Right on target!
Posted on 05/11/2008 2:31:47 PM PDT by Mark
EVER since former Vice President Al Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for his fight against expanding climate change, there have been claims that nuclear power plants are the easy solution. They give phenomenal amounts of energy, after all, without much carbon production.
Some who seek facile solutions say it's about time to dump the safeguards of 1976's Proposition 15, which essentially put a stop to atomic-power facility construction in California after completion of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant on the central coast.
One example: Last fall, Republican Assemblyman Chuck DeVore of Orange County introduced a bill aiming to permit construction of a new nuclear power plant if 20percent of the power were used for desalination facilities. That bill went nowhere, despite rampant threats of a drought.
The legislation met that fate because building and maintaining new nukes is no simple matter, if California's experience means anything. And if California's own experience with nuclear power doesn't matter in this state, something is wrong.
Take the very latest glitch, revealed last winter by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission after examining the record of the San Onofre nuclear generating station near San Clemente, whose reactors produce power for 2.75 million households served by Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric and the city of Riverside's municipal utility.
The NRC found numerous violations of rules and falsified records perpetrated by employees at San Onofre, including one worker who faked records for more than five years to show operators made hourly fire patrols when they had not.
There were also two unspecified security lapses, whose details were not unveiled publicly because of what they might reveal to possible terrorist attackers.
No one suggested these incidents represented a "serious threat" to the safety of San Onofre or its neighbors. But they might be. For if an uncontrolled fire broke out in a nuclear facility, one consequence could be radiation leaks. And security lapses could have all manner of unknown ill effects.
Then there was the "mirror image" problem during the construction of Diablo Canyon, which saw workers essentially build that plant backward and then have to do it over again, causing Pacific Gas & Electric Co. a cost overrun of more than $3 billion in 1970s-era currency. Make the same kind of mistake today, and the costs might be triple or more.
There's also the problem of nuclear waste, for which there is no answer in the offing. For decades, spent fuel from most American nuclear power plants went to points in South Carolina and Washington state. But those dumps are at or near capacity, and most waste both in this country and around the world is now stored at or near the places where it is produced.
So far, no country has built a deep geological repository for radioactive waste, and there is certainly no American site in prospect any time soon.
For a while, Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush eyed a space beneath southern Nevada's Yucca Mountain, but once California elected Barbara Boxer to the U.S. Senate, that was pretty much out. Boxer bought into the theory that radioactivity from Yucca Mountain might trickle into underground water supplies that eventually flow to the Colorado River, and thus pollute much of California and Arizona's water supply for generations to come.
Yucca Mountain is also highly unpopular in Nevada itself, and every Democratic presidential candidate this year pledged it would not be used for spent fuel. Republican John McCain was less definite about that, even though water earmarked for his home state of Arizona could be affected.
The upshot is that there can be no absolute guarantees of either environmental purity, protection from employee negligence or safety from terrorism at any new nuclear power plant. So far, none has ever produced a serious problem in this country, but that offers no guarantees for the future.
All of which means politicians like DeVore who seek simple ways to solve both energy and water problems need to look elsewhere. It is not yet time to give up the protections voters gave themselves via Proposition 15. Far better to look toward more emphasis on renewable energy sources like wind, sun and geothermal than to bank on the uncertainties of the atom and the people associated with it.
Thomas D. Elias is a writer living in Southern California. Write to him by e-mail at tdelias@aol.com.
“one worker who faked records for more than five years to show operators made hourly fire patrols when they had not.”
Sounds like they’re hiring Russian workers to run the plant. Or maybe Homer!
The French get 80% of their power from nukes - why is everything else the French do a model for us EXCEPT their power model?
And Areva, the French nuke builder, is building on nuclear construction projects here in the US. So construction would be with a company that is currently building a dozen others, with a world wide safe design.
Admission: my husband works for them, here in the US.
But if it is safe enough for the French, Norwegians, Swedes, and other Euro-socialist countries to build, why not us.
As a electric utility worker, I absolutely believe that nukes are a viable solution. Why is congress/gov’t so blind? Tell the tree huggers to go pound sand (in a non-electrified country).
Liberals do not want solutions.
Liberals want problems.
It’s how they gain power. Conservatives need to stop bashing McCain, and start standing up to democrats about this. Insist on solutions, and keep repeating it, day after day.
This is how liberals take over. Conservatives squabble or simply repeat talking points from oil companies as their own - while leftists coordinate, act like communists and take control. Schools. Unions. Media. Movies. Entertainment. Law. One after the other, while conservatives do nothing to oppose them.
What is conservatives’ solution to the energy problem? Sure we need more drilling - but that’s not going to solve the problem. At most, is slows our slide into the swamp, while keeping us dependent on imported, increasingly expensive oil from terrorists.
So ... what do we DO? And why are liberals the only ones talking about the issue? Riding the issue, to yet more power.
Whitehouse next, unless conservatives stop the circular firing squad, and start opposing democrats with at least half the enthusiasm - with which too many fight John McCain.
Remarkably straight forword too, and allows California to continue power consumption colonialism on the adjacent United States of America.
With energy prices rising, consumers are starting to howl. Green (environmentalism) is a luxury we are no longer able to afford.
Where to begin? Simple, just shut down the nuke plants in Cal. and sell their share of Palo Verde.
That worked well for Long Island when Shoreham was shut down.
You can bet that people are looking into building Nukes in Mexico, just over the border. A few transmission lines and *presto* - California has plenty of power and no additional nuclear plants.
As for the waste, there's a proven transportation scheme already in place - coyotes can smuggle the waste over the border with little chance of being caught. Just like they do with people....
“one worker who faked records for more than five years to show operators made hourly fire patrols when they had not.”
Oh, the horror!
Who writes these regulations? I wonder do they require that at chemical/petroleum plants?
I’ve changed my driving routine, and now always consider how to reduce my driving. I’ll buy an electric car the MINUTE one is available. And never look back.
Despite $3.90/gallon, I’m now spending less on gas, than I was one or two months ago.
And I’ll stop entirely, the moment that’s possible.
Fortunes of unimaginable scope will be made in the next 5 years. It will be like the dot.com run-up, for alternative fuels.
But faster.
Two more years till things take off, max.
"That's not illegal nuclear waste, it's just a few undocumented transuranics".
Good one!
That’s basically what the greens want us to become - a BANANA republic!
How terribly ingenius ~ sorry I didn't recognize that the conspiracy was already in place. Should have seen that when the Farm Bureau Coop and the Chamber of Commerce started lobbying Congress for more illegal aliens.
The bay area is already a sewage dump, the won’t even notice.
and we could build all the refineries, power plants, etc. without all the whining...
NIMBY has been replaced by BANANA — Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
Unless it happens to be a new shopping outlet. People, self-centered as they are, tend to go for things like that.
Maybe we should build a nuke reactor.....then disguise it as a shopping outlet. :^)
just think of it as a maximum return on the investment.. highly trained guards sleeping while guarding a shopping outlet/reactor complex.. It might actually be easier to get it licensed that way.. the hard fact is, nuclear technology has come a long way.. ask the chinese . :-)
More people have died in Ted Kennedy’s car than in all the nuclear mishaps in the U.S.!
Californians, please heed this guy. Keep on building the nukes in Arizona instead. We want California to go on being our energy bitch.
They have a hugh budgetary shortfall yet have hugh resources such as offshore oil and the freeways are still free. There is no excuse.
Good analysis. But a serious problem with John McCain is that he has often taken sides with the liberals - on ANWR drilling and on the global warming scam (and yes - it is a scam). The problem we have as conservatives is that the GOP, a party we have largely identified with, no longer acts on principle but on the expediency desire for re-election. They wind up advocating for what the Democrats want, but less of it - which is about where the Republican Party was, pre-Reagan. But it avails them little, as the Democrats never laud their “moderation” but rather assail their lack of principle. And in that, they are correct.
LOL, but carbon credits are......do these people even have a brain?
That statement is one-hundred-percent opinion, heavily seasoned with an incredibly heavy-handed ignorant bias.
If Japan can produce 30% of her energy needs and France 80%, Belgium 55% and Sweden 52%, it will take a dizzying amount of BS to argue that all those countries are suicidal; or any more desperate to be free of the Middle East yoke than we are.
What kind of idiot would even try try mount such a (lierally) 19th century argument?
What's their rallying cry?
Luddites Live!?
Good luck with that.
I've been hearing it for over 40 years now.
I'm really getting tired of replacing my BS meters.
Just saying...
More people have died from unsafe food than from all nuclear power plant accidents in history.
Yet, even something as beneficial as irradiation has been rendered useless by the terminally ignorant.
Tell that to France, Lithuania, Slovakia, Begium, Sweden, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Armenia, Slovenia, S. Korea, Hungary and Germany, the top 13 top producers in the world, as a percentage of their energy needs.
Either you are prepared to declare them all stupid and irresponsible, or insane. I consider them rational planners for a brighter future than nationsfull of idiots.
I want the car to plug in at night at home and ge6t a range of about 300 jmiles. Do it now or sooner.
Stop giving $300 bill to the saudis and the other idiots.
So easy, even the French can do it!
No nukes,
no coal,
no oil drilling offshore
no hydroelectric,
no windfarms,
Can California DemocRATS name a form of energy that exists today that they support.
And that electricity is going to come from...???
It's been almost 30 years since California has added any real generating capacity. In the interim, they now have almost 15 million new utility consumers. The root of their energy problem is, like most of their other problems, purely political, not practical.
Years ago, the Cal. legislature capped the rates the utilities can charge consumers. With millions of new energy users, and no new generation, the utilities are forced to buy excess power from WAPA (Western Area Power Administration), and that's all at market rates. When they have to pay more per KWh than they can recover, they lose money (billions, last time I talked to any of them). Then it's "rolling brown-out" time, and that makes them really popular with their customers. Cal's last Governor got ousted for this issue (with a lot of help and funding from the utilities).
Anyway, back to your electric car. That power's got to come from somewhere. Think about the effect of a million electric cars plugged to Cal's already overwhelmed grid every night. Plus, while you might save some gas money, you'll just be giving most of it to PG&E or SoCalEd in higher electricity usage. There's just no free energy lunch in this world. Especially not in California.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of alternative fuels, and I'm all for new generating plants (epsecially nuke, since I work in that industry, and because it just makes good sense), but we have a verrrrryyyyy long way to go before we can make a substantive shift in our energy profile.
Well, if a neighboring state has the inclination they can build some nuke plants and charge Californians exorbitant rates. What the heck.
The author has an agenda....
call BS...
There is no reason with current technology and CAD, a simple and safe nuclear plant could be designed and built in a standardized model that could be duplicated around the country. Sadly even with a simple efficient and safe design it would take decades to get through all the red tape needed to build and operate a single nuclear plant.
Thomas D. Elias, Columnist.
Should read:
Thomas D. Elias, Communist.
Why not? Works for their water problem.
That is a reasonable solution.
Envirowhack’s “solution”: Build no new plants; everybody just plug in on “off peak” hours!
Wish I were kidding.
“Remarkably straight forword too, and allows California to continue power consumption colonialism on the adjacent United States of America.”
I am certain California is self-sufficient in food, and is a net exporter.
I am certain California is self-sufficient in computer technology, and is a net exporter.
What is the problem with states exporting what they can, and importing what they need?
FYI I very strongly support nuclear power plants all across these United States, insofar as France uses mostly nuclear generated electricity, as does the US Navy for Subs and Carriers.
Can't say for certain, but maybe slave labor.
At least it seems like they like to keep certain people working on plantations. Fits their Marxist/Maoist models, too.
California exports pollution and imports manufactured goods. That’s how they meet their federal air quality standards. The folks downstream pay the price and have to give up something so that Californians can have open fires.
Both can be done at once, frankly. The idiocy in this article is no reason to make up with Global Warming's new convert, Senator McCain.
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