California Energy Officials Plan for Life Without San Onofre
By Abby Sewell, Los Angeles Times
June 24, 2012
California energy officials are beginning to plan for the possibility of a long-range future without the San Onofre nuclear power plant.
The plant’s unexpected, nearly five-month outage has had officials scrambling to replace its power this summer and has become a wild card in already complicated discussions about the state’s energy future.
That long-range planning process already involves dealing with the possible repercussions of climate change, a mandate to boost the state’s use of renewable sources to 33% of the energy supply by 2020 and another mandate to phase out a process known as once-through cooling, which uses ocean water to cool coastal power plants, that will probably take some other plants out of service.
“Some of the weaknesses we have in the infrastructure [of Southern California] are laid bare by San Onofre,” said Steve Berberich, chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that oversees most of the state’s energy grid.
Before the current closure, 19% of Edison’s power was generated by San Onofre. Though the reactors might never return to that level of operation, replacing the power permanently would take a massive, long-term planning effort. The Huntington Beach gas generators will be available only for a few months.
Nuclear energy has been a relatively cheap source of power and one that doesn’t contribute to global warming, but the energy is not worth the long-term risk. As we have said before, California, with its network of earthquake faults and the environmental health of the ocean to consider, is the wrong place for such plants. Now is the perfect time for Edison, and the state as a whole, to begin the planning for a non-nuclear future.