The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved Pacific Gas & Electric’s request to withdraw its application to renew the licenses for the two reactors at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California. That takes the facility another step toward its planned closure in less than a decade.
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) in 2009 filed to renew the licenses for reactor Units 1 and 2, which respectively began operations in 1985 and 1986. But in a 2016 “Joint Proposal” with a number of environmental and labor groups, the utility instead said it would shut down Unit 1 in 2024 and Unit 2 the next year.
It asked in March to withdraw the license extension application, saying the power plant would not be necessary to meet California’s “projected energy demand requirements” beyond 2025. The NRC responded in the affirmative in a letter posted to the agency’s website last week.
“Pursuant to the requirements in part 2 of title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations, the Commission grants PG&E’s request to withdraw DCPP, Unit Nos. 1 and 2, license renewal application,” according to a notice dated April 23 in the Federal Register.
PG&E is now focused on developing its decommissioning plan for Diablo Canyon, spokesman Blair Jones said last week. He did not say whether the company has selected an approach for decommissioning.
In the 2015 Nuclear Decommissioning Cost Triennial Proceeding filing with the state, PG&E cited two options for management of the facility after closure: move immediately into decommissioning, which was estimated to cost $3.8 billion; or put the plant into SAFSTOR mode, in which it could be maintained under monitoring for up to six decades prior to active decommissioning.
“For the next NDCTP filing, we are focused on preparing new cost estimates for both approaches, which will be further informed by a site-specific decommissioning plan that we are currently preparing,” Jones said in a statement. “The NDCTP will be filed in either late 2018 or early 2019.”
NRC staff worked roughly 8,500 hours on the PG&E application, and billed the utility nearly $2.5 million, between mid-2012 and this year, an agency spokesman said. Figures for the full review dating to 2010 were not immediately available.
The regulator had completed the safety evaluation report on the license renewals and was preparing an environmental impact statement and a supplement to the safety evaluation report when the process was suspended in 2016.
The NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board had also not completed its hearing on the renewal request at that time. The board ultimately would have forwarded a recommendation to the commission.
