The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will allow California’s last operating nuclear power plant to remain online after the facility’s federal license expires while the agency considers a 20-year extension, the commission said Thursday.
The exemption, which NRC announced in a Thursday press release, allows Diablo Canyon Power Plant operator Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to ignore a federal regulation known as “timely renewal” which requires nuclear plant operators to apply for a license extension at least five years before expiration.
PG&E will qualify for the exemption as long as it applies for a license renewal by Dec. 31, NRC said. If it does so, the Avila Beach, Calif., Diablo Canyon plant can keep running after its license expires at the end of 2025, while the commission reviews the extension request.
A typical NRC license renewal review lasts around two years, the agency said.
“We are pleased the NRC approved our exemption request,” PG&E chief nuclear officer Paula Gerfen said in a statement Thursday. “We are committed to California’s clean energy future, and we are proud of the role DCPP plays as the state’s largest clean energy producer, providing reliable, affordable, carbon-free energy to the people of California.”
PG&E and Diablo Canyon have been the beneficiaries of a full-court press by the federal and state governments to save nuclear power in California.
Thanks to roughly $1.4 billion in state loans authorized under a climate bill signed into law in August by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), PG&E is looking to keep Diablo Canyon online through 2030. The utility has also received around $1.1 billion in federal bailout funding via the Department of Energy’s civil nuclear credits program, which Congress approved in 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Before the bailouts, PG&E planned to shutter Diablo Canyon’s two reactors in 2024 and 2025.
A regulatory exemption from NRC was plan B for PG&E, which in November asked the agency to resurrect a license renewal application for Diablo Canyon that the utility began in 2009 but scrapped in 2018 after momentum in the state swung against nuclear power and the company decided the plant would close.
NRC Jan. 24 rejected PG&E’s idea about picking up the dead license renewal application, saying at the time that there was “no compelling precedent” to allow such an action.
Opponents of the proposed exemption told NRC in a February letter that allowing Diablo Canyon to run on an expired license would violate the Atomic Energy Act, which they argued mandates nuclear power plants run for a maximum of 40 years.
PG&E responded that such claims were “extreme” and “not supported by any fact or law.”
