A state court ruled last week that California can proceed with its effort to keep the Diablo Canyon Power Plant online into the 2030s, spurning an environmentalist group’s argument that the plan violated a contract.
A 2022 state law that allowed a five-year life extension for the plant’s two reactors essentially voided the contract that Washington-based Friends of the Earth had with plant operator Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the Superior Court of the State of California in the County of San Francisco wrote in a 19-page order dated Aug. 21.
In a lawsuit filed against PG&E in April, Friends of the Earth characterized the law, SB 846, as a pure financial bailout for the utility, the court said. Passed in September 2022, the measure gave almost $1.5 billion in state subsidies for PG&E, which also got about $1 billion from the Department of Energy that year.
But the law also did much more, the court said.
The law “expressly invalidated the [California Public Utilities Commission’s] Decision approving the proposal to retire Diablo Canyon at the expiration of the current NRC licenses” in 2025 and 2026, the court wrote in its order.
That meant the court had no power either to prevent the California Public Utilities Commission, the state power regulator, from carrying out SB 846, according to the order.
Diablo Canyon’s Unit 1 reactor is licensed to operate into 2024. Unit 2 was licensed to operate into 2025. It could take longer for the NRC to review a license renewal application than the reactors have left on their licenses, so the commission will let the plant stay open beyond 2025, as long as PG&E files for renewal by Dec. 31.
The court’s decision ends one attempt by environmentalists to block a life extension for the state’s last operating nuclear plant. Others, in federal court and at the NRC, continue.
Meanwhile, DOE recently cleared an important paperwork hurdle that will allow the federal agency to formalize the $1 billion in aid it awarded to PG&E under the civilian nuclear credits program, which was authorized and funded in 2021 by the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act.
