Diablo Shutdown Marks End of Atomic Era

[UCmeNdc]

As worldwide headlines have proclaimed, California’s Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) says it will shut its giant Diablo Canyon reactors near San Luis Obispo, and that the power they’ve been producing will be replaced by renewable energy.

PG&E has also earmarked some $350 million to “retain and retrain” Diablo’s workforce, whose union has signed on to the deal, which was crafted in large part by major environmental groups.

On a global scale, in many important ways, this marks the highest profile step yet towards the death of U.S. nuclear power and a national transition to a Solartopia green-powered planet.


snip........

A tiny, top-down “greens for nukes” front group is currently shouting around California in support of Diablo. But this agreement renders the “atomic environmentalist” charade even more marginal.

Meanwhile corporate media outlets throughout U.S. have accepted this Diablo news as nuclear power’s definitive death notice. The SFGate called it the “End of an Atomic Era.” I saw it reported that way on a streaming news wire high above downtown Cleveland. What Linda Seeley, a multi-decade veteran of the San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, thought was a local radio interview went nationwide on NPR.

Closing Diablo will make our largest state nuke-free. The agreement embodies the sixth and seventh U.S. reactor shut-downs announced in the last month, the fifteenth and sixteenth since 2012. WPPSS2, the only other operating reactor on the west coast, is bleeding cash and may be among the next to go.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/diablo_shutdown_marks_end_of_atomic_era_20160623

[Gabi Hayes]

1. what? no more of this? the HELL, you say!

http://small-games.info/s/l/i/I_Was_an_Atomic_Mutant!_1.jpg

[gratuitous]

2. Not quite the end

There's still the little matter of, well, leftover matter that will continue poisoning the environment for some time to come. Let's just say that it's the end of any marginal utility the atomic era might have had. The terrible costs, like Celine Dion's heart, will go on.

[jpak]

3. But...but...but...Nucular Renaissance!!!!1111

[hunter]

4. There are worse things than nuclear power. Fracked gas is the devil.

Fracking puts toxins in our groundwater that have a half-life of FOREVER. The tritium contaminating all that water stored at Fukushima will decay. Many fracking wastes are more dangerous and don't decay.

Fracking puts carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gasses in the air.

Fracked gas, with it's window dressing of solar and wind power, is a terrible alternative to nuclear power.

Most ant-nuclear activism is a different flavor of climate change denial.

The German experience with heavily subsidized solar and wind is a failure. They allowed their heavy industry to run merrily along on cheap 24-7 coal power, and made small business and residents pay very high electric rates for intermittent solar and wind, on top of dirty coal power.

The numbers in Germany speak for themselves:

https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm

Sweden looked at the German experience and has recently decided to abandon policies that would have shut down existing nuclear plants and halted further nuclear development.

Reality sucks.

We can keep using fossil fuels, poisoning ourselves and the natural environment, suffering increasing climate catastrophes, until this civilization collapses.

We can switch to nuclear electric. Your commuter car will be electric. Your public transportation will be electric. Short-hop airline trips will be replaced by electric rail transportation.

Or we can dismantle our high energy industrial society, which would be my choice; I'm some kind of Luddite. Sorry, no more cars, humans return to walking as the primary form of transportation, the population density of urban areas and suburbs increases, electricity is expensive.

The fossil fuel industry ought to have been shut down decades ago. It wasn't. Now we are toast.