RCEA Says ‘No’ to Nuclear Energy Offer
Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in 2005 [Original image via WikiCommons from marya from San Luis Obispo, USA]
In a close vote at a Sept. 26 meeting, a majority of the RCEA’s board of directors voted not to accept the option of receiving nuclear energy from the Diablo Canyon Nuclear power plant.
Customers statewide and locally are paying for the plant’s operation, which has been extended to at least 2030.
According to a staff presentation, accepting the plant’s power would allow the agency to “receive a clean energy benefit that customers are already paying for.”
There’s also a budget consideration, as a $9.4 million deficit is projected for RCEA in 2025. Accepting the nuclear power would reduce the deficit by $500,000.
A public comment period included statements from longtime opponents of nuclear energy.
Arcata resident Dave Ryan said he participated in protests against the Diablo Canyon plant in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Referring to lack of nuclear waste disposal sites, he said nuclear energy is “like flying an airplane when landing gear hasn’t been invented yet for it … it’s a mess, it’s a really messy form of energy.”
Also during public comment, Arcata resident Kathleen Marshall, who also protested Diablo Canyon, believes accepting nuclear power doesn’t jibe with RCEA’s identity.
“It is not in keeping with your mission and it makes you look more like PG&E and I buy my energy from you because you are not PG&E,” she said.
Michael Welch of the Redwood Alliance citizens group, which played a key role in the decommissioning of the Humboldt Bay nuclear plant, warned of encouraging nuclear power through using it.
“We believe that any statement of ‘yes’ to nuclear energy only furthers the goals of the nuclear industry, including building more nuclear power plants and repowering or continuing the use of nuclear power plants like Diablo Canyon,” he said.
Boardmembers weighed the pros and cons of the decision, with Vice-Chair Scott Bauer citing the longevity of radioactive waste and saying, “I just can’t do that to our kids.”
Other commissioners were more open to the option due to its financial benefit and addition of what’s considered as carbon-free energy.
Boardmember Elise Scafani said the $500,000 gained from accepting the Diablo power may be used for local energy projects.
“We know that this energy is being generated from this nuclear plant whether we accept it or not,” she continued, adding that RCEA could “take that money we can save by accepting this credit and put it toward renewable energy that’s generated in Humboldt County and controlled by RCEA for the benefit of our customers.”
A motion to accept the nuclear power and have staff return with plans for use of the $500,000 failed in a 3 to 2 vote. Five boardmembers were absent.
The decision can be revisited annually and RCEA staff will soon return to the board with a draft of a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission explaining why the nuclear power’s been turned down.
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If we are to get to the Holy Grail of net zero CO2 nuclear energy has to be part of the solution.
No it doesn’t. And the waste lasts half a million years. You can’t even put up a warning sign because no language will last that long.
Good and courageous decision. It’s rare for an agency Board to reject an offer that has been sweetened with money. Values occasionally do prevail. Hooray!
Just virtue signaling. We’re all paying for the power anyway.
We’d being paying proportionally more of the cost by directly buying its product. Any amount we kick in directly just reduces the costs charge to everyone paying taxes. So support it would be.
In the face of PG&E petitioning to keep it going another 20 years, making it cheaper for the utility to keep it operating without developing a waste disposal facility is playing Russian roulette with the likelihood of a damaging earthquake.
But pge just passes the costs on to us rate payers anyway. It’s not going anywhere for 20 years and whether we use the power up here or not doesn’t influence the chances of an earthquake.
The point of having different sources and RCEA provide energy is too get away from PG&E making all the choices. I suppose if you think that nothing anyone can ever do changes the legislature from extending the time frame for renewing Diablo Canyon’s license and that principles don’t matter, then your position is at least practical if not principled.
As for the earthquake. I can’t make sense of that comment at all. The point is to not have a nuclear power plant that will be such a danger operating when the inevitable earthquake happens.
I suppose that’s noble. And I agree that the plant is in an incredibly stupid spot (as is our own local defunct reactor).
But this action doesn’t change any of that. It’s most immediate impact is to make rcea less robust and less able to ever become a genuine alternative to pge. And ultimately I think that nuclear power is the only viable path forward if we are actually interested in reducing our total toxic impact on the planet.
I understand other people feel differently, and I still think that this decision accomplishes nothing beyond a little local virtue signal by the rcea board. My money still goes to this nuke plant. And the local organization that gives me the best chance of escaping pge without going off grid now has a less robust pool of power to draw from.
But who knows, maybe going for it would have pushed more customers away than I imagine and would have weakened rcea even more. Either way, I think it was the wrong choice.
You seem to forget it is the federal goverments failure to supply the promised waste disposal , pge was only supposed to store it for a short amount of time . The DOE has dropped that ball and because no one wishes it to be in their back yard it is a unpopular thing to bring up. But contracts were signed and one side failed to preform costing pge millions , ever wonder why pge gets away with having the highest rates in the nation ?
however all that waste no one seems to want happens to be pretty valuable when used to fuel fast burn breeder reactors , and once all this bad waste had been ran through a advanced reactor the amount of waste is reduced by orders of magnitudes and the half life of the waste goes from 10’s of thousands of years down to mere 300 years , and all i have to say about that is wow , but one again the boomer generation seems to disregard any meaningful way of repairing the pillaging of the planet that happened on their watch to leave something for those stuck living with it, i mean hey we have a fuck ton of laws now thanks to the boomers as well . They only seem to want freedom in regards to how they wish to live and have zero cares as to if their desires are trampling on anyones else’s freedoms always pointing their fingers seldom putting the blame on their own actions and when forced to they give the good old excuse of it was my job . That did not work out for the guards when standing trial at the hag one would think that if any generation would know not to attempt that one the boomers would , but hey we arent speaking of the brightest generation after all . The second excuse they like to give is well thats just the way it was back then everyone did it . Yeah and how many boomers told their children just because everyone else jumps off a cliff blah blah get the point demanding others live one way while living for themselves another way
Half the board couldn’t be bothered to show up for such an important vote. How often do they meet? That is ridiculous.
it was a setup. This was on the agenda for weeks. How could some not be there?
Whether you agree or disagree with their position at least the 5 who voted were willing to take a stand on a controversial issue – the other 5 should resign in disgrace.
But I’m also wondering how they were able to hold the meeting since a quorum of a public board requires the presence of at least a majority of the sitting board members.
These people are uneducated morons. Waste from lithium mining, disposal of lithium batteries, solar panal,and turbine blades are the white elephant in the room. No way to dispose if any of it and is going to be a much bigger problem than nuclear waste is. Also much of our power comes from coal which now calls itself “green” because of energy credits purchased from musk et al. Take a drive through Utah and Nebraska and marvel at the miles long coal trains and mountains of coal next to many power plants. The number one industry in Utah? coal mining. Isn’t going to stop anytime soon. Buy some energy credits, call yourself green and sell it to morons in kalifornia who can then feel good about themselves….enjoy the darkness.
Don’t forget the children working in those mines…so “progressives” can feel good about how “clean” their technology is…. it’s disgusting the denial and selective reasoning these “intellectuals” use to force decisions down our throats…
Good point. Also all the children in the third world mining the rare earth’s all our technology requires. We’ll, f**k them as long as I get the latest IPhone. How many dead children per phone?
Coal mining isn’t even in the top 10 industries of Utah:
https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/economic-profiles/utah/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065228/utah-real-gdp-by-industry/
https://www.industryselect.com/blog/top-10-manufacturing-companies-in-utah
You should educate yourself before calling other people uneducated morons.
Sorry about that. My coal info was dated from the 90’s. Utah still gets 43% of electricity from coal. And they’re still morons.
You mean Mormons. Lol
Michael Welch is still at it!!
Diablo Canyon was instrumental in my education in activism and how even if you ‘win’ you’re always gonna be fighting the same battle over and over…
capitalism has the ideology of a cancer cell
Good on RCEA
I guess if you hate the environment then sure this was good of RCEA to do. Nuclear power should be used wherever a nuclear plant makes sense.
Nah I hate death and maiming…
and human hubris…
Wow you must hate the whole world then
Yes, nukes should be used wherever it makes sense. Which is nowhere.
Without nuclear power net zero is impossible. Solar and wind aren’t energy dense methods of generation at all. They take hundreds of square miles of land to generate very little electricity. What’s the point of net zero if the land we are trying to save has to have miles windmills and solar panels built all over it? The landscape will still be forever changed, much of the land is irrecoverable, and the projects only generate power for 20 years. The densest most renewable form of energy is constantly shunned. What’s with these clowns?
Awww. Did we get a new unicorn pillow for the safe space rooom?
Check you power bills. Just say NO to RCEA.
Five boardmembers were absent.?
This needs to be revisited. A full vote must be take.
Are a few wackos going to set the agenda for bankruptcy of the system?
I read no positive statement for nuke power in this report.
Wait, what, they refused my free electricity? how is that acting in consumer interest?
This is what you get. You keep increasing population, increasing energy consumption with your many gadgets while you rail against fossil fuels and you will get nuclear. They are already beginning to build new nuclear reactors in your beloved progressive Europe. Soon we will be building new reactors here. What did you think was going to power your wonderfully progressive electric cars?
It’s the best energy generation technology we’ve ever invented. We should be leaning into nuclear technology
The detrimental environmental impacts of the mining to get the fuel, the risk of a catastrophic accident, and the lack of a way to dispose of the waste are issues that still need to be solved.
Find solutions to those, and I’m on board.
are we talking ev’s or nuc’s here?
I agree. I was arrested at Diablo Canyon. But…you will be forced on board don’t you see? All those mandated electric cars and trucks need power. Overpopulation and more energy consumption by all those humans. You’re actually the problem here. I have called for depopulation beginning w capital punishment for murderers and child molesters but you argue against even that. Your form of “compassion” leads us directly into the inevitability of nuclear power. Or please tell us a better solution…a real one though not a unicorn rainbow feel-good smoke show okay?
Those issues all exist for all existing power sources as well. And given the energy density, it’s much less total mining needed in nuclear. Also, the Chinese are about to fire up the first large scale plant to extract uranium from sea water, which could be a game changer.
As far as waste, it’s almost certain that we can recycle the “spent” waste. If it didn’t have energy potential left it wouldn’t be dangerously radioactive. Unfortunately we have largely shut down uranium processing as part of the battle against nuclear weapons.
Nuclear power is by far the most viable technology for meeting our power demands with the most limited environmental risk
Umm you have zero research on modern reactors i take it . That or you bought into off shore wind farms where they still have yet to solve the leading edge problem where ocean spray degrades the blades to the point of failure and the whole thing ends up a huge loss , that is only if they catch it in time imagine some sort of storm where they are bot able to lock a failing blade down in time and it flies apart sending objects of destruction hurling through the air causing a domino effect . The company will be long gone by then at least the money will be while laughing at how they got Humboldt to agree to pay those extra rates . But hey get off fossil fuels by creating a source of power that requires crude oil as well as many many more chemicals that only come from …. you guessed it fossil fuels so that people can get the government’s more up their rears and hand over that much more of control of their lives and freedoms . But hey we spend billions trying to protect our nations freedom from foreign countries. And most people are clueless to the fact that it did not take a military to destroy our rights to freedoms but a handful of nut jobs with a few box knifes and a plan. And the people of this country folded like the towels those nut jobs wore on their head demanding those in power take their freedoms away so they could feel safe doenst matter that they are less safe today then they were before they think they are more safe because they see people taking their flipping shoes off lol. All the while screaming for gun control yet not a single gun was used that day , i do not see any box knife bans however but hey logic and most people will never see eye to eye
Yes jebs loves the government and believes everything they tell him
It’s 2024 not 1960. I’m sure it will be fine as long as there’s know DEI employees
I’d love to have a small nuke in my backyard. Reliable energy.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generator. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Accidents
Well if you live in or around eureka you have one. Might as well be getting some cheap power from it
Haha. Noooooo!
Chernobyl and Fukushima were accidents. But they could just as easily have been caused by terrorist attacks, killing and injuring thousands or millions, like the Russian nurse I met who got cancer from Chernobyl fallout. She lived 250 miles from the site. If you think nuclear power is acceptable, you probably don’t know much about it. I suggest the book “We Almost Lost Detroit” by John Fuller.
Yeah I’m aware that nuclear power caries risk. And absolutely, building nuclear plants on known fault lines seems like the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to safety.
But this emphasis on the health risks of nuclear plants comes off as very myopic to me. Coal and natural gas and all other combustible hydrocarbon energy sources are constantly causing health problems and we just ignore them. The mining and extraction of those fuels cause harm to the workers and destroy and contaminate ecosystems, the transportation of them to power plants adds to that, their combustion produces various toxic pollutants and their waste plagues the communities saddled with their disposal.
I’ve never see an attempt at comparing the health and environmental impacts of something like coal vs nuclear, but I’d wager that nuclear is safer for the human and natural health per kilowat hour than any hydrocarbon based fuel.
Maybe P.G. & E. could update and fire up our own little reactor? Make trips to Gill’s more fun.
It’s kind of funny Farce that the EV crowd doesn’t see this. Hopefully David Ryan doesn’t drive an EV,Crack me up.
It’s funnier for me because they used to be my friends! I was arrested protesting Diablo Canyon. But since then we have not found a reasonable solution and we have only made choices that lead us inevitably to …Nuclear Power. I’ve spent the last couple decades pointing this out to my old friends and they only maligned me w/o debating a better solution. Now they will get it- it is the only energy source on the table. They didn’t want to fix or even discuss overpopulation or massive energy consumption so now they get nukes. I can already hear them sobbing from their safe spaces through their pink hats….
UK to finish with coal power after 142 years. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o
Stupid is as stupid does.
Moronic, but it’s what you get when feelings guide your decisions, while thinking and reason are ignored. It’s the liberal way. The sure-fire path to darkness and despair. Oh yeah, enjoy your next rate hike in January.
“Boardmember Elise Scafani said the $500,000 gained from accepting the Diablo power may be used for local energy projects.”
“MAY be used” Uh huh, again we see the green in the “green new deal”. The remarkable part, there are some among us who believe it.
I saw the movie ‘China Syndrome’ in Nashville, TN the night before my co-driver woke me in the sleeper while driving my tractor&semi-trailer north on I-81, exclaiming, “There’s been a nuclear accident at some place just ahead of us!” I thought he was joking but it was Three Mile Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
I remember it well. I was back east near State College. But it wasn’t so bad. Chernobyl- that was something! Fukushima- that was something! Media blackout on both of those disasters as the radioactivity spread. I got news reports forwarded from my sister in Sweden about the plumes of radioactivity that spread. US media had nada. That was my final proof that our US media was controlled by the Big Boys…and the Big Boys have led us down the electric car and everything path that leads to their ” next generation safer” nuclear plants. I hope everybody enjoys what they themselves made inevitable! Next nuclear disaster- where? There will be one…or more
Thanks for telling it like it is
The plumes from Chernobyl were spreading over Europe. Of course it was bigger news there. And the Japanese release of radioactive water has been in the news all the time with reports on protests from Korea, China and the Japanese themselves.
Yikes. That would be creepy.
I would be happy to accept nuclear energy from the Diablo Canyon Nuclear power plant. As the area grows larger by the year, it is part of a lack of energy solution. On top of that, we have been paying for from day one.
But we’re paying to keep Diablo canyon open anyhow.
idiotic move by rcea.
without nuclear, our immediate need to meet carbon reduction measures is much more difficult.
Local tax payers are already contributing. But power from Diablo still would be billed to local users. It’s not that we’d get free power from it. We’d get cheaper power from it. I have no idea how many customers there are but a number of tribes, businesses, cities, utility districts besides residence get power from them. $500,000 sounds like a lot of money but I suspect individual’s saving from a switch would not be large.
When I was younger we would go to fields landing and go crabbing. Mostly rock crab. As I got older I began to think that maybe that wasn’t the smartest idea I have ever had.
Weak-minded, anti-nuclear, virtue signaling, maggots. Waste elements fears from nuclear power generation is an artificial construct of the antiproliferation activity. Effectively the anti-nuke camp takes a two pronged approach to limiting true low CO2 energy. Step one, limited the construction of plutonium breeder reactors, ya know because bombs. Breeder reactors that could infinitely reprocess spent fuel in to reusable nuclear fuel. Then they try to tell you there is no way to dispose of the waste from nuclear power generation.
But you’re right about both. Nuclear weapons could cause the end of life on the planet. And there is no viable disposal plan for radioactive poisons that last for tens of thousands of years.
Sure there is – it’s called Yucca Mountain
Pretty dumb to think we are not going to use nuclear power in the future. Wind mills and solar panels are great but if we want to advance civilization we are gonna need more reliable energy in a smaller footprint. I don’t think virtue signaling is worth half a million dollars. Can we vote to keep nuclear and distribute half a million to all the rate payers in Humboldt County instead?
Microsoft is restarting one of the reactors at Three Mile Island to deal with the need for power to run AI.