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Nuclear power plant owners seek damages

July 18, 2013

san onofreeSouthern California Edison, the owner of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, served Mitsubishi with a notice that it will seek reimbursement for the cost of shutting the plant

In June, Southern California Edison retired San Onofre’s Unit 2 and Unit 3 reactors and laid off approximately 1,000 employees after it was determined that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries had supplied the plant with defective equipment that caused issues to pervasive to fix.

Southern California Edison determined the cost of shuttering the plant at $2.1 billion.

Frank Gillespie, a Mitsubishi senior vice president, said in an interview last week that he believes Mitsubishi’s liability is limited to the $137 million value of equipment his company supplied to San Onofre.

 


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I don’t blame Edison for wanting some compensation. This all started with the purchase from Mtsubishi. Remember it will be the Edison customers paying for this in the long run, so I say make those responsible pony up the due.


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Edison could easily recoup the losses from this plant by building/operating another nuclear plant.


Wind & solar are never going to fulfill the California electricity consumer’s needs at a reasonable cost. We can either build it ourselves or let neighboring states build them and then pay through the nose to buy it from them. Might as well have the jobs & economic benefits in our state.


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There are at least two problems with that. First, there is no place to store nuclear waste long term and, for political reasons, there may never be one. It will be hard to get a permit to build a nuke plant unless that detail is resolved.


The second problem is that the state is full of NIMBYs. Justified or not, any proposed location is going to get heavy local/regional opposition even if the waste situation is resolved. I think that there will have to be a much higher level of electrical service problems before enough people will give real consideration to nuclear power to allow a new plant to be built.


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I agree with both of you.


Now stop and consider: A federal push on federal land (read VAFB etc) for ‘strategic power reserves’ that incorporates nuclear power plants. If this is done on the federal level on federal ground, it circumvents CA NIMBYs, the coastal commission, etc.


Consider: 2 new plants per state @ $10 billion per plant = 1 Trillion dollars. Think of economic boost throughout the strata of our society that would be benefited. All the way from mining raw materials to universities training scientists and engineers. Had we spent our stimulus $$ on nuke plants nationwide, our economy would be booming right now and we would have the infrastructure to power our passenger car fleet.


Waste? Reprocess & reuse. If Johnston Island was acceptable for storing chemical weapons, it should be acceptable for storing nuclear waste. There is already a contaminated plutonium area there now, why not store a few casks there inside of the left over bunkers???


1

It was hard enough getting San Onofre and Diablo built thirty plus years ago. With the political climate the way it is in California today…………It is NEVER going to happen.


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