The Concrete Beach Balls Are Going Dark
NBC reports that Socal Edison Retiring San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
I saw them every time I went to LA from San Diego – right on the ocean so they could get hit by a tsunami, built on an earthquake fault so they could be cracked open like an egg. This was some of the worst siting ever for a nuclear reactor, and it was made worse by recent remodeling. They have been shut down since January of 2012 because the new changes leak. This is prime beach property, and it will be generations before anything can safely be done with it.
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” This is prime beach property, and it will be generations before anything can safely be done with it. ”
Good. Because that’s something that might actuallly get noticed by people with money – the only people who matter in this society.
Yeah, I’m feeling sour today, partly because our affairs have been arranged such that the only way to even protect savings against inflation is to play the market – and the house always wins.
This is a monument to corporate ownership of the government. They should never have been allowed to build at that site between the two largest population centers in the state, and given private control of public beaches. I admit they didn’t know about the earthquake fault when they built the plant, but that was because they didn’t do a very thorough study of the site geology, or much of anything else. They wanted the water from the ocean to cool the reactor, which reduced their operating costs.
Water is the Achille’s Heel for nuclear reactors in California. Nevermind the earthquake fault issue — we have ways of dealing with that (like, don’t build on a fault?!) — but salt water is extremely corrosive, and we have limited supplies of fresh water. My understanding is that the new tubes were supposed to be able to deal with salt water but as usual today the contractor didn’t deliver what was promised, so they corroded and started leaking. Once salt water leaks over all your fixed equipment, there’s nothing left to do but scrap it and start over again from scratch — which is why Cal Edison threw up their hands and gave up.
Water is the issue everywhere, especially since you can’t depend on the rainfall patterns any more. We have had reactors shut down Florida and Georgia because the river levels fell too low. Between drought and growth, the ocean and the Gulf are the only sure supplies of water for cooling.
The joys of contracting – maybe they should have looked on Angie’s List 😉