Oral arguments are scheduled, but not inevitable, in January for a high-profile legal challenge by environmental groups who want to shut down California’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant this decade.
Arguments are on the slate for Jan. 10 in Pasadena, Calif., in the lawsuit brought by San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace and others against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit could decide the case on briefs before then and skip orals altogether, according to an Oct. 29 docket entry in the six-month-old lawsuit.
The suit by Mothers for Peace, Friends of the Earth and the Environmental Working Group is one of the last remaining challenges environmental groups have left against California’s plan to extend the life of the state’s last operating nuclear power plant to at least 2030.
The NRC in March said that it might take longer for commission staff to vet plant owner Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) Diablo Canyon license renewal application than the plant’s reactors have left on their operating licenses. Unit 1’s license expires on Nov. 2, 2024. Unit 2’s expires on Aug. 26 2025.
So, the commission said the utility could keep the reactors online while the application was pending, if the application arrives at NRC by Dec. 31. The environmentalists contend that this is illegal and fired back with their federal lawsuit.
PG&E has intervened in the suit and the state of California has filed an amicus brief. The utility and the state each said that the environmental groups’ suit ignores California law and the state’s ongoing regulatory power over Diablo Canyon.
Part of the problem for PG&E is that in 2022, California reversed a 2018 state law that had required the plant to shut down when its operating licenses lapsed. To comply with the 2018 law, the utility that year withdrew a license renewal application it filed all the way back in 2009.
NRC last year declined to reactivate the 2009 license application and instead settled on the grace period at the heart of the environmentalists’ Ninth Circuit lawsuit.
The federal lawsuit is among the last avenues of legal opposition Mothers for Peace and other groups have. The state in August lost a lawsuit at the state level and is awaiting NRC staff review of a claim that Diablo Canyon’s Unit 1 reactor is dangerously brittle and must be shut down immediately. In mid-October, the commissioners themselves refused to take up that issue.
