Californians are, like, so HAWT

Skydancing has an interesting post up about the heat wave in southern California. Bottom line: The Powers-That-Be have asked the citizenry to jack the AC up to 78 degrees in order to keep the stressed-out power plants operational. This directive has lots of Californians steaming.

Naturally, there's now a lot of talk in CA about making the shuttered San Onofre nuke plant operational again. Even locals who hate nuclear power love to drive by this plant (located just off the San Diego Freeway), if only because...well, look at it. Whoever designed this thing was a visual artist of great wit. The nipples even have red lights on top.

Skydancing author Quixote smells a big, fat, nuclear-powered rat...

They’ve been bewailing the temporary shutdown of the San Onofre nuke like the loss of the last drop of drinking water. (The thing has cracks in hundreds of steam pipes due to design flaws.) It provides 2200 Megawatts. It’s loss is terrible. We’re all dying out here.

A complete load of horsefeathers. I live near two natural gas power stations, and they’re barely ever even on. If it’s as bad as all that, you’d think they’d have to use them, yes? One produces 560 Megawatts, the other 1516MW. But they don’t. Especially the 1516MW one. If I see it running two days out of the year, that’s a lot. Admittedly, I don’t spend my life staring at it, so I might miss a day or two, but not much more than that. The other one seems to run maybe 14 days out of the year.

Of course, Californians have been snookered previously by the energy mavens. Remember the Enron scam? At the time, you were called a "conspiracy theorist" if you said that the crisis was deliberately manufactured. Nobody says that now.

Do the Powers That Be hope to get away with that scam again? They must think that California is filled with big boobs.