By John Mecklin

The LA Times and U-T San Diego thoroughly covered the local nuclear power plant’s closing, but the wider energy story is still waiting to be told.

SANTA BARBARA, CA — Nuclear power plants are complex, interdependent systems of systems, and the state and federal bureaucracies that regulate them are labyrinthine. Because anything to do with radiation is politically charged, the regulators and owners of nuclear plants speak a dry language of numbered rules, lettered sub-rules, acronyms, and jargon. Except for the relatively rare outage or accident, news reporting on nuclear power plants tends to revolve around electric rate cases, proceedings so full of qualified quantification as to frustrate most attempts at simplification. Covering this complex of complexity—further complicated by the continuous war between supporters and opponents of nuclear power—is an exercise in explaining the arcane under duress.

Given this reality, reporters at the Los Angeles Times and U-T San Diego did yeoman’s work when Southern California Edison announced in June that it would close the remaining two reactors at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, an iconic beachside facility between Los Angeles and San Diego that had served electricity to some 1.4 million homes. Immediately and in the weeks after the announcement, the Los Angeles Times responded with major stories on the reasons for the decision, the effect the closure will have on the region’s energy supply and electricity consumers, and on the as-yet-uncertain process for decommissioning the plant, which could take decades. U-T San Diego published a similar flurry of well-reported stories that covered the basics of the reasons for the closure, as well as the impact on consumers, workers, and the electricity supply. At both papers, coverage included infographics that effectively explained the problem that forced the plant to close—vibration that caused wear in tubes for the plant’s steam generators. (The Times’s tick-tock takeout on the history of the steam generator snafu, published in July, is especially comprehensive.) The specifics of the San Onofre closing were covered well and thoroughly.

The context within which those basics reside, however, was far less well-examined, and the two major newspapers closest to the San Onofre plant both therefore missed a real opportunity to inform readers about the major energy choices California and the country will need to make in the coming decade.

You can read the rest of the article here.

For more on the San Onofre situation:

The Nation’s Nuclear Plants are Nuked

Nuclear Concerns, Policy Fuel California Energy Storage Boom