A federal bailout of Diablo Canyon Power Plant should be paused because the government did not properly review the environmental effects of keeping the plant open, environmentalists said in a lawsuit filed this week.
The bailout came from the Department of Energy’s Civilian Nuclear Credits Program and was contingent on DOE completing an environmental impact statement about Diablo Canyon’s continued operation.
Instead of doing that, Friends of the Earth alleged in a lawsuit filed Thursday, DOE combined and passed off as its own a series of environmental reviews about Diablo Canyon conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, some of which date to the 1970s.
Legally, this was “grossly deficient” and failed to examine the conditions that would exist if Diablo Canyon gets the five-year life-extension to 2030 that the state of California seeks, Friends of the Earth said in a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division.
“[T]he bulk of the environmental analysis adopted by DOE here was prepared before the [Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant] was even operational and in fact, the environmental impacts from extending the lifespan of this aging power plant at this point in time have not been adequately addressed or disclosed to the public,” Friends of the Earth wrote in its complaint.
The group asked the court to send DOE’s environmental review of Diablo Canyon back to the agency to be done over. That would effectively pause federal aid to the plant.
DOE’s financial aid to Diablo Canyon operator Pacific Gas and Electric was to be paid out over four years between 2023 and 2026 after the agency’s formal decision in January to sign off on its review of the old NRC and Atomic Energy Commission reviews.
Pacific Gas and Electric in November applied for a license extension with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to keep Diablo Canyon’s Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors online. In 2022, California, as part of its own billion-plus-dollar bailout, approved a five-year life-extension for the plant. However, the utility applied for a 20-year license extension from NRC.
This week’s lawsuit is only the latest court challenge to the proposed Diablo Canyon extension.
In January, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in a lawsuit filed by another group of environmentalists who claim that the NRC broke the law by allowing Diablo Canyon to stay open beyond the expiration dates of its current operating licenses while the commission reviews the license extension filed in November.
Diablo Canyon’s reactors would shut down in 2024 and 2025, respectively, without a license extension. In January, NRC staff said they might need two years to review Pacific Gas and Electric’s license extension application.
