A Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel should decide this summer whether to force Pacific Gas and Electric to formally defend its request to relicense the Diablo Canyon Power Plant’s spent fuel storage facility.
The environmental group San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace has mounted a multipronged legal attack on Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) effort to get Diablo Canyon’s two reactors relicensed for at least another five years of operations in Avila Beach, Calif.
In a June 13 hearing before an Atomic Safety Licensing Board panel at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., Mothers for Peace pressed ahead on one front. The group argued that PG&E should not be authorized to keep used fuel in dry storage at Diablo Canyon’s independent spent fuel storage installation for another 40 years unless the utility completes an extensive review of the facility’s long-term environmental effects and makes a better case for its financial ability to safely operate the storage pad.
The board intends to decide the fate of Mothers for Peace’s arguments “within 45 days,” E. Roy Hawkens, the NRC legal judge chaired the June 13 hearing, said after brief testimony from the environmentalists, PG&E and NRC staff. The decision should come down by July 28, Hawkens said Tuesday through a spokesperson
If the board admits either of Mothers for Peace’s two contention to the license renewal request, there will be another hearing. If it does not admit the contentions, NRC staff will continue to review the license renewal request for the independent spent fuel storage installation.
The review probably will not be done this year, Adam Gendelman, a NRC staff lawyer, said during last week’s hearing. Previously, NRC staff thought they could get the review finished by November, Gendelman said.
During the June 13 hearing, Gendelman said NRC staff remained unconvinced that Mothers for Peace had a case when it came to the substantial environmental review they claimed should be triggered by PG&E’s request to operate the independent spent fuel storage installation for another 40 years, into 2064.
The extension would cover both an extended period of reactor operations and much of Diablo Canyon’s eventual decommissioning.
But Gendelman told the board that Mothers for Peace had one contention that was potentially admissible for a second hearing: the group’s argument that PG&E had staked its ability to fund the spent fuel facility beyond 2024 by tapping into Diablo Canyon’s decommissioning fund. If the plant does not go offline in 2024, PG&E would not have access to those funds.
Following a combined $2 billions bailouts and de facto power purchase promises in state legislation approved in 2022, PG&E is scrambling to extend the federal operating licenses of Diablo Canyon’s two reactors beyond 2024 and 2025. The utility wants to extend operations at least until the 2030s but planned to apply for a 20-year license extension, in case California decides it wants nuclear in the state’s energy mix beyond 2030. The bailouts reversed California’s 2018 decision to close down Diablo Canyon, ostensibly because there was no long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in the U.S.
Ryan Lighty, a lawyer who argued for PG&E during the June 13 NRC safety board hearing, said the utility’s plans to extend the Diablo Canyon reactors had no bearing on whether the plant’s independent spent fuel storage installation could be legally extended for another 40 years.
The plant extension was a legal hypothetical in March 2022 when PG&E applied to extend the license of the spent fuel facility and remained a legal hypothetical last week, when the utility defended its plans before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, Lighty said.
Hawkens said Lighty had “a very strong hyper technical argument,” but acknowledged at the end of the hearing that PG&E’s plans to keep Diablo Canyon online might indeed affect the fuel storage facility.
The utility has until Dec. 31 to apply for a Diablo Canyon reactor license renewal with the NRC. If, as Gendelman expects, the commission does not rule on the separate license renewal request for the plant’s dry storage facility before that, “then certainly you have to look at the implications of plant license renewal” on the independent spent fuel storage installation, Hawkens said.
