source for this makes me skeptical that this is solely the fault of environmental groups.

There have been several leaks and you know, maybe a state with a lot of earthquake activity isn't the best place to put a nuclear reactor.

How do the leaks compare to the continuous streams of coal ash and radon now that the load is being picked up by coal and natty plants?

You are committing the fallacy of the seen and the unseen here.

Nuclear power could be literally 10x as dangerous, and it would still cause far less harm to humans than existing non-nuclear sources of energy, and that's when you ignore the negative effects on the climate from those energy sources.

It does well when you compare it to coal and gas. It's not 1980 though. We have cheap battery backed solar and wind now.

3x the cost (5-7x if you take out the batteries) with a small chance of catastrophe doesnt really add up any more unless the country is trying to maintain a nuclear industry for military purposes.

Coal emits more radioactive particulates into the air over a wider area than a nuclear reactor generates for the same amount of power.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

"Perfectly good" Diablo Canyon was on the fritz throughout 2020 and 2021 and was the proximate cause of August 2020 capacity-related blackouts.

It is End of Life.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/6099?fr...

That ramshackle contraption should never have been turned on in the first place. It is being shut down now not because of hippies, who have much less influence than is often claimed, but because it would cost $billions to get it into good enough shape to operate until the next big earthquake.

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