An environmentalist group on Tuesday sued the operator of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California, seeking to keep the facility’s recently bailed-out reactors from operating beyond 2025.
If it keeps Diablo Canyon open until at least 2030, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) would violate a 2016 contract with Friends of the Earth which stipulated that the company would retire the plant by 2025, the group wrote in a six-page complaint filed with the Superior Court of the State of California in the County of San Francisco.
The Washington-based Friends of the Earth asked the court to block PG&E from keeping the plants open, according to the complaint, to which the group appended a copy of its contract with the utility.
PG&E had not filed a response to the complaint as of Wednesday afternoon, but a spokesperson wrote in an email that the company was following California law by planning to extend Diablo Canyon’s life.
“PG&E is required to follow the policies of the state,” the utility’s spokesperson wrote in the email to the Exchange Monitor. “PG&E’s actions toward relicensing Diablo Canyon Power Plant are consistent with direction of the State of California in Senate Bill 846.”
The company planned by the end of the year to file a license extension renewal request with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Diablo Canyon’s Unit 1 reactor was 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.
Diablo Canyon has in the past year raked in more than $2 billion in bailout money. California provided $1.4 billion in August and the federal government provided $1.1 billion from the Department of Energy, which Congress authorized to award the money as part of November’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
