Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff need until August 2025 to review an application to keep California’s last nuclear power plant online for five more years according to a letter published online this week.
That is according to a letter, dated Jan. 26, to Paula Gerfen, senior vice president of Generation and chief nuclear officer for Diablo Canyon Power Plant operator Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E). The letter came from Brian Harris, senior project manager for NRC’s License Renewal Projects Branch Division of New and Renewed Licenses in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.
“The NRC staff’s goal is to complete the review of the LRA [license renewal application] in 20 months provided that PG&E fully addresses the staff’s information needs in a timely manner,” reads the letter, published online Monday by the NRC.
Diablo Canyon Unit 1’s license will expire on Nov. 2, 2024. Unit 2’s will expire Aug. 26 2025. NRC has said it will let the plants stay open at least until the commission finishes its review of PG&E’s renewal application.
Even after staff review the application, the commission itself will have to approve it.
In its letter to PG&E, NRC provided a notional timeline of the Diablo Canyon review that called out several milestones.
The deadline for hearing requests and petitions for leave to intervene in the Diablo Canyon license review, all but a certainty in the face of ongoing opposition to the plant from environmental and antinuclear groups, is March 3, according to the letter.
Another major milestone is tentatively set for Oct. 24, when, after a roughly eight-month review, the NRC believes it will publish a draft supplemental environmental impact statement about the plant. The document will be the commission’s study of the environmental effects of keeping Diablo Canyon’s two reactors online until about 2030, five years longer than PG&E’s current operating licenses allow.
In the near-term, NRC last week announced it planned to conduct a pair of public meetings about its planned environmental review of a Diablo Canyon life extension.
In 2022, California and the federal Department of Energy combined to provide PG&E with a roughly $2-billion bailout to keep Diablo Canyon open. The state decided that year to reverse a 2018 law that required PG&E to shut down the reactors when their current operating licenses expire.
California was trying to transition its electrical grid to renewable resources but decided it needed nuclear in the mix, after all.