An urgent attempt to prolong the life of California’s final nuclear power plant has encountered a problem that will be challenging to fix: a lack of time.
According to a state report released on Monday, federal authorities won’t take any action on a request to prolong the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant’s operating lifespan until late 2026. The plant’s planned permanent shutdown by the middle of 2025 is the issue.
The operator Pacific Gas & Electric’s request to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for an unusual exemption that would allow the decades-old reactors to continue producing electricity while the NRC reviews the application – not yet filed – to extend its licenses for as much as two decades could determine the future of the state’s remaining reactors.
Reactors are expected to shut down in November 2024 and August 2025, respectively. On a beachfront bluff halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the factory is situated.
The exemption would amount to a risky, first-ever short cut that would expose the public to safety risks from reactors that started operating in the middle of the 1980s, anti-nuclear activists and national environmental groups argued in a petition to the federal agency on Monday. They urged the agency to deny the request.
The exemption that PG&E is asking for has never before been granted. The NRC has never permitted a reactor to continue operating past the expiration dates of its license without carefully evaluating the safety and environmental hazards, according to a statement from Diane Curran, an attorney with the anti-nuclear campaign group Mothers for Peace.
The disagreement over the proposed exemption is the most recent front in a protracted conflict over the reactors’ safety. The Diablo Canyon plant’s construction started in the 1960s, but detractors claim that possible shaking from adjacent earthquake faults, which were not acknowledged when the design was first approved, could cause equipment damage and radiation leaks. Only one nearby fault was found until 2008. The facility is seismically safe, according to PG&E, and federal authorities concur.
Formerly in favor of dismantling the plant, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom last year changed his mind and argued that it should continue to operate after its scheduled shutdown to prevent potential blackouts as the state switches to solar and other renewable sources. The Legislature dismantled a convoluted 2016 agreement between environmentalists, plant worker unions, and the utilities to shut down the facility by 2025 at his request, creating a means to keep it open for longer. Given the state’s enacted energy regulations, the utility claimed it shifted course.
Given the complexity of changing direction on a plant that was slated for permanent retirement but now needs to prepare for a possible longer lifespan, PG&E executives have stated that they are eager for assurance regarding the plant’s future.
In October, the company asked the NRC to resume reviewing a 2009 proposal to prolong the plant’s existence. The application had been withdrawn after PG&E declared in 2016 that it would shut down the reactors when their licenses expired.
However, the government rejected the idea of going back in time to resume reviewing the earlier proposal, leaving PG&E with the laborious chore of completing a new application, which it anticipates filing by the end of the year.
An extended license request review normally takes two years or longer. Without additional licenses, one or both reactors might need to shut down while the NRC evaluates the applications.
That prompted PG&E to make a different request, asking the NRC to permit the plant to operate past its already authorized term while the federal organization reviews the license extensions. The predicted date of the decision is next month.
The existing license often remains in force up until the NRC’s application evaluation is finished if a nuclear plant files for a license extension at least five years before the expiration of the current license. This is true even if the current license has officially beyond its expiration date. However, PG&E refused to reach the typical five-year standard.
The corporation said in documents it submitted to the NRC that the requested alteration would not constitute an unreasonable danger to the public health and safety.
Without the exemption, the NRC would have much less time than usual, less than a year, to complete the license-extension examination before the existing license expires and the plant is forced to shut down.
The environmental organizations claimed that carrying out a hurried evaluation in a matter of months “would be difficult, if not impossible,” and that doing so would endanger the safety of a plant that was previously slated for closure.
Before a longer run is allowed, the NRC evaluation must be finished in order to ensure that ongoing operation of the reactors would be safe, they wrote.
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