DID YOU KNOW in 2018 Gavin Newsom signed a very important plan—a two year undertaking to close out the dangerous old brittle, DIABLO CANYON Nuclear Power Plant that sits near earthquake faults and is brittle and is known to have cracks and was supposed to be closed down by 2025? 
 
The transition from nuclear power was going very well.  California on most days gets all its energy from renewals plus battery storage.  Did you know the nuke plant is operated by PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) a private, for-profit corporation—the same one in charge when San Bruno blew up, and City of Paradise burned down.  Do you know that if that plant, built on the same plan as the Fukushima plant in Japan, should have a melt- down, deadly radiation could blow down to the LA basin within 5 hours, radiating millions leading to the risk of deaths and health problems for generations. 
 
Diablo Canyon needs to be shut down.

But did you know that out of the blue, in 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom flip-flopped and killed the deal and is now allowing the nuke plant to continue operating until 2030 and maybe beyond. He rammed through Senate Bill 846 to keep it operating claiming the state needed Diablo Canyon to prevent rolling blackouts like those in 2020. 
 
But Sierra Club’s California Energy/Climate Committee member Robert Freehling in a newspaper editorial (2022 New Times SLO) debunked such claims.  “The plant is not needed for general system reliability for California. In fact this nuclear plant was one of the main reasons for the August 2020 power outages”.  The operator was afraid Diablo might fail and bring down the grid so they called for rolling outages. And even PG& E itself admitted Diablo is not needed for grid reliability. If imported electricity, rooftop solar and energy efficiency are included in figures concerning California electricity, Diablo’s share of California’s total electricity resources is less than five percent.
 
(Famed Australian physician Helen Caldecott said the only reason we keep nuclear power plants going is to produce nuclear bombs). Maybe you didn’t know that the waste from those plants is reprocessed into plutonium and other bomb material.
 
Atomic Energy is SO EXPENSIVE.  90% of all new energy capacity world-wide is from wind and solar and it is so much cheaper than oil, coal and gas. So we have to ask:  who pays for the fuel and who profits? With the nuclear power plant, the only one profiting is PG&E, who gets handouts of Billions out right. Hundreds of thousands of jobs that could be generated with roof-top solar are lost.  California has the highest electric rates in the country.
 
Because of Gavin, Californians continue to subsidize the two atomic reactors at Diablo Canyon. It is completely uninsured. If Diablo Canyon blows up, there is no insurance to cover the costs and injuries. Federal government prohibits power plants from getting insurance. California could turn into a nuclear wasteland.
 
Not only did Newsom and the CPUC California Public Utilities Commission subsidize the operation and bail out PG&E from bankruptcy, but also California stopped giving the same incentives to our residents for solar power installation. And both rate-payers money as well as tax-payers from the entire state (even So. Cal. which doesn’t benefit from Diablo Canyon) are subsidizing the nuclear power plant.
 
The plant is located only 35 miles from the San Andreas Fault (1/2 the distance that Fukushima was from the fault when it blew). It is very near the Hosgri fault. The executives at PG& E are making huge salaries. And PG&E gives campaign contributions to Newsom. And Newsom appoints members to the California Public Utilities Commission which sets the rates.
 
Meanwhile the Trump administration is loosening safeguards at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  Gregory Jaczko, a former NRC Chair, told the LA times that Trump’s executive order to reorganize the NRC is akin to taking a “guillotine to the nation’s nuclear safety system”. Trump wants to push nuclear at all costs and even wants to do nuclear bomb testing. They want to spend trillions more “upgrading” nuclear weapons.
 
Mothers for Peace, from San Luis Obispo said “the Trump Administration is actively and openly gutting the NRC as an independent safety regulator and rendering it subservient to the Administration’s political aims.” President Trump has recently fired Commissioner Christopher Hansen from the NRC, who had advocated for “independence, technical competence and protection of the public” and had committed to Senator Alex Padilla that they would conduct a thorough evaluation of the seismic risks at Diablo Canyon as a condition for relicensing.
 
Mothers for Peace said that Diablo Unit 1 is one of the most embrittled reactors.  They noted in an April letter to PG& E that an embrittled reactor vessel can crack due to pressurized thermal shock, which could prevent the core from achieving adequate cooling and result in a disastrous meltdown. Linda Seeley, a board member, said “the seismic danger, as you can imagine, is intrinsically connected to the embrittlement… If, God forbid, there were an earthquake that would necessitate the immediate shutdown of the reactor, the operators would order that cold water be poured into the vessel. That scenario could be apocalyptic, with the reactor vessel shattering like glass and causing an  uncontrollable release of radiation”.  Embrittlement testing hasn’t been done since 2003 and the reactor is passed the 40-year licensing limit.
 
PG&E’s vice president Roderick Robinson claimed this summer that Diablo Canyon is necessary not just for the megawatts it produces but for inertia. But energy engineering experts like Stanford University professors, Mark Z. Jacobsen and Amory Lovins, dissent with that analysis. They claim that batteries can provide inertia through advanced power electronics that mimic the stabilizing effect of large spinning masses and grid-forming inverters that allow batteries to control voltage and frequency. They also inject power into the grid when needed due to a drop in supply or increase in demand within 20 milliseconds. Diablo Canyon nuclear cannot even do that because it is baseload so can only provide constant power.
 
So what is behind this decision to keep this dangerous nuclear power reactor going? 
 
Read “Risky Business Continues at Diablo Canyon” by Greg M. Schwartz, published December 21, 2015 in COUNTERPUNCH  where much of this information and more was discussed and presented here.
 
Schwartz reports that Jacobsen and Lovins are also working to “debunk the nuclear industry’s marketing agenda surrounding the grift behind the so-called “nuclear renaissance” and the ramp up of nuclear energy in an alleged need to power Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centers.”
 
Quoting Jacobsen: 
 
“Every dollar spent on nuclear is one less dollar spent on clean renewable energy and one more dollar spent on making the world a comparatively dirtier and more dangerous place, because nuclear power and nuclear weapons go hand in hand.”

Stanford expert Lovens says “Nuclear lost the race to power the grid, so new reactors have no business case or operational need. Each year, nuclear adds as much net global capacity as renewables add every two days. Soaring renewables generate three times more global electricity than stagnant nuclear power …”
 
There is one last battle over Diablo Canyon in 2026. PG& E still needs one more permit from the Central Coast regional Water Quality Control Board to keep the plant operating. It’s set to decide on the pollution discharge permit this coming February. Mothers for Peace says there’s ongoing concern about radioactive elements in bioaccumulation from effluent emitted by the plant, which sinks to the ocean floor.
 
For forty years tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, has been discharged into the ocean. There is more accumulated there than in Japan even after the meltdown at Fukushima. So we shall see whether, as Greg M. Schwartz puts it: “the regulatory powers that be could just be convinced to stop gambling on seismic safety and marine degradation for energy which the state of California doesn’t even need.”
 
For more on this important subject, readers are referred to Solartopia.org, and the great Harvey Wasserman who has been speaking out against Diablo and for renewables for decades. 
 
I also must remind the readers that we have no place where it is safe to discharge or safely store nuclear waste, some isotopes of which have half-lives of 250,000 years or more. In the 90’s they were planning to dump barrels of nuclear waste in shallow trenches in the sand at Ward Valley, off Hwy 40 near Needles, CA, on “Water Road” right over the largest ground-water aquifer in the Mohave Desert and only 13 miles as the crow flies from the Colorado River, where, at that time, 20 million of us humans got our water. By this time, had we (native tribes and grass-roots organizers at great peril to ourselves and families) not fought that State and Federal government plan, those canisters would now be corroding and leaking and radioactive isotopes migrating underground toward the River to cause cancer and mutations for generations to come. They always put nuclear facilities near our water. “Dilution is the solution to pollution” they claim.
 
One of the jobs of the Attorney General is to Protect Californians from activities that threaten the public safety, and enforce laws that safeguard the environment and our natural resources.  I would take that job seriously. I can’t make the laws but we would find every way possible to serve life, not destroy it, and to move rapidly away from nuclear and fossil fuels and to clean renewable energy from the wind and sun, for the safety and security of current and future generations.