Posted on 06/08/2013 9:11:27 AM PDT by Uncle Chip
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The demise of California's San Onofre nuclear power plant began with an attempt to fix it.
A $670 million equipment swap in 2009 and 2010 went haywire, leaving Southern California Edison on Friday with two idle reactors, more than $500 million in bills and a federal decision on a possible restart nowhere in sight.
The company decided to close it, permanently. The announcement triggered a celebration among environmentalists and other critics of the nuclear power industry who argued the plant was too damaged to operate safely.
"There's a huge sense of relief for us," said Laguna Beach Councilwoman Toni Iseman, whose community is about 20 miles up the coast from San Onofre's twin domes. "We were just sitting with a time bomb just to the south of us."
Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, said San Onofre's closing represents an opportunity for California to use more wind, solar and other clean energy. The group waged a long fight to block the restart.
The U.S. nuclear industry, Pica said, "is on its final trajectory downward."
The San Onofre reactors — situated along the Pacific Coast in the densely populated corridor of millions of people between San Diego and Los Angeles — are the largest to shut down permanently in the U.S. in the past 50 years, federal officials said.
It was a jolt to the nation's nuclear power industry, which had been encouraged in recent years by development of new plants in the Southeast. Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, described San Onofre's problems as unlike any other reactor and said Edison's decision highlights a flawed, plodding regulatory system.....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Nuclear will rebound one day... it has to if we want to truly be independent and we have new technology that is safe and clean. California can fall into the ocean and perish... I just pray that the good people get out of there in time. If I were in control... I would sell no energy to California until they open up offshore to drilling and rescind all of their hippie energy fantasies. California needs to grow the **** up!
LLS
If California has its way, it will close all its power plants and refineries and force neighboring states to supply them with power. They’ve already been doing that since Jerry Brown’s first term in office.
Aging hippies win. Consumers lose. And just what will be the ACTUAL cost of returning the site to it’s original pristine condition. Whatever that is. Is that the condition from 1950,1850,1750? Please protect us from these fools. For they DO know what they do. Think power costs will now necessarily rise like king hussein said?
Well, you can’t live on moonbeams alone.
California voted for George Bush Sr in 1988 and since then it’s been all Democrats all the time. The people out there swallowed a liberal pill and messed up their state. I mean how could one state absorb governance by the likes of Moonbeam Brown, Gavin Newsome, Antonio Villaraigosa, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, etc. etc? That’s a lineup more deserving of Ringling Bros than the largest state in the union.
IRS tactics now in play at the NRC
Oh, hi NSA
Remember this line when there are rolling blackouts in CA this summer.
What a complete dumbass! Note to dumbass Pica. There is not enough land or money in the US to replace Onofre’s output with Wind and Solar. Why not just mandate CA use candles for light....
Considering the politicians they elect, Californians certainly are high on drugs. It helps them cope.
Let them freeze in the dark.
I was SHOCKED to read that a bill to ban fracking in California failed in the state legislature.
I guess they’ll just have to do it via regulation instead....
Rolling blackouts are a real possibility. At its peak, San Onofre was supplying up to 20% of the power used in southern California. They have had to work around this issue since the reactor was shut down in January 2012. If it’s a long hot summer, it will strain the capacity of the electrical grid in California.
Well, Californians can deal with the “brown outs” from their electricity as well as the “brown ups” with their sewage and all the other utilities they think they can rule success with by fiat.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of appeasing, illegal-loving liberals.
Guess the place to start is that the initial decision to close this plant was made more than 20 years ago when Edison gave up the fight to build a replacement power plant on the same site, and have a phased decommissioning of the existing reactors.
Instead, they went into a planned ‘renovation’ of the plant, ‘upgrading’ equipment as they went along, which in the end was doing a patch job. They finally hit the wall as they were installing even more new equipment and the pipes they were hooking it up to had to pass far more stringent testing than they were designed to pass.
Getting those existing pipes to be required to pass the present standards was the ultimate win of the anti-nuke activists. Forbidding Edison from replacing those pipes with new pipes that could pass present standards was a win for power hungry government drones, who essential declared that if Edison wanted to do that, they'd have to re-apply for permits to build a new nuclear plant as it would be beyond the scope of a repair or upgrade.
But the blame for this whole mess has to rest squarely on Edison's shoulders, and their decision to give up on building a new plant. Had they continued, the new plant would have been approved, and construction finished well before now, including the demolishing of the old power station.
“And still unresolved: who pays for all the trouble, customers or shareholders.”
That IS a tough call but I’ll guess the customers. Oh well...as long as the sun shines, the wind blows, the medical grass grows........
How they ever decided to build the reactors there is beyond me.
I have visited that site a few times to do service on equipment years ago..
Great views, spolied beach front property imo..
They should have built it downtown next to LA city hall to run the bovine excrement pumps that that city gubamint runs on and outputs daily.. a never ending supply of baloney and crap.. or better yet, in Hollywood.
“At its peak, San Onofre was supplying up to 20% of the power used in southern California. “
Not to worry, The Illegals in SoCal come from where they simply build charcoal fires in the middle of their “dirt floor residences,” so they will feel right at home.
That sucks. We are being passed by other nations.
our internet tab was bigger than out bar tab
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