California state lawmakers have recently pivoted from ending the state’s nuclear moratorium to instead conducting a study on the potential role of advanced reactors to meet state’s clean energy goals.
The shifting of the bill, AB 2647, to a study came after the author of the bill, California Assembly Member Lisa Calderon (D), office received recommendations from committee members and experts, according to an April 21 LinkedIn post from Ryan Pickering, head of development at Oppenheimer Energy.
“California’s nuclear moratorium has always carried a clear condition: it may be lifted when there exists a way to dispose of the long-lived radioactive waste,” Haakon Williams, executive director of Committee to Bridge the Gap, said in an April 22 article. “It has now been 50 years since the state put that condition in place, and those decades have revealed it to be a wise policy. We are hardly any closer today than we were in 1976 to figuring out how to responsibly dispose of spent nuclear fuel, which remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.”
California’s ban on building new nuclear plants, put in place in 1976, came as the United States failed to establish a permanent national repository for nuclear waste. Calderon (D) introduced the initial version of the bill on Feb. 20. It sought to exempt advanced reactors from the state’s moratorium and effectively remove the ban.
Calderon’s amended bill, which was tweaked on April 6 and April 16, would now order California public agencies to conduct an assessment of advanced nuclear reactors, nuclear workforce and waste management. The California Energy Commission would be mandated to conduct a full lifecycle systems cost analysis of nuclear against other energy sources.
If signed into law, the analysis report must be submitted to the state government by July 1, 2027. AB 2647 passed out of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee on April 20 in a 11 – 1 vote and the Assembly Appropriations Committee on April 22 in a 16 – 0 vote.
Over the past two months, several environmental groups, such as the Brookdale, Calif-based Committee to Bridge the Gap and the Union of Concerned Scientists, have opposed the original version of the bill noting that California is still having to deal with an extensive amount of high-level radioactive waste.
California is currently dealing with the decommissioning of the San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station in San Clemente, Calif. and casks of spent nuclear fuel from the decommissioned Humboldt Bay Power Plant.