A few weeks ago Southern California Edison (SCE) was given several billion dollars by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in a General Rate Case (GRC). The timing was perfect for SCE. The Order Initiating Investigation (OII) regarding San Onofre’s twin-reactor wear-and-tear problems is currently in a nebulous 45-day “grace” period, and so the fact that San Onofre wasn’t running and might never run again wasn’t factored in to the GRC that the CPUC just approved — it was as if they didn’t know.
The OII is small potatoes to SCE. To them, the OII is all about the money, and they’re trying to keep as much of it as possible. SCE doesn’t really care about who pays — they don’t expect it to cost them AT ALL: They’re sure that the steam generator (SG) manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) will cover some of the costs, insurance will cover even more, and the ratepayers will cover the rest.
What SCE cares about — all they care about — is that the work to restart/rebuild San Onofre be allowed to proceed, and that the ratepayer’s rates don’t go down just because the — very expensive — power plant is off-line. San Onofre’s monthly expenses are enormous whether it’s running or not. SCE wants ratepayers to pay for rebuilding the reactors, but SCE still doesn’t know how they’ll do that. In the meantime, they simply want the ratepayers to keep paying for San Onofre’s upkeep.
The effort to restart San Onofre is a totally bogus scam for a totally terrible reason: To create deadly poisons in enormous quantities and risk releasing those poisons into the environment, destroying Southern California. Poisons with nowhere safe to put them anywhere. SCE wants to produce some electricity along with these poisons, the poisons will remain but the electricity which will be gone in a flash. Furthermore, the electricity could easily be produced by renewable resources, especially if the same money that will be poured into San Onofre were to be put into solar rooftops and wind turbines instead.
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