I agree the bullet train is stupid. Before the earthquake damaged Fukushima, I would have strongly supported desalinization with nuke power. San Onofre nearly joined Fukushima as the next big accident. It is “shutdown” for purposes of power generation. Still loaded with fuel and sitting on an active earthquake fault and on the coast. There is no money to properly decommission it. It is 20 miles from my current location.
Well, there was no reason to have shut down Rancho Seco in Sacramento. It was working just fine, but fell victim to those who view a nuclear plant as a bomb. San Onofre is an old plant, and was probably due for decommissioning. The idea that “there’s no money to properly decommission it,” is just SoCal Edison trying to escape their responsibility. Ratepayers got low-cost energy, they need to pony up now to close the facility. And we can thank Jimmah Cahta for squelching the fast breeder reactor way back when. That technology, as I came to understand it, was the way to “dispose of” the nuclear waste from the current generation fission plants. But we all know that Jimmah was a nuclear Navy guy, so he “must have been smarter” than the scientists of the time.