It's been 10 years since the Palo Verde nuclear power plant had a major accident, that was worse than Fukushima, but less than that of Chernobyl. Prevailing westerly winds carried the fallout from the accident over the Phoenix metropolitan area, causing large swathes of the city to be evacuated, and then finally abandoned.
What would have happened if there was no such accident? Would Arizona still thrive? Would the US use more nuclear power?
The nuclear aspects of the Incident have been well discussed (including how they contributed to the successful failure at Fukushima), but let's not forget the significant disruption to the regional power grid.
Palo Verde was identified as a major risk area on the West Coast power grid by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council for years prior to the Incident. The simultaneous failure of 2 out of the 3 units was considered a worst case scenario for grid stability, and of course when the earthquake hit not only the power plant but the entire power grid was hit with a beyond design basis incident. Within moments Southern California lost its connection to Palo Verde. Since it was winter California was exporting power to the Northwest through the
Pacific DC Intertie and quickly shut down the connection, collapsing the Northwest power grid until the hydropower plants kicked in. The California grid still collapsed anyways when the nuclear and thermal power plants went offline due to the earthquake and power grid fluctuations. The Northwest barely averted its own power crisis due to clever coordination with major industrial consumers and using what little water it had stored at that time of year and still had to conserve power during the next summer, but California was left reeling for years, and there was the huge legal battle over the future of
San Onofre,
Diablo Canyon, and all the other nuclear power units in the state.
Columbia Generating Station is now set for early closure too, and
Boardman and
Centralia were given a new lease on life. The Incident also led to
WNP-1 and WNP-4 being canceled for what now seems to be the last time, bringing an end to the WPPSS (pronounced "whoops") saga. Ironically at the time there was even consideration of undoing the 1999 cancellation of the
WNP-3 and WNP-5 reactors at Satsop, but the Palo Verde Incident ended that.
Here's a map of the power connections at the time of the Incident, so you can see what happened:
It's worth noting the irony of the Palo Verde Incident driving massive growth in natural gas production, especially through fracking, which has led to significantly increased earthquake risk in areas of the United States. Oklahoma is now as seismically active as California.
It's also ironic that nuclear power has seen a resurgence of interest since the successful failure of the units at Fukushima. They were older boiling water reactor units that weren't as advanced as the
Combustion Engineering System 80 units at Palo Verde, but a few relatively minor safety modifications really went a long way. You can see what changes came about due to the Palo Verde Incident
here.