Diablo Canyon and What To Do About It

Rally for Diablo Canyon
Mothers for Nuclear,, Californians for Green Nuclear Power and others
June 17, 2016
San Luis Obispo
Photo from Californians for Green Nuclear Power

The Announcement and What To Do

Today, PG&E announced that it would not apply for a license renewal for Diablo Canyon, but would close the plant by 2025. The New York Times article this morning: California's Last Nuclear Power Plant Could Close.

 IF this agreement goes through, Diablo Canyon will stay open for another eight years before it closes.  Eight years is not tomorrow. This is not the time to despair and scuttle the ship.  Now is the time to take action! There are things we can do to help our nuclear plants survive.

Right now, we can do two things:  Sign a Petition and Make a Donation. I have done both.

Sign a Petition to the White House

A petition to the White House requests that the special benefits of nuclear power be recognized by federal government policy. The petition has 13,000 signatures, and needs 100,000 to get a response from the White House.  Sign it here to Keep America's Nuclear Power Plants Working for US!

Please sign it and circulate it!

Make A Donation to the March for Environmental Hope

California pro-nuclear groups are marching from San Francisco and Oakland to Sacramento,  in the March for Environmental Hope.  They will publicize the importance of nuclear power for California, and they will attend a meeting of the California Lands Commission. The Commission will be holding a crucial vote about Diablo Canyon.

The March is sponsored by Mothers for Nuclear, Save Diablo Canyon, and Environmental Progress.  Other groups will be marching with them: Californians for Green Nuclear Power and Thorium Energy Alliance.  

The marchers in California are doing this for all of us, for everyone who believes in nuclear energy as the safe, clean energy of the future.  Help them!  You can donate here, and help pay campground fees and so forth for the marchers.

 Commentary

Three excellent articles, worth reading:

Rod Adams at Forbes: NRDC Announces PG&E Has Agreed to Kill Diablo Canyon
James Conca at Forbes: Pro-Nuclear March In San Francisco to Protest Closing of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant
Michael Shellenberger at Environmental Progress: Why Diablo Canyon Will Live--and Why the Corrupt PGE-IBEW-NRDC Proposal Will Fail

And, just for fun, to see some of the stakes in this particular case, from the San Diego Times Tribune yesterday: Heat wave raises worries about power outages. To quote the article:

Rotating outages result when utilities, largely due to gas issues, don't have enough supply to meet demand.
"We would tell the utilities to turn off the power to a substation...until.... we can go back to balancing supply and demand in real time," Greenlee (of California ISO) said.
Outages can last from 30 to 90 minutes.
But Greenlee said as of Monday afternoon, the system was holding up.

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In other words:

Sign!
Donate!

Save Fitzpatrick: An Opportunity to Help

Fitzpatrick Nuclear plant is now the subject of a hard-hitting website, Upstate Energy Jobs.  The name of the site's video expresses why Fitzpatrick should be saved: This is What Closing a Power Plant Looks Like. (Video is also embedded below.)

You can take action to save the plant. On the home page, there are links to Sign the Petition and a link to Contact the Governor.   I urge you to follow both links.  Also, I encourage you to explore the website, which includes links to news about Fitzpatrick.

From the About page of the website:  Upstate Energy Jobs is funded by the County of Oswego Industrial Development Agency.  All hail to the sensible people of Upstate New York!  (My husband was born and raised in Upstate New York.)

Go to the Home Page, sign the petition, write an email to the Governor. I am grateful to Oswego Industrial Development Agency for building a page with convenient links--to help us make a difference.




Sad side note: Can you imagine any official Windham County governmental organization doing anything to save the jobs at Vermont Yankee?  I can't.  Looking back at everything, I am amazed by the lack of community feeling in greater Windham County.  End note.

Since upstate New York has a local movement that is trying to save the plant, let's help them.

Carbon taxes and the Fitzpatrick plant: a reason to sign the petition

The petition

There's a petition to save the Fitzpatrick plant.  The petition is addressed to Entergy.  I think it should be addressed to Governor Cuomo, as you can tell by my post on Governor Cuomo, Fitzpatrick and Money.  At any rate, I signed the petition.

http://www.savefitzpatrick.com

I encourage you to sign the petition to show support of Fitzpatrick.  More signatures will be a good thing, wherever the petition is addressed.

Carbon dioxide taxes?

Some of the people who signed the petition also left comments.  I was particularly struck by a comment that noted that many states are considering carbon taxes.  If carbon is taxed, that will increase people's electricity bills. If Fitzpatrick is not running, and most of its power is made by natural gas plants, there will be an increase in people's electricity bills.

I decided to do a quick and dirty calculation of the amount of money Fitzpatrick will save New Yorkers…if there is a carbon tax.  Here's my calculation, and my sources.  I invite comments and corrections.

Fitzpatrick and carbon taxes:

How much energy: 
Fitzpatrick makes 838 MW of dependable capability. Source, Entergy Nuclear.
There are 8760 hours in a year.
I assumed a 90% capacity factor, which is on the low side for the nuclear fleet.
At that point, we have 838 MW x 1000 kW per MW x 8760 hours per year x 0.9 hours operating per year, and we have

Fitzpatrick produces 6,606,792,000 kWh in a year of operation.

Saving how much carbon:
Okay, now, what if that power was produced by a gas-fired plant?

Gas plants make, on average, 1.21 lbs of carbon dioxide per kWh. Source: EIA

This number is an average for gas-fired plants, and no doubt someone will come up with a lower number, with the assumption that only bright shiny new combined cycle plants should be counted.  Since these shiny new plants would still only be part of the local fleet of gas plants, I will stick with my number.

carbon dioxide

So, now we have 7,994,218,000 lbs of carbon dioxide being produced if Fitzpatrick nuclear station is replaced by gas plants.  And now, a brief pause to realize that that Fitzpatrick save 7 billion pounds of carbon dioxide per year.

Next, let's look at money.

In terms of carbon taxes:
Carbon taxes. This is where it gets a little tricky. There are plenty of carbon tax bills introduced, often for as much as $40 per ton.  However, that feels a little theoretical for me.  I can't find a place where a carbon tax is really that high.

So I went to a website that compares carbon taxes, world-wide, and came to the conclusion that $20/ton, as in British Columbia, was a number that I was more comfortable with using.

 7,994,218,000 lbs of carbon dioxide x 1 ton/2000 lbs is 3,997,109 tons of carbon dioxide.

At $20/per ton, this would be $79,942,183 dollars paid in carbon taxes, by the citizens of New York, to support the natural gas power that would replace Fitzpatrick.

Call to Action!

Assuming only modest carbon tax is introduced, a tax at half the number ($40/ton) that is often bandied about, continued operation of Fitzpatrick will save the ratepayers of New York, about $80 million a year in carbon taxes. If the big number ($40/ton) is used, Fitzpatrick will save ratepayers $160 million a year in carbon taxes.

In short, if the state of New York is serious about reducing carbon dioxide and saving money for all ratepayers, a modest amount of support to Fitzpatrick is in the interest of everyone in the state.

(And that doesn't even count the well-known volatility of natural gas prices. Natural gas won't be cheap forever.)

So, your action is simple:

Sign the petition! 

And, if you live in New York, contact your state legislator and your congressman.