The LA Times Makes the Case for Shutting the Diablo Canyon Nukes
December 3, 2024
Diablo Canynon, Wikipedia.
In a landmark front page feature, the Los Angeles Times has made a powerful argument for shutting California’s last two atomic reactors.
The forty-year-old Diablo Canyon nukes are being subsidized by statewide ratepayers to the tune of nearly $12 billion in over-market charges slated to enrich Pacific Gas & Electric through 2030. PG&E’s CEO, Patti Poppe, was paid more than $40 million in 2022. The company has been convicted of more than 90 federal manslaughter charges stemming from fatal fires in San Bruno in 2010, and in northern California in 2017
Taking up a quarter of the Times’s November 25 cover, the feature by Melody Peterson reports that a “glut” of solar-generated electricity is regularly shipped out of state at enormous losses to California rate payers. Green energy capable of powering more than a half-million homes is regularly “curtailed.”
But the cost of generating that electricity with solar panels is a fraction of Diablo Canyon’s hyper-expensive “base load power”, which is currently jamming and jeopardizing the California grid.
During most afternoons, photovoltaic cells in the Central Valley regularly produce electricity “too cheap to meter” (wind turbines in west Texas regularly do the same).
As it pours into the grid, the cheap solar juice is often used to charge industrial-scale batteries that power the state into the evening hours after sunset.
During part of virtually every day now, California’s entire electric supply comes from solar, wind and geothermal sources, at far less cost than what comes from Diablo Canyon. Atomic reactors are shut on average 9% of every year.
A landmark plan to phase-out Diablo Canyon by 2024 and 2025 was signed in 2018 by then-Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom. Compiled through two-years of intense top-level dialog, involving scores of public hearings and countless hours of research, the plan was signed by then-Governor Jerry Brown. It was endorsed by the state legislature and regulatory agencies, neighboring local governments, the plant’s labor unions, a wide range of public safety and environmental groups, leading ratepayer organizations and PG&E itself.
The Diablo phase-out relied on the projected ability of renewable sources and battery back-ups to replace the reactors’ output. As indicated by the LATimes’s cover piece and more, rapid advances in solar, wind, geothermal and battery technologies have far exceeded expectations for replacing Diablo’s base-load output. They’ve also plummeted far below current nuclear price levels…as well as those projected for future Small Modular Reactors in the unlikely event any should come on line within the next decade.
Battery technologies in particular have hugely advanced, all but eliminating the “periodicity” that comes when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. The industry has been largely dominated by lithium ion technology, which has gotten a huge boost from two major finds in California. But Vanadium, iron air and sodium technologies are also booming toward much cheaper, cleaner and more powerful storage systems that are rapidly accelerating the green-powered paradigm, especially when it comes to the large solid state units that will dominate non-vehicular uses in homes, business and factory settings.
This increasing renewable-based flexibility is accelerating the ability of grid operators synchronize supply with fluctuating demand. By contrast, nuclear power’s rigid base-load mode blocks cheaper renewables off the grid, forcing some to be shipped out of state.
California’s backup battery capability—, much of it decentralized and privately owned—has at least twice saved the state from impending blackouts. The Golden State’s battery-based reserves—-still rapidly expanding—-now exceed Diablo’s maximum output by more than 400%.
But in April, 2022, Newsom shredded the nuclear phase-out plan he signed four years earlier. Allowing no public hearings, Newsom strong-armed the legislature into a widely resented 11th hour rubber stamp.
Newsom’s hand-picked Public Utilities Commission then trashed California’s well-established “Net Metering” system that initially helped foster some two million rooftop solar installations. The moves cost the state more than 17,000 of its 70,000 solar installer jobs (about 1500 workers are employed at Diablo Canyon).
Newsom’s pro-nuclear package gifted a “forgivable” $1.4 billion loan to PG&E. Running the two reactors through 2030 could cost the public $11+ billion in over market billings, a gargantuan hand-out to the state’s biggest private utility. Even consumers who get zero power from Diablo are expected to pay.
Thus it’s no surprise that California suffers the US’s second-highest electric rates (behind only Hawaii, which gets much of its electricity from burning oil…but is rapidly now shifting to renewables).
Newsom has issued an executive order to “research” why our electric rates are so high. But as shown by the LATimes’s cover story (entitled “Solar Power Glut Boosts California Electric Bills. Other States Reap Benefit,” by Melody Peterson) much of California’s solar electricity can’t get access to a grid jammed by a rigid, hyper-expensive nuclear base load.
Diablo now faces federal licensing challenges. Like all commercial US reactors, it has no private liability insurance to compensate the public for catastrophic accidents. Shown to be dangerously embrittled in 2002, Unit One has not been tested since. Some 45 miles from the San Andreas, Diablo is surrounded by a dozen known earthquake faults whose impacts a long-time NRC site inspector (among others) says the plant can’t withstand.
Diablo pours radioactive carbon 14 into the atmosphere along with other greenhouse gasses emitted during the mining, milling and fabrication of its fuel rods. Thousands of tons of radioactive waste sit on site in cracked dry casks with nowhere else to go. .
Diablo’s twin cores operate around 560 degrees Fahrenheit, heating Avila Bay and the Earth in violation of state and federal law.. They kill countless marine creatures with thermal, chemical and radioactive emissions.
Despite their huge economic costs, devastating jobs impacts, and bitter public opposition, Newsom has opted to keep Diablo running.
Without a hint of irony, the LATimes’s latest attack blames the “glut” of green power on the success of renewables.
But it underscores (without ever mentioning Diablo) that Newsom’s $11+ billion “nuclear base-load tax” could be avoided by letting the PV industry fill the grid with its far cheaper power.
The Times also confirms that nothing terrifies the fossil/nuclear industry and its monopoly utilities more than the prospect of a global energy economy run on renewable power produced by rooftop solar, delivered through public-owned green grids and decentralized micro-grids, all backed up by a new generation of advanced batteries.
With the Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028, the Games could be totally powered by covering the state’s available rooftops with cheap, reliable, battery-backed solar cells.
The epic drop in electric rates and rise in employment and economic well-being could win the Earth’s ultimate, life-sustaining gold medal.
It would also make great copy for yet another LATimes cover story…this one celebrating rather than denigrating the astonishing success of the Golden State’s sustainable energy industries.
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