We have a nuke plant that has been offline for 18 months. Its power was thought to be necessary before it went offline. I’m talking about San Onofre. cal ISO has just issued a position that for the second summer peak season it will not be needed.
That is one nuke plant. Not every nuke plant can go offline at once. But I never said they could or should. You on the other hand seem to be arguing against any movement to replace nuclear as if that goal is impossible. Do you believe it to be impossible?
I have personal experience with California electricity - I lived in what’s now described as one of the most generation-deficient areas of the state - San Jose - during the blackouts and the brownouts. I personally measured 107 volts coming from my wall socket. I also witnessed the pitched but futile battle against the construction of Calpine’s Metcalf 600MW gas-turbine power plant, across the way from the county shooting range I frequented, which now spews three tons of emissions per day into the atmosphere.
In 2008 to 2009 California shed 1.3 million non-farm jobs, don’t you think that might have had an effect on electricity demand?
You point out that the San Onofre capacity is not needed right now, but with its nearly 2.5 gigawatts offline, the power instead has to come - in the best possible case - from four plants like Metcalf running at 100% capacity 24x7x365, spewing twelve tons of emissions per day. Does California’s air need twelve tons per day that could be completely eliminated by SONGS?
And what happens if California through some miracle turns its abusive and job-killing government around and starts to grow again like it did in the old days, instead of turning into Northern Mexico as they seem determined to do? Converting everyone to LED lightbulbs will only get you so far - eventually, somewhere, someone has to build and use a machine to turn fuel into electricity, because people die without electricity.
I certainly don’t believe it’s “impossible” to shut down all nuclear power plants. Japan did it, Germany’s doing it. But what I do believe is that the costs of doing so - in fuel, in pollution, in a life-or-death addiction to an uninterrupted supply of fuel sucking away our wealth and our freedom - would be far more staggering than you seem to realize. I’m not interested in seeing nations cut their own throats - even Germany.
Japan was $32 billion in the hole after only one year because they shut down perfectly good power plants on the basis of irrational hysteria, and thus more than doubled their fossil fuel consumption. And that $32 billion is just the smallest beginning of their economic suicide. America should never, ever go down that road.
According to information obtained several months later, the MAXIMUM potential dose of radiation to anyone was 5.2E-5 millirem (0.000000052 rem) which is one billion times lower than the annual limit for radiation workers at the time that I first became a nuclear energy professional.
For this vanishingly small amount of radiation, about 10 million times lower than you get from bananas every year, you're willing to spew, best case, 12 tons of emissions per day into the atmosphere. Shouldn't it tell you something when people like Feinstein and Markey are leading the charge? That maybe you should be on the opposite side?