The San Luis Obispo Tribune Editorial Board
Mon, December 20, 2021, 6:30 AM·5 min read
A couple of weeks ago, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm suggested California consider extending the life of Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.
In an interview with Reuters, she also “hinted she would be willing to give her persuasion skills a try with officials in California,” the news agency wrote.
But in a visit to Sacramento Friday, she walked back those statements. “California has made a decision on Diablo Canyon and they’re moving in a decision to close it down. I totally respect that,” she said.
Good thing, because the president has no authority over a power plant in California.
More to the point, Gov. Gavin Newsom has no intention of intervening to keep the PG&E plant, located in the Central Coast community of Avila Beach, open past 2025, when its Nuclear Regulatory License expires.
“California has the technology to achieve California’s clean energy goals without compromising our energy needs. The pathway is through diverse renewable energy sources, expanded energy storage, and grid climate resiliency,” Newsom spokesperson Erin Mellon wrote in an email to The Tribune. “Our retail energy providers are already in the process of procuring new energy projects to replace the energy produced by Diablo Canyon.”
That all but slams the door on what many saw as the most logical way to keep Diablo open — an emergency order from the governor or the president.
But that almost certainly won’t be enough to discourage the campaign to keep California’s last nuclear power plant operating for at least another five or 10 years.
It’s a cause that has been gaining traction lately, especially since the publication of a Stanford-MIT study that supported keeping the plant operating past 2025, to give the state more time to ramp up offshore wind, solar power and battery storage facilities.
Several editorial boards — including The Washington Post — have come out in favor of Diablo’s continued operation.
More activists are joining a loosely knit coalition that includes scientists, climate change activists, public officials, celebrities and energy sector workers.
And negative public opinion about nuclear power appears to be shifting. In a 2021 national poll by Bisconti Research 76% of 1,000 respondents supported nuclear power.
‘No plausible scenario’
There is no denying that huge obstacles stand in the way of continued operation.
In addition to relicensing, there’s the likelihood that the plant will require an expensive new cooling system and seismic upgrades; strong opposition from activists who say a nuclear power plant never should have been built in an area riddled with earthquake faults; and here’s the kicker — no one has stepped up and expressed a willingness to operate the plant past 2025.
Yet some, like Diablo Canyon employee Heather Hoff, still hold out hope that PG&E will change its mind.
“We have a largely new board of directors,” said Hoff, a co-founder of the activist group Mothers for Nuclear. “I think they are largely pro nuclear and support clean energy.”
Plus, Hoff says the current CEO of PG&E, Patti Poppe, is more sympathetic to their cause than the executives in charge when the closure agreement was reached.
Yet PG&E’s PR team is sticking to its statement: The company is moving forward with the “retirement” of the power plant.
Even if the company were willing to reverse course, it’s too late for a last-minute rescue, according to legal expert Alex Karlin, a retired Nuclear Regulatory Commission judge who has served on the Diablo Canyon Decommissioning Panel.
“There is no plausible scenario whereby (the) NRC or the state could order that the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant continue to operate after 2025. It would violate criminal law for Diablo to operate without the necessary federal and state licenses. Those licenses expire in 2025. There is no realistic way that the NRC licenses can be renewed by 2025,” he wrote in an email.
Not a ‘finger in the dike’
Given the severity of the climate crisis, it’s easy to see why keeping Diablo Canyon open would appear to be a logical, albeit temporary, fix.
But Diablo Canyon cannot be the finger in the dike. And truth be told, there was no little Dutch boy who saved a town from flooding, just as no single power plant is going to “save” California.
The fact is, we’re paying the price for haphazard energy policies and foot-dragging by public officials.
If they had done their job, we would have no need to be looking to extend the life of Diablo Canyon.
We would already have wind turbines off the coast of California.
Rooftop solar would be the norm.
And coal-fired power plants would be gone.
Instead, we’re still years — maybe even decades — away from that.
Rather than ruminate about Diablo, we should hold public officials and utility companies accountable for putting us in this situation in the first place and demanding that we stay on track to meet clean energy goals.
To that end, we need to hear more from the California Energy Commission about where we stand on the transition to 100% clean energy.
Ideally, we would have an easy-to-decipher, concise, up-to-date dashboard that shows where we’re at now; which projects are in the pipeline; and where we’ll be when those projects come online.
If we can keep track of our progress against COVID, we should be able to do the same in our fight against the far greater threat of climate change.
Being stuck in this endless loop of debate over Diablo Canyon accomplishes little — especially if there’s no conceivable way the plant can remain open.
Instead of fighting the inevitable closure of the plant, it’s time to rally for offshore wind, protest new fees for rooftop solar, become more aggressive about conserving energy.
It’s time to finally look beyond Diablo Canyon.
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