Your recent article by Editor Shelly Cone titled “Decommissioning Diablo,” July 14, leads off with Mothers for Peace as if they had something to do with it. While these anti-nuclear groups are pesky and a waste-of-time nuisance, they had no direct impact on this decision. Neither of their claims of fault dangers or radiation have been found to be substantiated by real data. Ms. Cone does a disservice to the public by promoting the viewpoints of these hysterical “powder-puff engineers” as if they knew anything about the technical aspects of nuclear engineering.
They don’t.
PG&E’s decision is directed by the difficult changes the state is requiring to relicense the plant. In the meantime, the state is stupidly demanding the primary use of low-yield renewable sources of energy by 2025, so we see this plan to address the very expensive efforts to decommission the plant based on these financial impacts.
California is really dumb for this. Many modern nuclear plants are moving forward in other states and worldwide as the most efficient way to produce a lot of power for lighting, machinery, and water purification.
The mini-power of Germany has found that by having plans to shut down their nuclear plants, they have got to go back to relying on fossil coal to supplement their renewable energy plants to meet their power needs.
So will we in California if this decommissioning is really implemented.
This article appears in Jul 21-28, 2016.