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Beercourt, how about that west coast pay, $37+/150+, for ANSI techs! Rare, but real!
If you look at the turn that this thread had taken, you'll notice that Bartlett is packaging their jobs so that your season is set in advance. Diablo Canyon will not be a part of the plan, so working one outage there could effectively lock you out of everything else for the season.
This isn't so bad. You can make as much money for one outage at DC as you can make for the whole Illinois circuit. Given a choice, I'd be heading west. But, Diablo Canyon only hires a limited number of people who are hand-picked.
They have been doing this for years, so their effect on pay rates outside their fence has already been realized. It is not as huge an effect as one might expect. Here's one perspective that you can consider.
DC takes 50 techs out of circulation, rather than raising pay to try to lure them back (which would be impossible) a site might consider that they can get whoever is left for LESS money - considering that they are paying for the HP's who weren't good enough to make the top 50.
It's kind of like taking all the peanuts out of the box of Cracker Jack. As a mixture, the stuff is worth $.25 a box (?). Without the nuts, I'm not going to give you more than a dime; certainly not going to pay $.50.
So, you see; the Diablo Canyon effect on technician pricing could actually be a negative. In reality, I don't think so. I think that the difference only matters to those techs who are picked for DC, and not to anyone else.
This supply and demand thing is really the sixth-grade version of economics. In the real world, there are so many other forces affecting the market prices that it is just too hard to move them with one action. The step changes in pay and per diem have only barely kept up with the rate of inflation - perhaps lagging it. There will be pay increases in the future, but not because of Diablo or because of outage schedules, or because of an aging and dwindling pool of techs, They will be the result of the net effect of all these things and others, but never enough to make us stop arguing over them here.