An interesting thing happened at the SLO County Board of Supervisors’ meeting on Sept. 27. After PG&E’s presentation on SB 846 and its plans to extend operations at Diablo Canyon, the meeting was ending in an impromptu love fest of supervisors thanking and praising PG&E in its “difficult job” of planning for decommissioning while preparing for extended operations. And then, in the midst of it, Supervisor Debbie Arnold made the most incredible comment. “It’s like you are navigating the Titanic between all the icebergs” or something to that effect.
Wow. Did she just compare Diablo Canyon to the Titanic?! I wish I had. Because it’s a very apt analogy. The parallels are too significant. Hubris, greed, disregard for safety, the powers that be not listening to the experts, uninformed people having a party.
Just like the operators of the Titanic believed that there was no iceberg big enough to destroy it, PG&E continues to believe that there will never be an earthquake to cause a major accident at Diablo Canyon. The one very crucial difference is that the Titanic was brand new. Diablo Canyon is at the end of its lifespan. We know how the Titanic story ends, but we can still change the narrative here so that we don’t become the disaster movie of the next century.
Carole Hisasue
Los Osos
This article appears in Oct 6-16, 2022.
Perhaps Arnold’s “Titanic” analogy was to the nation, and not to Diablo Canyon, as we attempt to address climate change in this bitterly divided country., and find ourselves paralyzed by doctrinal squabbling. Here, environmentist liberals are torn between their loathing of nuclear power, and their horror at adding additional carbon to the atmosphere by replacing it with fossil fuels. In another letter in this paper the writer opposes the construction of a battery storage facility in Morro Bay, something we will surely need if we are to convert to an electrically power world, asking us to instead have a chat with “the land” to learn its thinking on the subject. Instead of substantive arguments, we get hissed references to “corporations” to prove their points, the assumption being that any corporation is definitionally evil, and forgetting that even the Sierra Club is a corporation. If just the environmentists are this fractured, is their any hope for the larger society to act effectively to solve any of our problems?
I’ve said this a thousand times while everyone else is being diverted into the same ol bs arguments. REPLACE Diablo with Modular Molten Salt Thorium (MSR) reactors and reuse the old turbines and old fuel rods. MSR doesn’t use sea water cooling, is cheaper, doesn’t create fissionable plutonium, and is way safer! The original is still on Oakridge TN, we had one in Utah and guess who’s working on their first one? China!
What ever happened to can do in America?
Sad when old people keep repeating the same falsehoods for half a century and convince themselves that repetition made it true. Diablo canyon is not only safe today, but it has saved Lives. So far 18,354 people are alive today who would be dead if coal and gas had supplied the same energy since 1985 when it opened.
Lots of lies were spread about nuclear power– when the real enemy was the nuclear arms race and folks on the left (like me) thought it was OK to smear the industry with a broad brush.
Yet so-called environmentalists in California are building a giant new grid connection to Wyoming to bring in Coal, and that’s why they wanted to close Diablo Canyon. They don’t call it coal, but “Unspecified Imports from Wyoming” smells like coal to me. They will claim the new grid will help California sell excess solar to Wyoming. Good luck getting Wyoming to shut down their Warren Buffet owned coal plants so they can buy power from California. Such a shell game!
Diablo Canyon should be expanded to MAKE WATER as in the original design. There is no shortage of water in California. It’s just a bit to salty and we know how to fix THAT!
Diablo Canyon reactors are not reliable based on Nuclear Regulatory Commission data. One or both reactors were down 40% of the days for the last four years. This was for both planned and unplanned events. For example, PG&E ignored corroded salt water pump until it required an emergency shutdown of one of their reactors. SB846 was passed based on the assumption both reactors would be operational. The law should be challenged.
https://sanonofresafety.files.wordpress.co…
go to – http://sanonofresafety.files.wordpress to learn the truth, why Diablo must go – NOW. Nukes compared to the Titanic – a perfect analogy