A Nuclear Regulatory Commission board in May plans to decide whether a citizen’s group can contest a utility’s plan to renew a license for storing the spent fuel of California’s last nuclear power plant, the commission said Monday.
An NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board planned to hear arguments on May 24 from the San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace environmental group, the commission wrote in a press release. The proceedings, which also will feature Diablo Canyon Power Plant owner Pacific Gas and Electric, were set for 1:00 p.m. Eastern time at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md.
The antinuclear group is pressing NRC on multiple fronts to prevent what it believes is an illegal plan by Pacific Gas & Electric and the federal and state governments to keep Diablo Canyon open longer than planned after massive clean-energy government subsidies steered to it in 2022.
Mothers for Peace’s opposition to a 40-year license extension for plant’s independent spent fuel storage installation storage facility, the subject of the May hearing, is procedurally separate from, though tactically related to, the main thrust of the group’s plan to block Pacific Gas and Electric from keeping the plant’s two reactors online while NRC processes an application to renew the reactors’ operating license.
The utility wants to extend reactor operators by about five years, to 2030 or so. NRC had not scheduled any hearings in that matter as of Tuesday.
A reactor license extension will take the NRC longer to process than the plant has left on its current license but the commission has agreed to let the plants stay on as long as Pacific Gas and Electric files for the extension by Dec. 31.
That, the environmentalists say, is illegal. The plant must shut down until the utility files for and receives a full license renewal, not merely an extension. A full renewal, the groups said, citing a 31- year-old NRC rulemaking, is the only way to legally keep a plant open for more than 40 years. Diablo Canyon’s Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors will turn 40 in 2025 and 2026, respectively.
The utility last year secured billions of dollars in state and federal bailouts, arising from the government’s desire to preserve sources of carbon-free electrical generation, to keep Diablo Canyon’s two reactors running beyond the respective expiration dates of their current federal licenses: Nov. 2, 2024 for Unit 1 and Aug. 26, 2025 for Unit 2.
It was a dramatic reversal from California’s plans in 2018 to shut the two reactors down forever and phase out nuclear power altogether.
Editor’s note, April 25, 2023, 7:54 a.m. Eastern time. The story was corrected to show that the hearing is about Diablo Canyon’s independent spent fuel storage installation storage facility.
