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Comment by zadokshi | Hacker News Reader

What do they propose instead? A new nuclear plant, coal plant? Decreasing power needs by taxing everyone out of the state?

I’m all for improving the environmental situation, but how?

They should use their donation money on layers that will force the hand of politicians to build newer better supply sources rather than just trying to shut down the current power sources.

What is their end game? Is it political or environmental? Is it just a pure emotional “this bad, turn off” type thought process? Is it a “oh this is in our budget and we don’t know what to do with it” situation?

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FOE wrote a report on this in the early-2010s. For quite a while energy use was dropping in California, PG&E was a leader in improving energy efficiency and replacing "negawatts" with "megawatts", which was a highly successful policy... for a while. Thus FOE thought electricity use would continue to decline in California but... it didn't. And it won't.

Many people today think we are not moving fast enough, but climate change is on the radar now, we are seeing "net zero" commitments from governments, corporations and NGOs. 10 years ago there was a lot more talk about decarbonizing "easy to decarbonize" sectors and not about making sharp cuts in all emission sources.

There are electric cars and a movement to stop using natural gas for heat and cooking. Thanks to climate change we need more air conditioning. For that matter, climate change is putting pressure on water supplies so there is more interest in desalination, which today is done by pushing water across membranes with high pressure, which takes electricity. Industrial carbon emissions are under attack with hydrogen, gas turbines run backwards, electrolysis and other methods... That need clean energy.

Thus. California's demand for clean energy appears bottomless in the next few decades.

There have been a lot of environmental critiques of this particular nuclear power plant. They largely center on wastewater from the plant (which is warm, and rich in Tritium), as well as the risks posed by the potential of a strong, shallow earthquake in the vicinity of the plant.

But this is armchair quarterbacking, isn't it? We have a Nuclear Regulatory Commission that has the technical competency (and the legal mandate) to determine if a nuclear power plant is safe to operate. We also have an EPA that determines if something constitutes pollution or not. All nuclear power plants release Tritium in the environment. No exception. All nuclear power plants use water for cooling, and the water coming out is warmer than the one coming in. Those "concerns" are simply disingenuous.

No, they're not. Just because the NRC says it is cool doesn't mean that a power plant is above criticism. People are allowed to object to things happening around them.

> People are allowed to object to things happening around them

Sure, but when the topic is very involved from the technical and engineering point of view, it's still armchair quarterbacking.

Here's the link to the statement that Diablo Canion is safe from the earthquake point of view [1], and here are the relevant quotes:

  As part of its response to the Fukushima event in Japan in 2011, the NRC directed all U.S. commercial nuclear power plants to perform a reassessment of the potential seismic and flooding hazards to their facilities.

  The seismic hazard analysis was performed using an NRC-mandated process known as the Senior Seismic Hazard Analysis CommitteeOpens in new Window., or SSHAC. Under the SSHAC process, existing and new seismic information was peer-reviewed and publicly evaluated by leading third-party, independent seismic experts.

  The flooding hazard re-evaluation involved the use of the latest NRC guidance and methodologies and independent expertise to determine the maximum potential waves and rainfall that could impact Diablo Canyon. It also examined the plant's ability to withstand storm flooding.

[1] https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/how-the-system-works/diablo...

Because Diablo Canyon has received so much scrutiny it has had a lot of investment to fix problems. For instance they discovered the seismic risk was worse than they thought it was when they built it so they reinforced it to handle a bigger earthquake.

(Note Fukushima NPP was hit by an earthquake much bigger than it was designed for, this damaged the plant but wouldn't have caused a serious accident if it wasn't for the tsunami, resulting loss of primary and backup power, the isolation condenser not working at Unit 1, an untested plan to inject water into some of the other units not working, etc. Diablo Canyon is on a very high bluff and not vulnerable to ocean events.)

The substantive complaint about the seawater cooling system is that the heat is bad for sea life in the vicinity which is true but there are several other fossil fuel plants that are even more damaging.

On top of all that, all nuclear power plants in the U.S. have received major rounds of safety upgrades after incidents such as Three Mile Island, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Fukushima.

> What do they propose instead? A new nuclear plant, coal plant? Decreasing power needs by taxing everyone out of the state?

(From the article) > Last year the Biden administration announced it would give PG&E a $1.1 billion grant to help keep the plant open.

One idea:

$1.1 billion dollars will buy around that many watts of installed solar, at today's prices. Vastly more in another decade.

Yes. As much as I am a proponent of nuclear power, the proposed grant does not make sense to me - what exactly do they need this kind of money for?

Operational expenses of properly built & operated nuclear plants are very low, which is the whole point. If there's a billion dollars required to keep it running, despite high energy prices in the state, something is very wrong.

A nuclear plant near me is currently undergoing "renovations" to extend the life of the plant.

I know nothing of the california plant, but I suspect its in a similar situation.

If so, the 1.1 billion is not running costs, but capital spent to renew parts of the plant, replace some parts and so on. The plants of the 70s were typically built with a projected 50 year life span, so extending it another 50% is not cheap, although cheaper than building a new one.

Your point about solar is well made. But solar is not 27x7 so its not comparing an equivalent thing. Solar and wind are enormously useful, and I'm a fan, but they're not enough by themselves, and won't be until we figure out how to store gw of power.

Running a nuclear plant in an earthquake zone is not ideal, but its hard to see any better alternatives at the moment.

>If so, the 1.1 billion is not running costs, but capital spent to renew parts of the plant, replace some parts and so on

That would explain it. Thanks for the data point.

> Your point about solar is well made.

That's actually somebody else's point, not mine. :)

That's probably not even enough money to buy the land or do the environmental reports to produce a similar amount of solar

And how much do the batteries cost to store all that power?

Great idea! Now to just find somewhere to put a billion dollars worth of solar PV in California, preferably somewhere where it doesn't ever get dark so the power will stay on at night.

I was in the I15 recently and drove past those huge solar generating tower things. Seems like an enormous amount of nice sunny space out there close to HV lines.

As for night time, sure, spend half the $1.1 billion on solar panels and the other half on batteries.

Problem is it needs to be like 90% on batteries…

How do you figure it'll give that much? Near as I can see large scale solar is a bit over $1/W so $1.1B would give you less than half as much power in the middle of the day, less spread out over time.

> $1.1 billion dollars will buy around that many watts of installed solar, at today's prices. Vastly more in another decade.

The nuclear plant produces 2.2GW. Solar costs $1/W. So $1.1 billion will get you 1.1GW.

The plant thus has twice the return on investment of solar - and is already here right now and doesn't need to be constructed.

It makes more sense to shut the plant once no more coal or gas is being burned, rather than waste all that energy right now.

It's hard to compare nuclear v/ solar because of availability. A well-run NPP can have much better than 80% uptime. A solar farm depends on the sun. So 1GW of nuclear capacity is worth more than 1GW of solar. Thus the very low prices being quoted for solar systems today are not entirely honest.

As others have pointed out in this thread, the $1.1 billion is not running costs for the plant, that just covers some expenses to renew it.

So actually getting a continuous 2.2GW from the nuclear plant will cost a lot more than $1.1 billion.

California already has an issue with peak solar happening before peak demand. There's a rush to spin up all the natural gas power plants during peak demand. More solar doesn't really help with that, and is part of the problem because you can only spin up power plants so fast.

They've named it the duck curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

After I've read about the stance of the Green Party of Germany, I've kinda started to agree with their strategy of closing nuclear plants and going coal, so that everyone is pushed to fund renewables, nuclear is a temporary solution that slows everything else, but once you're on coal, then you need to move fast to renewables

And since this particular plant has been given billions to stay open, nuclear also sucks investments that in case you're currently on coal, you can fully give to renewables

The problem with energy production is a lack of coal plants. We’ve known this since the 19th century and it’s good to see various green parties finally understand that

We can't fully move to renewables until we have sufficient grid scale storage. There are a variety of technologies which might work for that but none has proven to be economically viable yet. Batteries are still heavily constrained by manufacturing capacity and availability of raw materials.

Batteries have improved dramatically. Grid scale storage looked like science fiction 20 years ago, it is already competitive for reinforcing the grid against short term power fluctuations, it may get a lot cheaper and widespread in the next 20 years but it is not a bird in the hand.

Diablo Canyon is up and running right now. It took 10 years to build an AP1000 (state of the art reactor) at Voglte 3; two AP1000s have been built successfully at that site although two failed at Virgil C. Summer. Building a new NPP is an expensive and risky proposition that could take a long time to bear fruit, but keeping an old one running is a slam dunk and avoids all the delays that would come from getting permits for and building anything new be it power lines, PV arrays, wind farms, or battery farms.

Wow. This is like a student thinking: I won't study now, because then when exam time comes, I will be more motivated to cram! New renewables (solar & wind, non hydro) running without cheap oil as input for production,deployment, and maintenance, have very uncertain energy return on energy invested.

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