Ab 1632 Assessment Of California S Operating Nuclear Plants

This report assessed the potential vulnerability of California's largest baseload power plants, Diablo Canyon Power Plant and San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, to a major disruption due to a seismic event or plant aging and other major issues related to the future role of these plants in the state's energy portfolio. The report considers the seismic vulnerabilities of the nuclear plant sites, structures, and spent fuel storage facilities and the vulnerabilty of the plants to age-related degradation. It also considers the impacts of a major disruption at these plants on California's transmission grid and power supply. Finally, it considers policy areas related to California's operating nuclear power plants, including cost, land use, and local economic impacts of nuclear waste accumulation at the plant sites; economic and environmental tradeoffs among alternative power supply options; and potential implications of renewing the operating licenses of these plants. Figures. This is a print on demand report.

Nuclear power is not clean, cheap, or safe. With Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the nuclear industry's record of catastrophic failures now averages one major disaster every decade. After three US-designed plants exploded in Japan, many countries moved to abandon reactors for renewables. In the United States, however, powerful corporations and a compliant government still defend nuclear power-while promising billion-dollar bailouts to operators. Each new disaster demonstrates that the nuclear industry and governments lie to "avoid panic," to preserve the myth of "safe, clean" nuclear power, and to sustain government subsidies. Tokyo and Washington both covered up Fukushima's radiation risks and-when confronted with damning evidence-simply raised the levels of "acceptable" risk to match the greater levels of exposure. Nuclear Roulette dismantles the core arguments behind the nuclear-industrial complex's "Nuclear Renaissance." While some critiques are familiar-nuclear power is too costly, too dangerous, and too unstable-others are surprising: Nuclear Roulette exposes historic links to nuclear weapons, impacts on Indigenous lands and lives, and the ways in which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission too often takes its lead from industry, rewriting rules to keep failing plants in compliance. Nuclear Roulette cites NRC records showing how corporations routinely defer maintenance and lists resulting "near-misses" in the US, which average more than one per month. Nuclear Roulette chronicles the problems of aging reactors, uncovers the costly challenge of decommissioning, explores the industry's greatest seismic risks-not on California's quake-prone coast but in the Midwest and Southeast-and explains how solar flares could black out power grids, causing the world's 400-plus reactors to self-destruct. This powerful exposé concludes with a roundup of proven and potential energy solutions that can replace nuclear technology with a "Renewable Renaissance," combined with conservation programs that can cleanse the air, and cool the planet.