Given that one or both of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant’s reactors have been down more than 40 percent of the year for at least the previous three years (for problems and/or planned downtimes), PG&E claims that “the two units produce a total of 18,000 gigawatt-hours of clean and reliable electricity annually” are at best misleading statements.
Does the governor and Legislature know the true downtime of these two obviously unreliable nuclear reactors?
Extending the life of these unreliable reactors increases our risk for blackouts.
We need a plan that keeps the lights on, not one that improves the odds we’ll have more blackouts. Let the California Independent System Operator (ISO) do its job as it was originally required by law, to develop a transmission plan to ensure there would be no blackouts without the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors. Closing these unreliable nuclear plants should make Cal ISO’s job easier.
Donna Gilmore
Monterey
This article appears in Aug 25 – Sep 4, 2022.
Developing a “plan” is not the same as actually developing the capacity to replace the power that wiil be lost with the closure od Diablo Canyon. Plans are just words on paper. The old Soviet Union suffered from severe food shortages and had to import grain due to the inept management of their agricultural system. They would periodically announce a “5 year plan” or a “ten year plan” to increase production and become agrculturally self-sufficient. The “plans” never worked or changed anything, and just designed for political consumption. Here, we need something substantive, and we do not have the actual capacity to replace the lost energy with green energy.