The Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which sits on a cliff on California’s Central Coast, has been the subject of ceaseless protests and political battles since it was proposed in 1963.
Now, the plant is at the center of yet another major debate. After shuttering all the state’s other nuclear power plants in recent decades, California is considering extending Diablo’s life and lifting a moratorium on new reactors.
That these decisions are even on the table in California is a testament to the substantial change in public views of nuclear energy, which for decades has been reviled by the liberal lawmakers and environmental groups that wield tremendous power and influence in the state.
Many of its leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have expressed support for nuclear energy. The California Legislature last month passed a bill to commission a study on partly lifting the ban on new reactors.
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California is not a tropical climate. Solar resources in the winter can actually be quite poor in most areas due to low sun angle and high cloud cover. Of course the summer is the opposite but we do need power year-round.
Most analyses show the cheapest way to fully decarbonize will include some baseline sources like nuclear. I’m skeptical with CA’s bureaucracy challenges and its political unpopularity it will pencil out to be nuclear but we’ll see. I think all options should be on the table in a climate emergency.
Keeping the existing plant is a no-brainer though.
Show me a single serious one pls…
The whole concept of baseline production is obsolete. I was the idea of having a steady, cheap base load producer (mostly coal) with a quickly reacting, more expensive peaker (oil or gas) to cover the actual demand.
But coal isn’t cheap anymore, neither do we actually want to burn more of it even if it was. And nuclear can’t fullfill either role. It’s useless as traditional base load in the actual sense of the concept as it’s not cheap. It’s useless as a peaker.
And renewables plus batteries (both having seen exponentially drops in costs for years now) can actually already cover that base load concept. Get enough capacity to shift the production peak at noon to the demand peak in early evening and you are set (that is in fact what California is already doing).
The actual route to full decarbonisation is that renewables+short-term storage and some long-term storage. And a big part of that long-term storage is power-to-gas (from excess renewable production at peaks) and gas-peakers.
Nuclear can play a role in reducing some of the demand for short-term storage (flattening the curve by always producing at some level) and make electrolysis more economical (not only running with renewable excess power in the day but also at night when demand drops and nuclear still produces). But this is mostly from a perspective of already having nuclear, wanting nuclear for geopolitical reasons and then finding a niche were is can work in the renewable/storage system.
(For reference: RTE, the French grid provider –they have the higher share of nuclear after all–, did a big study about the future of nuclear up to 2050in 2021), modeling a lot of scenarios… Long story short: Renewables, batteries and power-to-gas with peakers is the way to go. Nuclear can work in this setup (at about 35%, 65% renewables) when that’s politically demanded.)
This one goes into pretty good detail about the challenges in CA in particular:
https://energy.mit.edu/news/decarbonizing-the-u-s-power-grid/
TL;DR you can do it with batteries it just costs more, and getting consumers to accept higher electricity prices in order to protect the environment is already going to be a tough sell politically. Of course, so is nuclear, so I do support continued efforts into some more novel sources of baseline power such as floating offshore wind and advanced geothermal. However, these are not ready to be implemented at scale today and the federal government is currently making offshore wind nearly impossible to construct. So I don’t know. There aren’t any easy answers, unfortunately, but we have to hope either the political or technological landscape changes somehow to make deep decarbonization possible.
I will read the whole thing once I get more time later. But if your excerpt is the main argument, then it’s very telling that they speak about costs of batteries and how that’s a tough sell, then switch to potentials for decarbonisation for nuclear without talking about the costs there.
These studies generally take a high level approach, but coming from a technical side I fail to see where the grid forming generators will come from: wind & solar cannot be grid forming, I don’t think there is enough water to maintain a stable grid. The only way I can see the renewable only setup working in the near future is to change transmission to DC, which has much larger technical limitations than a few nuclear plants. I skimmed the PDF, I didn’t see anything addressing that issue, if I missed it please point me in its direction.
But batteries can…
Also on the basic electronic level grid forming through inverters, smart regulation etc. is a long solved problem (see FACTS for example…)
Solar and wind are not intrinsically grid forming like traditional power plants. However, grid forming inverters are a solved problem at this point. If grid operators want a large solar or wind farm to be grid forming, it is a relatively low cost to make it so.