Edison will shut down the San Onofre nuclear plant for good

[Agnosticsherbet]

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-edison-closing-san-onofre-nuclear-plant-20130607,0,7920425.story
Edison will shut down the San Onofre nuclear plant for good

Edison will shut down the San Onofre nuclear plant for good
Southern California Edison announced Friday it would shut down the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant.


The move comes 17 months after the San Onofre plant was closed because of problems in steam generator systems. The plant powered about 1.4 million households in Southern California before the outage.

Until now, Edison had vowed to restart the plant. But the company released a statement Friday saying it would stop the process to fire up the plant.

---SNIP___

"We have concluded that the continuing uncertainty about when or if [the plant] might return to service was not good for our customers, our investors, or the need to plan for our region’s long-term electricity needs," said Ted Craver, chairman and chief executive of Edison International, parent company of SCE.

Of course, the paps of Southern California Edison will still be there for a good while, because decommissioning takes a long time, and because they will have to store Nuclear Material there until a permanent storage solution is found, which will be seven days after the Twelfth of Never what with all the NIMBYISM in this country. But it won't be operating. According to NPR, they have 90% of the 2 billion dollars necessary to decommission the place in a fund. Most of the people working there will be joining the ranks of the unemployed.

[NYC_SKP]

1. They'll need to work extra hard now on a low carbon mix and meet their RPS.

A good thing, overall, as millions live withing 50 miles of the plant, while fewer than 400,000 live within 50 miles of Diablo NPP.

[JayhawkSD]

2. Assumptions, assumptions

"According to NPR, they have 90% of the 2 billion dollars necessary to decommission the place in a fund."

NPR needs to do better research. Actually they have close to $3 billion in the fund, toward an estimated cost of $3.2 billion. The chances of it only costing $3.2 billion are slim and none, and slim has left the building, because that cost is based on finding an existing site for offsite relocation of the spent fuel (i.e Yucca Flats), and no such place exists.

SouCal barely squeaked by last year on power during a couple of warm spells, and since then two sizeable fossil fuel generating stations in Newport have lost their licenses, so things are going to be very dicey if we have even a normal summer, let alone a hot one. The Sunrise Power Link will not be of much use without voltage support from generating sources in SouCal.

It was probably a good decision, but it will come with costs.

[Agnosticsherbet]

3. Of course it will come with costs.

And I do agree that there is little chance due to Nimbyism for off sight storage.
But I think it was a good decision. Time to invest in a basket of technologies and different renewables to meet our power needs.