California regulators voted unanimously Thursday to shutter the state’s last nuclear power plant by 2025.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear facility is scheduled for an incremental shutdown, phasing out Unit One in 2024 and Unit Two in 2025.
The plant produces about 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually, enough to power 1.7 million homes and nearly 10 percent of California’s energy mix.
The California Public Utilities Commission voted to close the nuclear plant as the federal licenses for each unit expire, and move the state toward 100 percent renewable energy.
“With this decision, we chart a new energy future by phasing out nuclear power here in California,” CPUC President Michael Picker said, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. “We’ve looked hard at all the arguments, and we agree the time has come.”
Expecting to close the plants when the federal leases ran out, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company had brought together environmental groups and local officials in 2016 to construct a plan for the CPUC to review and approve. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]HOLLYWOOD, Ala. — Two massive cooling towers sit like concrete giants in the middle of rural Alabama, standing out amid the hilly countryside. Each is built using 500 feet tall rebar-reinforced concrete.
Despite their size, you don’t realize how big the towers are until you’re inside. Thousands upon thousands of filters line the cooling tower floor to collect water molecules filtering upward.
A plant manager walked us from the cooling towers over to the containers where two Babcock & Wilcox-designed reactors are housed. We walked into what looked like giant grain silos, then passed through the kind of door you’d expect to see on a submarine.
Before long we’re staring down over a nuclear reactor. It’s a site relatively few people have the opportunity to see, and we were only able to see it because the reactor is offline and not emitting any radiation.
In fact, the Bellefonte Nuclear Generating Station has been sitting idle for three decades since the project was first put on hold.
Frank Haney hopes President Donald Trump will give him the funding to bring the defunct nuclear plant online. Haney is asking the Department of Energy for a loan guarantee to finally bring the plant online and create thousands of jobs in the region.
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