Extending the license for Diablo Canyon Power Plant even for a few years would be very expensive for the rate-payers and taxpayers of California. Diablo is an aging plant and as such faces ever-increasing maintenance expenditures. Moreover, the continued and increased storage of dangerous high level nuclear wastes would result in substantial additional costs and risks, even without potential catastrophic releases of radioactivity. To fight climate change effectively, California would be much better off the to spend all that money on the burgeoning truly green technologies.
Klaus Schumann
Paso Robles
This article appears in May 12-22, 2022.
The green technologies are not in place, and are not ready yet. The technology for energy storage for the times when the sun is not shining, nor the wind blowing, has not yet been fully developed, and will take years to both develop and install. How many billions of tons of carbon will be dumped into the atmosphere while we are waiting? Diablo Canyon is in place, and the problem with the storage of spent fuel rods already exists, and delaying the close will not make the problem significant more difficult.
We can sit in caves and start fires to light and warmth.
Satchmo Kalvinator is uninformed about generating and storing energy. The arguments about the sun not shining and the wind not blowing as a hindrance to reliable energy are very 20th century. The problem is the will to build, not the technology.
Lee Greenawait: Other than a slogan about 20th Century, do you have anything to support your claim? Specifically, what mass energy storage mechanism has been developed and proven which can power large cities for extended periods? “Technology” has that pesky problem of requiring actual working solutions, and not just grand pronouncements.