CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2022, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DIABLO
CANYON ERRORS WILL SOON COST MOST CALIFORNIANS”
The
benefits to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. from keeping the Diablo Canyon
Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo open longer than previously scheduled
are now very clear: electricity customers all over California soon will almost
certainly be paying the big utility for not producing power.
That’s
the apparent bottom line, after Diablo Canyon shut down for substantial periods
twice in the last six months because PG&E violated its own management procedures.
The
outages at the huge generating station, which when working can produce 8.5
percent of all power created in California, came when a hydrogen cooling system
within the plant’s Unit 2 leaked and had to be shut down manually.
Resulting
energy losses from Diablo Canyon demonstrated the plant’s unreliability, which
was also on view in 2020-21, when the facility experienced 149 days of
unplanned outages over a 476-day period. Essentially, Diablo produced little or
nothing over one third of that time.
PG&E
customers are likely to be dunned $178.6 million for the costs of replacement
power during the shutdowns of the last 30 months. But the state law that will
let Diablo keep operating through 2030, more than five years beyond its
previously planned closure date, will have all customers of privately-owned
utilities everywhere in California foot the bills for future Diablo problems,
up to $300 million.
The
extension was Gov. Gavin Newsom’s way of providing backup electricity during
heat waves when blackouts have been threatened repeatedly in recent years.
But Newsom’s backup turns out to be a plant that has recently been dead
weight about one-third of the time.
The
entire plan, passed with little public review by the Legislature in the dying
days of its 2022 session, can be seen as Newsom again rewarding PG&E for
the $10 million-plus it has contributed to his many campaigns.
Or, it
can be seen as plain stupidity. For sure, the new subsidies for Diablo’s
error-caused outages are a recognition that it’s risky to count on the
40-year-old facility as an ultimate power backup.
Said
Rochelle Becker, executive director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility,
a longtime Diablo Canyon watchdog, “The extraordinary size of these (outage)
costs is a very bad omen for Diablo’s post-2024 future.”
Becker
points out that most of the recent Diablo outages have been caused by operator
errors, including “the botched installation of the newest equipment at the
plant, the Unit 2 main generator stator. (That’s the part that went haywire in
the latest shutdowns.) History shows that with PG&E, if something can go
wrong, it will.”
That’s
strong language, but it is backed up by PG&E’s record of the last 12 years,
including a natural gas explosion that killed eight in San Bruno and
company-caused fires that killed about 100 persons and destroyed towns like Paradise
and Greenville, leading to multiple manslaughter convictions for the company.
It’s not
an enviable record, and for California to depend on extended use of one of the
company’s older facilities might turn out to be a huge and expensive mistake.
It’s all
part of the coddling of utilities by a long series of California governors,
Democrat and Republican, all of whom received large donations from utility
companies, then appointed regulators who consistently favor the companies over
their customers.
That’s
why Southern California Edison consumers, soon to begin subsidizing PG&E
mistakes, are still paying on their unjustly assigned $3.3 billion share of the
$4.7 billion cost of closing the failed San Onofre Nuclear Generating
Station, which became a white elephant after to an Edison blunder.
It’s why
PG&E’s corporate survival was allowed under a plan seeing customers pay
multiple billions into a fund designed to pay for damages from future wildfires
caused by that company.
The
question now is whether extending Diablo’s life will turn out to be yet another
regulatory and consumer blunder.
In the
very likely event that it does, PG&E will get even more hundreds of
millions of dollars than it already has from California electric bills. And none
of this even begins to count the $1 billion in federal tax dollars the Biden
administration granted the company late last month.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias
at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most
Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,"
is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
No comments:
Post a Comment