B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. An aerial view of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. By Sammy Roth Staff Writer. Jerry Brown addresses a crowd protesting the construction of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in A ton steel cylinder that holds the reactor pressure vessel from Unit 1 at the now-shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
Support our journalism Your support helps us deliver the news that matters most. These aboveground casks at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, seen in , were built to house radioactive waste in the absence of a permanent storage facility. Sammy Roth.
Follow Us twitter instagram email facebook. More From the Los Angeles Times. Business Why economists got it wrong on U. The situation also caused a "large and unusual" separation in power prices between the northern and southern Californian electricity grids, which have historically tracked each other closely. This was attributed to higher average and peak summer loads, with lower in-state hydroelectric generation, outages of the San Onofre nuclear station, and increased congestion within the ISO.
In particular the demand response goals set in the early s needed to be tackled. In fact it appears that the plant will be replaced largely by natural gas generation. Of about Coupled with this is a presumed need for some refurbishment to take the reactors to if licences were renewed.
One aspect of this is a threat that very expensive cooling towers would be needed due to State Water Resources Control Board requirements, rather than continuing with direct once-through cooling from the ocean.
Then in October Californians for Green Nuclear Power asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission FERC to launch an investigation into whether shutting down Diablo Canyon violated federal reliability standards and whether two regulatory bodies were negligent in ensuring reliability.
The state law which effectively dictates that by Diablo Canyon should operate at lower capacity each year and buy in power from intermittent renewables has apparently sealed the fate of the plant. The multi-party agreement buys peace for nine years. However, a campaign continues with the aim of keeping the plant in operation until A state law prohibits construction of new nuclear power plants in California until a means of disposal of high-level nuclear waste is approved.
A bill to repeal this moratorium was voted down in April , but the California Energy Commission was reviewing the prospects of new nuclear capacity in the state. In September , the California Republican party voted unanimously to work to remove the prohibition on new nuclear power plant construction. However, to date no progress has been made towards ending the moratorium on new nuclear build. This scenario requires about 44 GWe of nuclear capacity.
There are, however, legislative barriers and public acceptance barriers that have to be overcome to implement a scenario that includes a large number of new nuclear reactors.
This found that: "Nuclear power provides reliable base-load power with very low emissions and can offset variability issues incurred by renewables, but faces obstacles with current public policy and public opinion. By law, new nuclear power in California is currently predicated on a solution for nuclear waste.
California's Electricity Updated April California has a large and growing population and a flourishing economy, with a major high-technology sector. Electricity demand has been rising steadily for many years, but it lacks sufficient reliable in-state supply. In there was an acute electricity supply crisis, triggered by several factors. In the summer of there was another supply crisis, with an emergency being declared by the system operator.
California has set the target of generating all the state's electricity from low-carbon sources by The crisis Compounding the long-term problem, towards the end of the state had a lot of its generating capacity off-line, mostly catching up with maintenance deferred from peak summer load conditions.
The crisis California had some 12, MWe of solar on grid and about MWe of wind capacity at the end of Deregulation Much newspaper coverage of the earlier Californian power crisis has pointed to deregulation as a factor, if not a cause. The San Onofre saga Early in California was focused on avoiding an electricity crisis partly arising from its growing reliance on wind and solar power, and partly from one nuclear power station being shut down with steam generator problems.
In San Luis Obispo County, a network of loud sirens called the Early Warning System Sirens is in place to warn nearby residents if something bad is happening at the nuclear power plant.
Those sirens are tested regularly, and hearing them is unsettling. While living in the shadow of Diablo Canyon is scary, she is also well aware of the dangers of climate change. The NRC continues to find the plant remains seismically safe.
One reason is a growing number of California residents buying power through local energy purchasing groups called community choice aggregators, the legal documents say.
Many of those organizations simply refuse to buy nuclear. There are 23 local CCAs in California serving more than 11 million customers. There are financial factors at play, too. CCAs that have refused nuclear power stand to benefit financially when Diablo shuts down. Once Diablo is gone, that fee will be reduced. Meanwhile, CCAs are aggressively investing in renewable energy construction. These are highly regulated firms. And so they're much more exposed to politics of the state than you would think of as a normal firm.
At the times when the electricity grid is being turbocharged by solar power, the constant fixed supply of nuclear energy will actually become a financial handicap. When California generates so much energy that it maxes out its grid capacity, prices of electricity become negative — utilities essentially have to pay other states to take that energy, but are willing to do so because it's often cheaper than bringing energy plants offline.
Although the state is facing well-publicized energy shortages now, that wasn't the case in For example, the plant was has a system called "once-through cooling," which uses water from the Pacific Ocean to cool down its reactors. That means it has to pump warmed ocean water back out to the coastal waters near Diablo , which alarms local environmental groups. Finally, once the wheels are in motion to shut a nuclear plant down, it's expensive and complicated process to reverse.
Now, California faces the challenge of weaning itself from nuclear power, without jeopardizing the reliability of our electric grid, and without triggering an increase in emissions from fossil fuel power sources. The decision to retire Diablo Canyon, the largest power plant in California, is no longer up for debate. Five years after the decision to close the nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo County, the CPUC is running out of time to develop reliable, cost-effective and clean energy sources to replace Diablo Canyon.
A recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists demonstrates that California can dispense with nuclear power and still keep the lights on without triggering an increase in global warming and emissions from fossil fuel power sources by making large investments in new, clean energy projects. But the report also confirmed there is no time to lose: We have to get started right away if we are going to succeed. A large group of environmental advocacy organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, has petitioned the CPUC to tackle this challenge in a serious way.
0コメント