The last nuclear power plant in California, Diablo Canyon, is slated to shut down in 2025. But Moms for Nuclear, started by self-described “liberal environmentalists”, makes the case that it should remain in operation as a safe, clean, low-carbon-footprint power source. Even Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom lobbies the legislature to keep Diablo Canyon going another decade. Will the campaign to save the nukes finally succeed?
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25 replies on “Save the Nukes: California Environmentalists Fight to Preserve Safe, Clean, Low-Carbon Power”
Two points I feel I must make:
1) It’s pronounced “nook-yoo-lar”. (I learned that from the defence department)
B) @ 2:55 Steve says,”California basically has two problems….” The correct ending to that statement is, ” the governor and the legislature.”
Both of which are unrelentingly leftist and elitist (but I repeat myself). Unfortunately, they’re also smart enough to see that the citizens of the state are about ready to hang the lot of them from the statehouse dome!
They are desperately grasping at this plan to save their own bacon.
End of line
“They” are in the process of replacing a coal fired plant in Southwest Wyoming with a nuclear plant. While I’m all for the idea my major concern is that it is being pushed by Bill Gates and a company owned and operated behind the scenes by the Chinese Communist Party. This is very troubling.
I watched this documentary type video on Three Mile Island and found it very informative. He goes through how it happened, some of the why and how people reacted using some news footage and interviews from the time period.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9PsCLJpAA
One on nuclear waste and the safe storage mechanisms we already have
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
Another video on a nuclear meltdown that did happen, SL-1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ8cYheR5xo
and one video those Moms for Nukes could use
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3znG6_vla0
But if you can’t charge your EV, you also can’t leave the CA hotel.
And take your state and local tax payments with you. Deviously logical!
The sudden turnaround in the name of energy sanity has less to do with Nancy Pelosi’s nephew being smart and more with him being a political opportunist. He looks like The Radical Left’s only hope for 2024, so it’s important that we start warning the country about him now
123456
Whenever you talk to anyone who claims to be a “greenie” or alarmed about anthropomorphic climate change and they are opposed to nuclear power you can be certain that their concerns over energy and climate change are not genuine. There’s something else going on with them.
It could be simple ignorance, it could be a form of meritless virtue signalling, or it could be something much more sinister.
A lot of those people think the world would be much better off if 90% of the human population were eliminated by whatever means. Of course they always think they should be in the 10% that remains.
This population reduction goal and agenda is a large part of the underlying ideology of the Left. If you look for it, it crops up almost everywhere. From butchering children so they don’t grow up to become ‘breeders’ and make more human beings to starving, freezing and cooking poorer people by making energy too expensive for them to afford and many planks in the platform that lie between those two positions.
I read recently that the UN wants the top polluting countries (US, India, China) to cough up extra billions to support the poorer countries in their defense against climate change. Instead of making the poor countries dependent on the wealthier ones, why not put the money toward infrastructure for energy production so they can also have electricity on demand? Think of it — air conditioning/heating, indoor plumbing, cleaner cooking, all the things we have. I would like to see the poorer countries become wealthier by giving them the tools they need to get ahead.
I think if someone advocates for everyone to turn to greener forms of energy, then let them be the first to do so. They should stop using anything that burns fossil fuels or was made from burning fossil fuels, etc. It’s only fair, right? No more traveling by car, plane, boat, etc. because I am pretty sure they were made by factories burning fossil fuels. No more buying groceries or clothing at stores that used fossil fuels to produce or transport them. It’s back to wearing animal skins (unless they’re opposed to that) and living in a cave and eating berries and bugs. Hello Fred Flintstone!
No, no, no California doesn’t need more water and power, we need far fewer people!
Question for Steve Green, in the past you’ve mentioned Thorium Reactors, and their being safe, small and could power a neighborhood.
But it’s always just a mention or a lament that it hasn’t happened. Can you elaborate on these reactors?
If not you, I gotta believe there is a nuclear engineer in this BWDC family, somebody speak up on Thorium Reactors?
RSAE?
Hey RR – I had tried to respond but was in one of the “invalid email address” timeouts
Not an expert in Thorium reactors but they do hold promise.
If I had Bill Gates’ or Jeff Bezos’ money, this is where I would be investing.
I do think that we suffer from a big power plant bias where companies want to be able to do this on a large scale and it would probably be better on a smaller scale. Not necessarily home size, but small town rather than big regions.
Also, I would remind everyone that the only real difference between coal-fired, oil-fired and Nuclear power plants is how the water is heated to steam. After that portion, all plants are generally steam-turbine turning an electrical generator, then some form of rectification and step up of voltage for transmission.
I know Wikipedia is a terrible source but this is the fastest, easiest way to explain …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
Those two articles are reasonably brief and won’t take you long to read while still giving you a basic understanding of the concept of using thorium as a reactor fuel.
That said, Generation IV solid rod reactors are comparatively cheaper because all the work has been done on that kind of reactor and both regulatory and construction parameters have been fully satisfied. Thorium may well be the reactor of the future but there’s a lot of work to do before we get there. Personally I hope we do get there because it’s a better system … If you’re not trying to make nuclear weapons from the reactor and are only trying to generate electrical power.
ACTS, thanks for the links. I went to WIKI for that before I asked the question in the comments. Scanned but didn’t go deep into it. I will now. And will read them keeping in mind your comments about Gen IV reactors. California is screwed not actually because of energy, we can make that by allowing the plants to come back online, cut regulations to get more up and running….
But water? California’s gonna get thirsty very quickly. And not enough desal plants to supply a very thirsty population. You can quickly make electricity, that is, if you wanted to. You can’t quickly make drinkable water. Oh, our local water district is going to try though. They want to purify sewer water, then pump it down into our precious aquifers. What could possibly go wrong? (Think M.T.B.E.)
I lived through the great drought of 73 to 79 in California. Empty reservoirs, empty spillways, great for a 15 year old skateboard enthusiast! Oh and hot summers with little fog at the beaches meant lots of surfing, frisbee, girls in bikinis and a really really good base tan laid down over the years for catching future melanomas.
Fun Fun Fun…..
Yeah, all the land that is watered by Mulholland and his Water Wars is in a desert. A real, no shit desert. It’s no surprise that it would run out of water and it’s kind of surprising that it hasn’t done so and had a full on water crash yet. That day has to come, sooner or later. In the meanwhile pulling water from the rest of California and Nevada is going to make a water crash bigger and harder than it might otherwise have been. So you’ve got that to look forward to.
I lived in SoCal for quite a while and this is among many, many reasons why when the chance came to split I didn’t hesitate. There’s a nice little summer thunderstorm headed this way tonight, should be here in an hour or two. Probably drop an inch or more of rain as it passes. Eat your heart out … 🙂
If California would desal with nuke plants theoretically the water crash could be avoided completely but no …
I think it was Steven Green who pointed out a couple months ago that just to charge up the electric vehicles the Left claims we’re all going to die without if we don’t transition now — Would take something like one or two nuclear power plants coming online at full capacity per month over the next several years. That’s just not going to happen. Not only because the greenies won’t get behind nuclear power, it just cannot physically be done no matter how many people think it needs to be done. By the time people figure out what an idiotic idea this whole ‘electric vehicle only’ idea is you won’t only not be able to charge your car, you won’t be able to buy food (because refrigeration and transportation need energy) or work (same problems) either.
So you have to ask yourself if this is misguided stupidity or if it’s being done intentionally. The more stupid it gets the bigger the argument for intent becomes.
Please do familiarize yourself with thorium reactors and generation IV solid rod reactors. The only real hope for a truly bright future is the massive development of reliable, cheap energy. If you want to help poor people and the developing third world shithole countries that’s the very best thing you can do for them. Unless and until fusion power becomes available fission nuclear reactors are the best hope to supply the energy that would lift the entire globe out of misery. People who do not support that, despite any silly pretensions to care about ‘the planet’, want more not less misery.
Steve, CA has THREE big problems: drought, electricity, and Gov. Gruesome. 🙂
I read an interesting article about a “Green Hydrogen” project in Delta, Utah that has received a $504 million loan guarantee from the USDoE to convert a 40-year old coal plant to a facility that burns hydrogen by 2045. Across the street from this coal plant developers plan to create caverns in salt dome formations underground to store hydrogen fuel. These caves will act like underground batteries storing hydrogen gas for when it’s needed.
According to the article, “solar and wind will power electrolyzers that split water molecules to create hydrogen. Energy experts call it ‘green hydrogen’ because producing it emits no carbon. Initially, the plant will run on 30% hydrogen and 70% natural gas. It plans to transition to 100% hydrogen by 2045.”
“When consumers require more power than they can get from renewables, the hydrogen will be piped across the street to the site of the Intermountain Power Plant and burned to power turbines, similar to how coal is used today. That, in theory, makes it a reliable complement to renewables.”
If this works out, maybe the stalled Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility in Nevada could be used to house hydrogen instead of nuclear waste. And as a taxpayer who lives in Nevada, I’d like to see some kind of return on all the dollars spent on that money hole.
Hydrogen makes a dandy fuel that when burned yields heat and pure water but …
I have to wonder about the idea of using wind and solar to create hydrogen by hydrolysis. I get that it allows a way to store wind and solar energy when those intermittent sources are not producing. That said, it seems like a tremendous amount of inefficiency would be involved. Inefficiency which would make the production of hydrogen via electric energy yield far less energy than if the electric energy used for hydrolysis were just pumped into the grid in the first place.
Wind and solar are already pretty inefficient energy sources, making them even less efficient seems a bit of a boondoggle to me. You would need even more wind and solar sources to get even less energy.
Georgia Power is getting ready to open up another new nuclear facility, adding to our energy grid and showing the way forward. Of course, if Stacy Abrams gets elected governor – if she doesn’t it has got to be fraud!!! – there is no telling what common sense she would be willing to abandon to appeal to the hard Left.
Speaking of Abrams, her most recent ads tout how she helped oppose a tax hike when she was in the Georgia house and is pro-law enforcement. If these cement someone’s stance on voting for her, they are willfully blind and woefully ignorant.
BTW – the US Navy has been operating dozens of nuclear reactors for decades without incident.
Bill – I know I have covered this previously when you have brought it up, but only to government types is that water pump a power plant. What engineers call it is peak shaving and is a very economical way to put power resources to WHEN they are needed.
There is nothing magical about this. It has been used for decades. We studied the problem in my classes. Heck, I had a similar problem to work out on my PE licensing exam way back when.
This has even been tried with compressed air rather than water in places that are too flat for the water head to be worth much.
The difference is it is supposed to be used to cover peaks. When growth makes it not just a peak, actual new power plants are needed. But the planning for those is usually measured in decades, not months.
“Ron”, I live about 40 min from that San Luis Reservoir Bill mentioned. Until I had heard Bill (and you) mention this a while ago, as a California citizen I had never understood why water was pumped from the California Aqueduct up to that massive reservoir. I thought it was just a buffer of water for release when Bill and his neighbors needed to water their lawns, take a 2nd shower, flush twice, and allow the city of Sherman Oaks to water the medians along Magnolia Blvd. Also wondered why there was the Oneill Forebay just below the dam, and why it was so huge. Now I know, Thanks BWDC and members like you.
That reservoir and dam structure was built in 1960 ish and President Kennedy did the ribbon cutting ceremony when it was opened. My dad saw this event, and prior to the dam being built, the lonely road from the Santa Clara Valley connecting to the San Joaquin Valley ran right throught the bottom of what would become, by design, the 5th largest body of water in California. In reality, it’s now closer to #1 as Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville are at 45% and 55% capacity due to a good solid drought. Why is it now number 1? Because Los Angeles is thirsty, and it continues to steal water from Northern California, and the San Luis Reservoir is about the halfway point between Redding and Sherman Oaks.
Oh, and once I got on my whine-cycle about the California Aqueduct….I just found a 2015 Paper from UC Davis saying that it’d be a good idea to cover the entire length of the CA Aqueduct, to prevent, get this, 1 Million Acre Feet of annual evaporation. Annual. To put this in perspective, the aqueduct “loses” 1/2 of the total capacity of the San Luis Reservoir. Each year. We all know we didn’t “lose” the water, it just escaped our capture, evaporated, then was blown by the prevailing winds to the Rockies, where Steve Green could then have 2 showers a day, wash 30 or so daily loads of clothes, and have the Greenest Lawn in Monument.
Of course, the good students at UC Davis suggested we cover the entire length of the aqueduct with….wait for it.…. Solar Panels!
Correct Scott. When your opponent is busy convincing themselves of your position, don’t stop them.
And don’t invoke sarcasm or other device to deride them. Encourage or say nothing.
My Mom always had a problem with this “say nothing” thing. She thought if someone asked her a question she was obligated to answer truthfully and completely.
I tried to convince her that she didn’t need to lie but also didn’t need to answer. Sometimes the best answer is “none of your business” or “I’m not going to talk about that”. Or just a blank stare accompanied by old fashioned silence.
I was never able to get her to comply with that idea so sadly there were things I would have shared with my Mom, things that were not meant to be common knowledge but not classified information because I would never reveal something classified, that I was never able to. This caused her a huge amount of confusion and made her opinion of my choices less than it should have been. If I could tell her why she could be proud of something I did then I also knew that the first person who asked her anything at all in that regard would get a full accounting of things that it is better they don’t know. So I couldn’t explain things to her and she often thought I was up to some sort of foolishness when the opposite was the case.
I’m saying this because The Truth, all the truth and nothing but the truth, isn’t always the best way to approach everything. You don’t have to lie, you don’t need to tell everyone everything that is on your mind. You don’t have to call out people who are on your side by their own conclusions idiots even when their prior position was in fact idiotic.
This doesn’t just apply in situations like the above video addresses. If your opinion (speaking in general and not to you personally) is needlessly harmful to someone or needlessly causes alienation of the people you’re speaking to, it’s best to just let it pass. This is a prime example of the difference between knowledge and wisdom.