Letter To The editor: LTE/LATimes

Start by following the money: 

Nowhere is nuclear power (which DOES emit heat, toxic poisons and radioactive & other carbon) cost competitive with modern renewables.

Solar & wind are VERY substantially cheaper than old operating nukes AND projected new small ones.

Continuing to operate the two uninsured nukes at Diablo Canyon is costing us $11+ billion over market...with no accounting for the unsolved waste problem, local health impacts & the virtual certainty of uninsured apocalyptic explosions when the next quake hits. 

Newsom's war on rooftop solar has already cost CA more than 17,000 jobs & is the chief reason our rates are the highest in the continental US.

The principle challenge to going 100% renewable is the cost & toxicity of lithium-based batteries. the soon-to-come conversion to sodium (already being deployed in electric cars produced by the Chinese BYD) will seal the deal.

CA's 1.8m solar rooftops deliver electricity far cheaper than any fossil/nuke sources. for at least part of virtually every day CA's energy supply is 100% solar/wind/geothermal, at far cheaper cost. 

Much-hyped small reactors (Silly Mythological Rip-offs) are soaring in cost & production times far before the first ones ever hit market . Not one of them will ever be competitive with wind or solar. 

New nukes in France, Finland, Britain, South Carolin, Georgia etc have been economically catastrophic. No private money will fund more here. the primary motivation for new reactors is to produce fissionable Bomb material, & to maintain corporate control over our energy supply. 

But far more new renewable capacity is being installed worldwide than nukes or fossil fueled sources.

Meanwhile, people DID die at Three Mile Island (I was there; see KILLING OUR OWN free on the internet); at least a million humans were killed by Chernobyl (see Yablokov & Yablokov) ; more than 130x radioactive cesium was spewed at Fukushima than by the Bombs at Hiroshima/Nagasaki. 

Works by Sternglass / Gould / Gofman / Wing / Bertels / Caldicott /Mangano et. al. show a constant stream of death being spewed by "normal" radiation from uninsured commercial reactors. 

TMI instantly turned a $900m asset into a $2b liability; Chernobyl cost at least $1 trillion; Fukushima instantly destroyed 4 reactors & shut myriad more, also costing $1 trillion or more. 

There are now 8 nukes in the ukrainian/russian war zone (not counting the 4 at Chernobyl) all of them dangerously vulnerable to drone strikes.

PG&E, SoCalEd et. al. are completely incapable of safely running their grids. Edison totally failed at San Onofre, as well as Altadena & Pacific Palisades; PG&E blew up the battery facility at Moss Landing, burned down our northern forests (killing 80+), incinerated 8 humans in San Bruno & much more. 

Can we really trust them to run nukes?

If LA were solarized the fires that destroyed Altadena & Palisades would never have happened. unless we go to green-based micro-grids, we will burn again.

CA has one route to economic & ecological survival: shut Diablo Canyon & upgrade the grid to 100% renewables, while shifting control to micro-based neighborhood control & advancing sodium-based battery backups.

Given the deterioration of the nuclear fleet, the incompetence of government/utility management, this failed atomic technology spells our economic, ecological and public health demise. 

DO THE MATH!!

Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman wrote Solartopia! Our Green -Powered Earth , & co-wrote Killing Our Own: the Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation.