Erma1ina wrote:
....
... The Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which shut down
its Rancho Seco nuclear plant in 1989 due to high costs and chronically
poor performance, is unlikely to want to go down that road again."

...

SMUD was, regrettably, a _VERY_ poor nuclear operating utility--the
problems there were really very little related to the power plant per se
but to poor (primarily inexperienced w/ nuclear generation vis a vis
fossil so they didn't control the interaction w/ the NRC and follow the
regulatory requirements to the tee. That led to the extremely high
costs in having to try to meet those after the fact which is far more
difficult and costly than doing so originally). I was, in fact, working
in the commercial nuclear division of the particular reactor vendor
during construction and went through plant startup and first year or so
of operation so know the plant pretty well and knew SMUD well also.

I'd have to refresh my memory on the actual shutdown decision politics,
but as I recall it was a plebiscite organized by the various activist
groups of the time that made the final determination rather than a
Utility District decision.

IMO of the time, if they would have brought in an experienced operating
contractor to oversee the plant day-to-day operation early on rather
than trying to operate it inhouse it would be a positive impact
economically to the state and an additional 850 MWe on the grid today.

SMUD, btw, wasn't terribly unique to several other relatively small and
first-time-nuclear utilities. They and others tended to think of them
as simply generation units w/ a nuclear boiler instead of coil or oil
which they were used to operating. Consequently, they generally would
name an experienced fossil manager as head of the nuclear project and
that would start the problems of not building the correct nuclear
management and operation mindset of even more precise attention to
detail. Many of the "performance issues" in these cases really had very
little at all to do with other than paper audit trails on welds or
similar QA/QC processes. The problem would be, when a failure to
document was found, it could be months down the road after a zillion
more welds had been completed or thousands of yards of concrete poured
or whatever and to have to go back and qualify the oversight was
terribly expensive.

Experienced nuclear utilities (often w/ ex-nuclear Navy-trained folks
who had already been thru the drill w/ Rickover) managed to avoid many
those mistakes; or at least minimized them.

If I were in the area, I'd have no qualms of a restart of Rancho Seco
from the plant safety aspect at all. It is, of course, out of the
question at this point as the plant wasn't maintained w/ the idea of a
restart.

quake-prone CA and nukes --

If there were a serious quake, in containment would be an ideal place to
be to ride it out.

--

Regarding the general issue the nuclear power in
[fresh-water-starved-fault-riddled] California:

"Rivers in California . . . are increasingly impractical and unavailable
for nuclear power. . . . there is continued demand for fresh water from
agriculture, industry and residential development. In the southern
United States, recent droughts have resulted in nuclear reactors being
shut down due to low water levels and high water temperatures in rivers
and lakes. The bulk of California's rivers are fed by Sierra snowmelt,
which means that drought and global warming (combined with the other
demands for water), tend to make river water an unreliable long-term
source, particularly in the quantities needed by nuclear plants."

and

"The Pacific Ocean provides the water for California's two operating
nuclear power plants, Diablo Canyon (on the Central Coast) and San
Onofre (between Los Angeles and San Diego), and there is certainly
plenty of ocean water. One problem in siting new nuclear plants on the
coast becomes apparent upon looking at seismic hazard maps - the coastal
region of California also is largely an area of significant seismic
risk. Even the staunchest advocates of nuclear plants should hesitate to
locate a reactor in an earthquake-prone area.

"In short, siting a nuclear plant in California presents a dilemma - if
you site it where there is plenty of water, you are increasing your
earthquake risk."