Critical hearing looms in battle over California’s last nuclear power plant | Hacker News Reader

Critical hearing looms in battle over California’s last nuclear power plant

thenewlede.org

25 pointsPaulHoule80 comments

>But Peter Bird, a geologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, doesn’t trust the PG&E report’s findings. [...] "I believe it’s biased,” said Bird.

>“The worst situation you can have is a thrust fault that would be directly under the plant at a shallow depth,” [...]. “In my best professional judgement, I would expect that there probably is a major thrust fault right along the coast, right next to the plant.”

While he believes PG&E's assessment is "biased", he has no problem with using "professional judgement" to "expect" there is "probably" the worst case scenario here. That is just as biased. I mean, why would the "worst case" exist at precisely this one location along the 850-mile California coast? And unlike Fukushima, Diablo Canyon is sufficiently elevated to not be affected by 13-meter tsunami waves.

> “Radioactive pollutants build up in the cooling water,” said Judson. “In order for the plant to continue functioning properly, they have to discharge them. Some of it is vented out of the smokestack and some of it is released into the water.”

Is there any truth to that? That is not how I thought a nuclear power plant worked.

No. Coal plants on the other hand: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

> The chances of experiencing adverse health effects from radiation are slim for both nuclear and coal-fired power plants—they're just somewhat higher for the coal ones. "You're talking about one chance in a billion for nuclear power plants," Christensen says. "And it's one in 10 million to one in a hundred million for coal plants."

Technically... yes. Nuclear plants routinely discharge a certain amount of tritiated water and radioactive gases. But it's well below natural radioactivity levels and certainly MUCH smaller than amount of "radioactive pollutants" released into environment by coal plants.

Only in the most pedantic sense that tiny amounts of tritium permeate through the heat exchangers. This discharge is negligible in terms of health impact.

Think about it terms of throwing bananas into the water

They make a splash?

So many more apropos sayings instead like "tears in the rain" or "drops in the ocean"

> So many more apropos sayings instead…

Here's why the parent chose bananas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Interesting. TIL

A massive misrepresentation of what’s actually happening. Cooling water is completely sealed off from the main loop, they exchange heat through a coil with lots of metal fins, which may leak tritium, but if you’ve ever been in a basement or eaten a banana you’ve seen worse.

said by "Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), a group that advocates for sustainable energy without nuclear power"

Awesome. Articles are quoting English majors on the nuances of nuclear danger...

https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-judson-85aa4014/

"Specialties: Organizational and Campaign Strategy, Policy Research and Analysis, Strategic Messaging and Communications, Field Organizing, Campaign Logistics, Government Relations, Grassroots Organizational Development"

Year over year we see the same discussion: one side say we can’t get to environmental goals without a lot more nuclear. The other side says renewables will be enough if we just [insert trending unproven excuse].

Anyone watching it closely can tell the pro nuclear argument is being proven right over and over and renewables are aways “a few years away”. Why continue insisting on the same error over and over again, with the proof in front of their eyes?

The major mistake was made 10 years ago by not building better and modern nuclear plants to replace Diablo and increase capacity. If this continues we’ll likely see the US entering an energy crises or going back to burning fossil fuels in a few years.

The best counter-argument is that people say they are going to build a nuclear plant but a year passes and they add another year to the schedule. That problem, and not what people imagine about safety, nor the fact that the headline costs aren’t terribly attractive, is a big problem,

The Bush administration gave out major incentives to get more power plants built, yet only a handful of projects were started. These projects ended up (like most nuclear projects) massively delayed and over budget. In the end, Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westin...

Pro nuclear people keep acting like our lack of new nuclear power plants is due to fear or lack of vision. The reality is that corporations do not want to build them, because they are incredibly expensive and may take over a decade before any revenue is produced. Renewables are cheaper and provide fast return on investment.

Why is my power bill in CA so high?

question, why aren't we building more nuclear power plant like china? isn't gen 4 reactor safer?

California is side stepping the whole mess with nuclear by building out solar and batteries.

> California is side stepping the whole mess with nuclear by building out solar and batteries.

I like all non-CO2 producing energy sources: nuclear, solar, wind, etc.

For any given energy source, only a subset of territories can use it: solar needs sun (hello Alaska and Wyoming), nuclear needs strong governmental, engineering and public oversight, wind, like sun, is also not universally available.

Specifically California can do all of them, which puts it in a unique position to be choosy. I believe that by going with sun+batteries, California will pave the way for less rich but sunny territories for energy independence / less CO2 pollution.

It's okay in my mind to leave betting on nuclear to the states which don't have that much sun. I am looking forward to the TerraPower plant in Wyoming being built and hopefully more to come after it.

Solar works really well in the Alaskan summer. Winters you have to figure something else out. Alaska has lots of hydro, which is really common in that region.

How many GWh of battery storage have California grid operators built recently?

Moss Landing can deliver 750MW with 3.0 GWh of total capacity. State has a total of 5GW. 90% of it rolled out in the last 3 years.

The problem with building a nuke plant starting today is it'll be a stranded asset before it goes online in 10-15 years.

So 5GWh of storage capacity would be about 0.6% of average daily usage. We're going to need a lot more than that to make renewables viable for base load. How much will that cost, how long will it take to build, and where will we mine the raw materials?

Well ten years ago you would have said the idea that solar and wind would be 25% of the states power generation in ten years was total nonsense.

But here we are.

Three years ago, well yesterday, you would have said the idea that the state would have 5 GW of utility batteries was nonsense.

But here we are.

Once there was a remote mountaintop monastery, nestled high in the clouds above a deep gorge. To reach the monastery, visitors were required to ride in a basket pulled up from the top. One day, halfway up the cliff, a tourist frowned at the condition of the rope. He asked his guide, "How often do they replace this rope, anyway?" The monk answered "Why, as soon as the old one breaks, of course."

Ah yes hence all those nuclear meltdowns in France

Point being, it's stupid to refrain from building new nuclear plants because they're "dangerous", because that forces the old plants to be operated far past their intended service life. Better to replace the rope before it breaks, so to speak.

In a rational world, those who believe atomic energy is inherently scary would be the first ones demanding that the old plants be replaced.

Once there was a remote mountaintop monastery, nestled high in the clouds above a deep gorge. To reach the monastery, visitors were required to ride in a basket pulled up from the top, after paying the ticket fee for the ride. One day, halfway up the cliff, a tourist noticed the sparkling condition of the titanium cable upon which they were suspended. He asked his guide, why did it cost me ten years salary to take this ride? The monk answered "If we didn't charge that much, we couldn't replace the cable after every trip". The tourist asked "is that really necessary"? The monk replied "Well, we used to use a hand woven hemp rope, and it broke once during a trip. We wouldn't want that to happen again, now would we?"

> Once there was a remote mountaintop monastery, nestled high in the clouds above a deep gorge. To reach the monastery, visitors were required to ride in a basket pulled up from the top. One day, halfway up the cliff, a tourist frowned at the condition of the rope. He asked his guide, "How often do they replace this rope, anyway?" The monk answered "We have a large team of monks who continuously monitor the rope using advanced technology. We actually invented the field of reliability analysis to help us keep this rope safe. If we notice anything wrong with the rope, we immediately repair it. The rope is guarded by heavily armed guards to make sure no one sabotages it."

FTFY

Because even in china they can't build nuclear as quickly (and likely as cheaply) as wind and solar. It's hugely different [0][1]. Over the last 10 years, they used 3.5x more energy (so not nameplate capacity, but actually generated energy) from solar and wind than they did from nuclear.

Further, if you download the data [1] an look at the derivative you get an even more grim picture. Not only is wind and solar increasing rapidly, but the derivative is positive (and possibly increasing itself). But when you look at nuclear, you find that not only is it not increasing as rapidly, but it's derivative is going down and heading for zero fast.

[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/china#what-sources...

How is solar and wind energy rapidly increasing “grim”?

I believe they mean grim if you are a nuclear cheerleader.

But it is pretty damning that a country that is motivated and willing to put its money where its mouth is, is also having troubles making it happen quickly.

Exactly yes, should have phrased that differently.

Not just motivated, but one with a track record of getting red tape (and sometime people) out of the way in order to reach a goal.

If it isn’t competitive under those conditions, what chance does it have elsewhere?

“The best time to build a nuclear generating station is 10 years ago, the second best time is now”

-ancient proverb

They can however, build nuclear plants wherever they want, which is why China is building them at all right now. They have plenty of renewable potential in the west, but it’s limited in the more populated east, and their transmission lines meant to carry power west to east over long distance are still limited in capacity.

I really can't square this idea that "global warming will end civilization" if we don't reduce CO2 with not using nuclear power. (Even worse, shutting down existing, working plants.)

It doesn't square, it's extraordinarily irrational.

With a trillion dollars the US could build 40-60 new domestic nuclear power plants (we have 54 currently). We can afford it (witness stimulus programs, or the Ukraine v Russia war).

What we can't afford is to not do it and to watch our nuclear power base vanish. And we should be going further than that. We should be leveraging the global reserve currency and trade agreements to assist other stable countries in more cheaply (as cheaply as is possible with nuclear) building their own nuclear power plants. We can help countries either skip the fossil fuel driven economic build-out phase (in regards to fairly stable developing nations), or accelerate their leap off of it. And it can be beneficial to the US economy: export our tech, develop it further, train domestic labor specifically for this program.

So you're volunteering to put the nuclear power station in your backyard? Because that's the problem - lots of people say they support nuclear power until you try to build a nuclear power station anywhere close to them. Which brings up another problem, you need to build a nuclear power station near a water source such as a lake, or a river, which, interestingly enough, are the same kinds of places where people want to live.

The ship has sailed on the current generation of nuclear power.

Yep, no problem?

Then get your neighbors on board and petition your local utility to build. Point out they're not going to have to spend the millions of dollars it takes to fight the lawsuits from those trying to prevent you from building the nuclear power station. You have them covered!

> So you're volunteering to put the nuclear power station in your backyard?

Sure. I have no problem with nuclear. Where can I sign?

We could spend a trillion dollars on 50 nuclear reactors and increase the nuclear percentage to 30% (there are actually 92 nuclear reactors in US).

Or we could spend a trillion dollars on 1TW of solar (400GW actual power). Or a mix of solar and wind, or solar and batteries for the off-peak usage. That is enough to wipe out coal. Enough to bankrupt nuclear power plants.

Two trillion is probably enough to decarbonize electricity except for natural gas peaker plants that need for bad days.

How much battery capacity would that require to maintain grid stability? How many years will it take to manufacture those batteries? Where will the raw materials be mined?

Solar tends to be better for grid stability since it has stable frequency and can dispatch quickly.

To deal with changes, like the evening peak, in the short-term we can keep using natural gas peaker plants. For longer term, we don't know if expensive batteries are solution. There are lots of groups working on storage, and it is possible that cheap batteries, pumped hydropower, something else, or all of the above will be the best solution. I think it isn't worth worrying about storage until we need it and know what to build.

Also, we don't need that much short-term storage, enough to deal with the evening peak and other daily variations. Long-term storage can be dealt with by overcapacity in renewables, which allows making fuels. The remaining calm, winter days can be dealt with generated fuels or natural gas.

We are already at the point where we need grid scale storage to significantly expand renewable power. A few little gas turbine speaker plants aren't going to be sufficient. We're going to need much larger thermal gas plants for the foreseeable future.

There are a variety of potential options for storage. None of them have proven to be economically viable at scale. Hopefully something will work well enough, but until we see solid evidence that's not a reasonable basis for planning.

it's just this simple: They don't want to stop global warming. They want to control everything. Global warming is just the excuse.

It can be summed up into two key questions: is it necessary, and is it effective?

One could argue it is necessary but it is undeniable that it is not effective -- nuclear power plants take decades to bring online and then they may never see break-even. Not only that but they require vast sums of water for the entire lifetime of the nuclear plant (which is fast becoming a scarcity, if not because of increased consumption but also because of changing water availability.)

On the other hand, renewable (wind and solar) can be brought up MW by MW, on a much faster timescale, privately funded (all nuclear is publicly funded now), and it has much better unit economics even without subsidies. Renewable energy is here to stay, it is going to become more abundant, and it is going to become more reliable with each passing year.

Nuclear is as unreliable as ever, even after 70 years of modernization, the economics of scale, and unlimited access to the public purse.

> nuclear power plants take decades to bring online

This plant is already online. That’s what makes the debate interesting.

They take millenia to take off line

Better get started

> take millenia to take off line

Don’t look too closely at how solar panels are fabricated.

The plant is old and past its expected lifetime. As a result it will be more expensive to operate and less safe. It was planned for decommission, precisely because it is old.

Aren't solar and wind using water dams to store energy

Even if we don’t think global warming ends civilization, keeping existing plants running requires a lot of mental gymnastics to oppose.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to oppose new nuclear on cost grounds; solar/wind are really cheap now.

But lots of people seem to oversimplify to “nuclear bad”.

I don't understand why people keep claiming that solar and wind are "cheap". That is only true at limited times on the spot market. The cost goes way up once you include enough storage and long-range transmission to maintain grid stability. It's like claiming that owning a car is cheap, without counting the cost of auto insurance.

It's also ignoring that we have chosen to make nuclear expensive. There are a variety of points on the cost-safety tradeoff curve. We have continuously chosen to push ourselves as far along that curve as we know how to reach, with us moving farther each time a new technology allows it. We have never stopped to ask "how does this amount of safety compare to other forms of power generation" or "how much additional safety are we getting for the cost to implement that safety".

> I don't understand why people keep claiming that solar and wind are "cheap".

It's simple: they're looking at the incremental cost of adding one more solar panel string or one more wind turbine, compared to generating that same amount of power with the already existing power plant mix.

> The cost goes way up once you include enough storage and long-range transmission to maintain grid stability.

That cost exists only if you for some reason insist on 100% solar and wind. If you keep already existing power plants (including gas and hydro), the cost to maintain grid stability is much lower. This can easily be shown to be the case in practice: a large portion of the solar and wind power in the world was added to the grid without adding any extra storage or long-range transmission, reducing the fuel costs (or water usage) of existing power plants but not replacing them.

Having a 100% pure solar or 100% pure wind grid is an interesting thought experiment, to probe the limits of what's possible, but it's not very relevant in the real world except on remote areas where delivering fuel is expensive, connecting to a wider grid is not viable, and there's no hydraulic or geothermal alternative.

I don't think you've actually done the math on that one. Keeping gas power plants online but unused except when renewables are unavailable is extremely expensive. We've been able to kind of ignore that up until now because of the limited scale of renewables generation but eventually the economics become untenable. Who is going to pay the large fixed costs to keep those gas plants on standby?

> I don't think you've actually done the math on that one.

Since you are implying that you _have_ done the math on this one, would you care to share links to analysis/modeling that backs up your position? I'm always open to being persuaded.

Recently I have been citing https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar/ for the claim "solar is cheap on the margin", and modeling like https://theconversation.com/up-to-90-of-electricity-from-sol..., https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... for "storage isn't going to be too expensive for some time".

To be clear I'm not making any particular case for how we cover the last 10% or so of demand, though I'd note that gas peakers are already a thing that are required to solve this problem, and yes they are expensive, but not unfeasibly so. My claim was it's cheap on the margin, right now. In a decade when we're closer to 100% it might start to get more expensive to replace the marginal % of generation with solar/wind.

Nuclear doesn't help at all with the intra-day variable portion of the demand curve, it's just lower-variance so you don't need to worry about inter-day fluctuations. It seems that most of the time, a diverse blend of renewables averages out the inter-day variability so it's not clear to me exactly how much we need in storage to guard against "no wind / no sun" days. (Is this the mirror problem that we currently have, where a heat wave in TX means the mostly-not-renewable grid can't keep up? Sometimes we see outlier weather-related demand-supply mismatches, and spot pricing / demand shedding are typically how we respond to those outliers.) Over-provisioning wind and solar might still be cheaper than building nuclear and/or storage, or perhaps green hydrogen might be a better option. Or perhaps we keep some gas peakers around.

For the intra-day variability we're already seeing lots of mixed-solar/battery being built (see the LBL report I linked above) which tends to be in the ballpark of load-shifting the generation 4 hours, which is most of what we need for intra-day gap between demand and solar peak production. This is still affordable vs running coal plants, and only going to get cheaper over time.

Anyway, this isn't my field and I'm open to being persuaded, if you want to share some modeling that you think is better.

It's super cheap because no consortium is controlling it. It's just being created by... Everyone. Solar is probably the most beautiful thing to happen to humanity.

You're not making any sense. Solar without sufficient grid-scale storage to provide for the base load has little value. Who is going to build that storage? It's certainly not going to be cheap. You guys need to look beyond ideology and actually do the math.

Why should the next thousand generations pay to prop up our greed and consumption for another fifty years?

Climate collapse will cripple us, but the system is self correcting. The next civilisation will do it better

In the time scales of pollution that nuclear power entails there is room for many such cycles

I really cannot square the greed of "consume now" and "pay for a thousand generations" with any moral framework

We should pay the price ourselves for what we have done to the climate and leave room for the future

What you just said can be applied for any sides of any infrastructure political discussion.

If we leave nuclear waste (which is already proven not problem over and over) the next generations will come up with solutions we don’t know yet. If we leave the climate worst, by not doing what we should, they will also figure it out.

The discussion right now is about getting to a reduced carbon footprint per country fast (nuclear, in 10 or 20 years) or keep betting renewables will take less than 50 years to make an impact in reducing carbon emissions.

I can, the moment I realized it's not about any technical problem, about energy or about the environment. It's about sin, penitence, redemption, guilt, shame, lack of self-awareness and too much free time.

There's always been people with those kind of needs and impulses, and they had non-civilization-destroying outlets to safely discharge them. Now we don't. Ah well, it will work out or it won't, one way or another Darwin will collect.

Maybe it's all the Republican and floating voters in California who've been told repeatedly by their trusted tribe members that climate change isn't a real problem that have moved onto the next thing on their list.

I mean, it's nice to blame Republicans. But they are more likely to support nuclear than the Dems. So...

“Clean” energy. Gas fired plants are clean: they only produce CO2 and H20. Nuclear is “dirty”: they produce no CO2, but relatively small amounts of highly toxic waste.

Bonus for “clean” “biomass” plants that actually produce hazard gases from burning tires!

I know you are being ironic with "clear", but gas fired plants should also be "billed" for the dirt created by mining the natural gas in the first place.

Sure. Same for solar. Same for forever plastics in wind turbines. Same for ecological damage for hydro.

> I know you are being ironic with "clear", but gas fired plants should also be "billed" for the dirt created by mining the natural gas in the first place.

+1 to taxing externalities.

I would also add a tax to the plants that ever used Russian gas with proceeds going to restoration of Ukraine. If not for the decision of German public to shut down their nuclear reactors, Putin would have never had that much money to start the war.

(edit: as correctly pointed out below, significant part of the lost electricity capacity after turning down the nuclear plants was substituted by domestic coal, not Russian gas, so my comment was based on partially wrong info; sorry about that)

> If not for the decision of German public to shut down their nuclear reactors, Putin would have never had that much money to start the war.

55% of natural gas that circulated in Germany in 2021 came from russia. 48% of natural gas that circulated in Germany in 2021 was exported to other countries. ~13% of natural gas in Germany that year was used for electricity production.

But go on and tell us how keeping nuclear power on in Germany would have cut those natural gas exports, heated the 14 million domestic gas boilers, or produced fertilizer.

Germany didn’t replace its nukes with gas, but with coal.

Germany replaced its nuclear power plants with all kinds of things, predominantly renewables. The first NPP going offline under the "Atomausstieg" went offline in 2003.

https://www.energie.de/et/news-detailansicht/nsctrl/detail/N... has a chart showing the energy sources for electricity production in Germany (up to 2021).

During the period in which nuclear (Kernenergie) went down from ~160bn kWh (2003) to ~60bn kWh (2021), lignite (Braunkohle) went down from a bit over 150bn kWh to ~110bn kWh. Hard coal (Steinkohle) went down from ~140bn kWh to ~50bn kWh.

There has been an uptick in natural gas (Erdgas) from ~60bn kWh to ~90bn kWh, but most of it was covered by renewables (Erneuerbare), going from ~55bn kWh to ~240bn kWh.

So no, nuclear power wasn't replaced with coal.

There has been an increase in coal to replace natural gas in 2022 (not on this chart) when the gas market imploded following russia's full-scale invasion in Ukraine, but that was more of a temporary measure. With the LNG terminals going online, that will be sorted out soon enough, and measures to increase the build out of renewables to get rid of all fossils (_and_ nuclear) were planned even before 2022.

Germany just had the problem that after a coalition government including the Greens until 2005, the conservative-led coalitions for the next 16 years didn't dare to reopen the snake pit that is nuclear power (it was a conservative government that ended new build out of nuclear power plants in 1989, too) but at the same time hampered the renewables build out - apparently they have some weird infatuation with burning fossils.

Look at primary production of imported power. That’s where Germany’s coal is burnt.

Net exporter since 2003. Increasing renewables since 2003. If we go by cherry-picking what kind of power plant creates whose power, Germany is busy reducing everybody else's CO2 emissions, too.

> Net exporter since 2003. Increasing renewables since 2003. If we go by cherry-picking what kind of power plant creates whose power, Germany is busy reducing everybody else's CO2 emissions, too

Germany exports a lot of intermittent green power. It also imports a lot of dirty stable power. Neither of us is cherry picking, they're just different sides of the same coin.

So what you are saying is that if Germany had kept it's reactors running it could have taken coal down to zero?

At the price of continuing tensions in society and politics. NPP weren't taken down just for fun, that was a long time coming. An NPP based energy policy wouldn't have stopped building new nuclear power plants in 1989: nuclear power never provided more than 1/3 of the electricity consumption of the country and unlike France, there was never a push to go all in, e.g. by promoting electrically powered domestic heating.

The real issue is that, even though renewables saw a pretty good growth, the renewables side of the plan was to push it even harder (and expand the transmission network, and establish storage) and that fell through once a government took over which didn't care for that all.

Those plans are 25 years old now (the Social-Democrat/Green coalition was formed in 1998 and set out to implement the transition from the start) and the south is still not properly connected to the wind power resources in the north.

Germany would have had to go all-in with nuclear (and build it out by a factor of 6 or so, to also replace avoidable uses of fossils like domestic heating) or it would have had to go all-in with renewables. Instead it stumbled around indecisively.

TIL a lot about natural gas. Gas-fired plants use "dry" natural gas which has had most impurities removed and consists of around 94% methane, with the rest mostly ethane, propane, and butane. I was about to say "ah-ha! what about ethane combustion?" but then I looked it up and the combustion reactions with ethane, propane, and butane all produce only water vapor and carbon dioxide.

Now, how to dry "wet" natural gas (remove the impurities that don't burn to just H2O + CO2), and how to "sweeten" "sour" natural gas (remove the toxic/lethal sulfur compounds like H2S)? I don't know what all of those reactions look like and what the processes cost in terms of energy and waste byproducts, but those are the kinds of externalities that are sometimes dismissed because they're not as visible (like the wastewater heating for the Diablo nuclear plant).

> Gas fired plants are clean: they only produce CO2 and H20.

AFAIK, that can only be the case if you combust the gas with pure oxygen; air also has a lot of nitrogen, so combusting with air will always lead to some oxides of nitrogen appearing in the output.

> Nuclear is “dirty”: they produce no CO2, but relatively small amounts of highly toxic waste.

It depends on your point of view. That highly toxic waste is completely contained in normal operation, so looking from the outside, it's "clean"; it's only when (or if) you open the box that it becomes "dirty".

They probably have scrubbers for nitrogen oxides, like how coal plants have flue gas desulfurization.

> AFAIK, ... combusting with air will always lead to some oxides of nitrogen appearing in the output.

I was curious so I did a search. I know this is a problem with internal combustion engines which operate under higher pressure (not sure about temperature.) There were a lot of hits for "do gas turbines produce nox", many of which were about dealing with the problem.

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