Nuclear pede here. The reason why SONGS shut down is not political, it was economical and due to a major engineering oopsie.
During a major overhaul as part of the license extension of the plant, they had to replace all the steam generators. These are the huge pressure vessels with hundreds of tubes in a big U-shape where the water from the reactor flows to boil into steam. The new steam generators were supposed to be designed to be identical to the original ones, but due to some engineering oversights, there were small differences that went unnoticed.
It turned out the small design differences caused the U-tubes to suffer failures due to harmonic vibrations. This couldn't be fixed, it would require completely replacing the entire tube bundle at a cost of billions of dollars. The plant owners decided that the plant was a lost cause at this point even though they had just spent billions overhauling it for a license renewal, because it would cost billions more to fix it and the economic break-even time would just be too far in the future to make it worth it.
Anyway, sad story that sucks but it is what it is. Now, Diablo Canyon on the other hand is another story. They are deciding to outright abandon the plant on its license date and not renew its license for another 20 years which is crazy. That is just money down the toilet and that is most likely for political reasons.
There was more than that. They could have plugged those bad tubes and ran the plant at reduced power which would reduce coolant flow which would remove the vibrations. But antinukes found a way to delay restart process via some bullshit paperwork issues. Then local govt threatened to pull their ocean water use permit for some other bullshit reasons because its full of CA envirotards. So the power company saw the writing on the wall and gave in.
Nuclear pede here. The reason why SONGS shut down is not political, it was economical and due to a major engineering oopsie.
During a major overhaul as part of the license extension of the plant, they had to replace all the steam generators. These are the huge pressure vessels with hundreds of tubes in a big U-shape where the water from the reactor flows to boil into steam. The new steam generators were supposed to be designed to be identical to the original ones, but due to some engineering oversights, there were small differences that went unnoticed.
It turned out the small design differences caused the U-tubes to suffer failures due to harmonic vibrations. This couldn't be fixed, it would require completely replacing the entire tube bundle at a cost of billions of dollars. The plant owners decided that the plant was a lost cause at this point even though they had just spent billions overhauling it for a license renewal, because it would cost billions more to fix it and the economic break-even time would just be too far in the future to make it worth it.
Anyway, sad story that sucks but it is what it is. Now, Diablo Canyon on the other hand is another story. They are deciding to outright abandon the plant on its license date and not renew its license for another 20 years which is crazy. That is just money down the toilet and that is most likely for political reasons.
There was more than that. They could have plugged those bad tubes and ran the plant at reduced power which would reduce coolant flow which would remove the vibrations. But antinukes found a way to delay restart process via some bullshit paperwork issues. Then local govt threatened to pull their ocean water use permit for some other bullshit reasons because its full of CA envirotards. So the power company saw the writing on the wall and gave in.