California lawmakers vote to keep Diablo Canyon online

> I know nuclear isn't perfect and building new reactors is a huge challenge but it's a great stopgap solution for the next 100-odd years until a sufficient amount of solar & wind can be deployed to replace the reactors.

I don't understand that? If you have functioning nuclear, why would you ever go to wind and solar.

Do you just want your power supply to be less reliable and have a massive dependency of storage?

If you have nuclear, why would you ever go of it? There is no reason what so ever to do so.

Even fusion will not replace fission. Nuclear fission is the cheapest possible energy by in a first principles analysis (except maybe some Aneutronic fusion maybe but we can't really even analyise what that would be).

I feel like there should be ways to engineer around this especially for reactors near the coast. Use some of the power from the plant to desalinate sea water or engineer to use sea water?

A few reasons: The amount of fissile materials on Earth isn't infinite. As far as I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong... this is not my professional background), there are only ~230 years of uranium available.[1] And that's at today's consumption rates; build the amount of reactors we need and it's even less. Maybe we'd find more or maybe there's some other fissile material to use (thorium?). I'm not knowledgeable enough about the specifics to be honest, but it is finite on some timeline. Whereas wind and solar will last as long as the sun lasts.

Aside from that, there's always the small risk of malfunctions and nuclear proliferation. Even with newer tech that could greatly limit the possibility of accidents to near zero (it's already absurdly low) there's still the constant need of water for cooling and geopolitical issues causing problems like what is happening right now with the Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine.

That's why I say it's not perfect but that it does serve an incredibly important purpose in the near term to dramatically lower CO2 emissions and buy time to either deploy more wind & solar, extend the life of nuclear, or maybe deploy fusion if we ever finally crack that egg. Exactly how that looks would likely be a question for our children to answer.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...

The issue I have with this argument is that if we don't dramatically reduce CO2 emissions far, far more people are going to die from climate change than nuclear might kill.

Plus, as another commenter already mentioned, the amount of deaths coal is responsible for is 470x higher than nuclear from air pollution alone. We accept these deaths for coal but somehow have a problem with a much smaller number of deaths from nuclear in the theoretical case of a massive incident. I'm not saying there's an acceptable number of deaths to just live with but pragmatically speaking I'll gladly take the proven option that kills orders of magnitudes fewer people than the status quo is already doing.

> Compared with nuclear power, coal is responsible for five times as many worker deaths from accidents, 470 times as many deaths due to air pollution among members of the public, and more than 1,000 times as many cases of serious illness, according to a study of the health effects of electricity generation in Europe.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nuclear-power-is-saf...