San Onofre to Power Down?

The Los Angeles Times reports that “California energy officials are beginning to plan for the possibility of a long-range future without the San Onofre nuclear power plant.”

The story continues:

“The plant’s unexpected, nearly five-month outage has had officials scrambling to replace its power this summer and has become a wild card in already complicated discussions about the state’s energy future.

That long-range planning process already involves dealing with the possible repercussions of climate change, a mandate to boost the state’s use of renewable sources to 33% of the energy supply by 2020 and another mandate to phase out a process known as once-through cooling, which uses ocean water to cool coastal power plants, that will probably take some other plants out of service.”

Heal the Bay has long worked to end once-through cooling, a process in which fresh ocean water is sucked into the power plant, cycled through to cool the systems, and flushed out, destroying thousands of animals a day.

Help our efforts to protect marine animals from threats such as once-through cooling, desalination and habitat degradation.