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California

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quaint

(3,962 posts)
Sun Aug 25, 2024, 10:32 AM Aug 2024

Earthquake risks and rising costs: The price of operating California's last nuclear plant [View all]

LATimes

Amid coastal bluffs speckled with brush and buckwheat, Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant uses this energy to spin two massive copper coils at a blistering 30 revolutions per second. In 2022, these generators — about the size of school buses — produced 6% of Californians’ power and 11% of their non-fossil energy.

The core of the debate lives in the quaint coastal town of San Luis Obispo, just 12 miles inland from the concrete domes, where residents expected Diablo Canyon to shut down over the next year after its license expired.
Today, the plant is still buzzing with life: Nuclear fission, in the deep heart of the plant, continues to superheat water to 600 degrees at 150 times atmospheric pressure. Generators continue to whir with a haunting and deafening hum that reverberates throughout the massive turbine deck.

Earthquakes account for about 65% of the risk for a worst-case scenario meltdown. Potential internal fires at the plant make up another 18%. The last 17% is made up of everything from aircraft impacts and meteorites to sink holes and snow.

However, new studies are finding that energy storage is a feasible approach to grid reliability — and that even when adding the price of that infrastructure, solar still costs less than nuclear.

Much more at link.

Non-scientist here, why don't we build small reactors at the site, then shut down the old one?
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