San Onofre closure to boost CA's carbon emissions by equivalent of 1.6 million cars

[wtmusic]

"The retirement of two nuclear reactors at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Southern California, announced Friday, is expected to increase state carbon emissions by at least 8 million metric tons annually — the equivalent of putting 1.6 million new passenger vehicles on the road — according to a Breakthrough Institute analysis.

The San Onofre station, located near population hubs San Diego and Los Angeles, supplied about one-tenth of the state’s electricity needs, generating carbon-free electricity to the equivalent of 2.3 million homes each year.[1] Meeting the same demand with natural gas, which emits roughly 1.12 lbs of CO2 per kWh, would generate an additional 17.7 billion lbs, or 8 million metric tons, of CO2.[2]

In preparation for the closure, California’s grid operator (CAISO) added 2,502 megawatts (MW) of generating capacity in June, with 891 MW coming online this month. The majority of this new capacity has been gas-fired power plants. Solar and wind have contributed to the added capacity, but to a much smaller degree."

http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/san-onofre-nuclear-closure-to-boost-state-carbon-emissions-by-8-million-tons/

[Gregorian]

1. I suppose it would be a huge inconvenience for people to drive just a little less.

They ought to anyways. But it's a small price to pay for not having to poison the planet with nuclear waste.

Actually, even 1.6 million more cars is probably not as bad as the consequences of a nuclear meltdown.

[wtmusic]

2. Millions die every year from health complications due to car exhaust;

the most highly publicized nuclear accident in the last quarter century has killed no one.

http://www.ehhi.org/reports/exhaust/summary.shtml

So in a word: no. Not even close.

[CreekDog]

7. you said "last quarter century" (that would be 1988) to be able to ignore Chernobyl

which happened in the past 27 years.

[PamW]

8. Don't have to poison the planet with nuclear waste

Gregorian,

You've been listening to the anti-nuke propaganda of you "think" that nuclear waste has to poison the planet.

First, if the USA reprocessed / recycled spent nuclear fuel as countries like France, Sweden, ...; we would reduce both the amount and longevity of the the nuclear waste. If we reprocess / recycle the way nuclear physicist and then Associate Director of Argonne National Laboratory, Dr. Till, said in this interview with PBS Frontline about 15 years ago:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.

We don't need to have nuclear waste with Plutonium-239 in it that lasts thousands of years. France doesn't have that problem.

Additionally, spent nuclear fuel is 96% Uranium-238. That Uranium-238 is no more radioactive than it was when it was dug out of the ground. Yet with our current policy, we are going to treat it as if it were fiendishly radioactive and had to be sequestered from the environment for thousands of years. Yet Uranium-238 is to be found virtually everywhere one has soil. It is one of the most uniformly distributed elements in the Earth's crust. If we separated it out; we would reduce the volume of our "true" waste by a factor of 25. I expounded on this option on this forum earlier:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1127&pid=46327

If one reprocesses, all the energy for a family of 4 for 20 years will produce an amount of nuclear waste that would fit in a pill bottle or shot glass. It would have the longevity that Dr. Till states. During that reasonable amount of time, the nuclear waste would be isolated from the environment until the radioactivity decays away, and there's no more problem.

After all, if you really want to see "nuclear waste"; then look around you. EVERYTHING you see around you that is not hydrogen and helium is decayed "nuclear waste". The only "indigenous" elements to the cosmos, the only elements created as a result of the "Big Bang", are hydrogen and helium. All other elements, including the ones that make you up; had to be formed in great big nuclear fusion reactors that we call "stars". Those stars "cook up" all the elements heavier than helium. Some of those stars explode as supernova, and hurl those elements into the cosmos, where they can form planets like ours.

So EVERYTHING you see around you that is not hydrogen nor helium, is cooled down "nuclear waste" from a star.

PamW

[roody]

3. Is conservation out of the question?

[kristopher]

4. The Breakthrough Ist. produces garbage

Without SONGS, California still has more than enough capacity to meet their needs:

In order to keep the lights on, the ISO needs to have more generation available than consumers are expected to use. This is known as a “reserve margin,” and the California Public Utilities Commission requires the utilities to plan for a 15% cushion. And the state already has more power plants than we need to pass that test. This summer, the ISO expects to easily exceed that margin under normal conditions, and to still avoid rolling blackouts even under extreme conditions (like if a lot of power plants go down unexpectedly at the same time customers’ demand is unusually high).




Source: ISO (Note: SP 26 and NP 26 are roughly Southern and Northern California, respectively)

As you can see the problem presented by the shutdown isn't having enough capacity to meet demand.

So why, in 2012 when SO shut down, did they need to pull 2 retired natgas generators (450MW) out of retirement in nearby Huntington Beach?

Blame it on a grid designed around centralized generation. The gaping hole in the system left by the shutdown of a large centralized source of generation causes a lot of problems besides the loss of ability to meet demand.

...the grid needs the “voltage support” SONGS used to provide.

Since a major part of the Southern California electric grid was built around SONGS, it is a lot harder for the transmission grid to remain stable without the plant operating and providing that voltage support. This all gets very technical fast, but the important thing to know is that there are different ways to provide voltage support (and they don’t all require burning fossil fuels at a power plant). So even though one might expect the state to fill the hole left by SONGS with more dirty power plants, this year the state is taking a better and cleaner approach.

So what happens now?

...(Huntington Beach - k) is instead being converted into “synchronous condensers,” which provide voltage support without onsite emissions. (The synchronous condensers operate like electric motors and use a small amount of energy from the grid in the process.) Other emissions-free efforts to fill the hole left by SONGS include installation of capacitors and upgrades to a local transmission line so that if the line has a problem, only part of it goes down instead of the whole thing.

<snip>

The Public Utilities Commission should continue to build on the great start made this year by requiring utilities to fill the gap with efficient and clean resources by:

making the electric grid more resilient through transmission system upgrades;
adding renewable resources in different geographic regions to take advantage of the different times when they’re available; and
avoiding new generation through more aggressive efforts to help customers:
improve the efficiency of their homes and businesses;
reduce consumption during costly “peak” periods; and
use clean on-site generation like solar panels.

Information courtesy of the wonderful folks at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dwang/replacing_songs.html

[wtmusic]

5. It's never out of the question.

There will probably be a certain amount of that just because of increased prices.

In terms of addressing climate change, it won't be nearly enough. We're going backwards.

[CreekDog]

6. look, you don't know anything about San Onofre

chief among what you don't know: it's been offline for 1.5 years.

increased emissions? it's closed already.