They botched the refitting of San Onofre, however, so this really isn’t a big surprise. The reactors have been mildly leaky for decades and as the thick cement walls keep getting bombarded by on-site stored spent fuel in excess of original design parameters, the concrete becomes more brittle as the radiation strips molecules and breaks more of the covalent bonds formed in the cement when it was cast. This leads to more vibration and resonance. The result is trouble.

I’m convinced more than ever, that most California (i.e. SCE, SDGE) utilities don’t give a damn about producing enough power so long as they can acquire it from somewhere and then charge their customers many times what it cost them. Brown outs mean nothing so long as their profits are there. Here, a brown out is as rare as an Earthquake – it doesn’t happen.

California is now a marketplace where the companies can sell their poisonous, UV irradiating fluorescent bulbs to a demographic not sharp enough to discern quality from crap. The “first generation American” demographic is exploited in many ways. They are usually just happy to be in America and so pay little heed to the lesser quality B & C grade products sold in the markets or the fast food places. They are happy to have electricity and running water and don’t complain about institutionalized brown outs or lead and arsenic in the drinking water. When the demographics were different the they could never get away with that sort of thing.

The same is true for the entire auto industry. Safety, which was a key selling point in the late 70s and through the 80s and 90s is no longer mentioned and only fuel economy or power are focused upon. Most cars sold offer up a one way ticket to the morgue if you get into a decent crash. But the less people expect, the easier it is to keep degrading products and services while still profiting. Global companies have been salivating at the prospects China’s new middle class offers. First generation middle class Chinese will never have parents who say, “That product is shit! It was better twenty years ago.”

This has stumbled off the topic, but that’s the way it rolls.