Unreported other than in a British newspaper, is the fact that Southern California Edison bowed to political pressure from liberal Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer in making the decision last Friday to permanently shut down its two nuclear reactors at San Onofre, because of problems in one of the reactors steam generator systems. The plant had provided electricity for 1.4 million households. The closure of the facility leaves just one operational nuclear power facility in the state, the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County.
The Guardian newspaper reports that week before last Boxer, an ardent supporter of environmental causes in the Senate, contacted the U.S. Justice Department and asked that they initiate an investigation of the plant, which was in the process of restarting one of its two reactors on a limited basis.
California’s available sources of energy have been on the downswing for sometime. Production of electricity by nuclear energy will be greatly reduced by the closure at San Onofre. Add to this that in 2007, the California Energy Commission banned energy acquisition from coal-fueled power plants, here and in other states. Earlier in that year, liberals in the Legislature, supported by Governor Schwarzenegger, enacted a ban on state utility investment in traditional coal-fired plants providing energy to the state. New offshore oil drilling has essentially been banned for the last four decades. Energy outages, shortages, rolling-blackouts and emergencies have become fairly common in the last 15 or so years. And three bills that would put a moratorium on “fracking” to obtain new sources of oil in the Central Valley are currently being supported by liberal Democrats in the Legislature. Energy prices are higher for Californians than in the rest of the nation, a great deal of employment and economic opportunity is being shelved by our lack of an energy production program, and one report claims California’s misguided liberal energy policies are responsible for raising costs of power to the consumer by 33%.
California has done an abysmal job exploiting its energy resources, which should be used to increase economic growth and employment. Crude oil production has fallen steadily and drastically over the last decades, and this persistent reduction in production coincides with California’s statewide economic decline. According to state government statistics, statewide oil production in November of 1995 was at 971.3 thousand barrels per day; but by November 2012, production had dropped to 536.3 thousand barrels per day, a loss of 46% annually.
We cannot know for sure if maintaining electricity production at San Onofre really threatened the environment. But we can see that Edison’s bowing to Boxer’s political pressure means even less energy production in our own state in the future, and given that liberal Democrats in Sacramento do not have a plan for expanding energy production in any way in the state, we should all expect shortages, and to be paying a lot more for power, in the future, thanks to the Democrats.