nuclear-news

Solving California’s Nuclear Dilemma HUFFINGTON POST Craig Lewis and Bill Ritter Jr,  09/13/2012 More than seven million Californians live within 50 miles of the San Onofre nuclear plant, which was abruptly shut down after safety inspectors discovered radioactive steam leaking at the facility in late January. The unexpected closure of San Onofre raises legitimate concerns about the safe operation of nuclear plants. To further complicate matters, both of California’s aging nuclear plants — San Onofre and Diablo Canyon — are located near active fault lines, greatly jeopardizing the safety of millions of Californians in the event of an earthquake comparable to the one that caused multiple meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
There is, however, one upside of San Onofre’s indefinite closure. Now, state policymakers have a pivotal opportunity to significantly expand the use of distributed renewable energy resources to offset San Onofre’s lost generation capacity. A shift to distributed solar, wind and biomass energy generation would prove cost-effective for California ratepayers and enhance grid reliability should future outages at nuclear plants take place.

In fact, reliance on San Onofre nuclear plant has proven exorbitantly costly for Californians. Southern California Edison (SCE), the majority owner of the plant, charges ratepayers about $54 million per month for San Onofre, even now, as the plant provides no services whatsoever. Furthermore, ratepayers funded a $671 million replacement of the plant’s ailing steam generators just two years ago — the very same generators that are now leaking, forcing the plant to shut down….. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-lewis/solving-californias-nucle_b_1881859.html

September 14, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general