In offering California’s last nuclear power plant a new lease on life, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sidestepped a legal argument from antinuclear activists who said the agency might be illegally extending the plant’s operating license.
The NRC on Wednesday published a roughly five-page explanation in the Federal Register explaining the agency’s decision to conditionally let Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) keep Diablo Canyon Power Plant’s two reactors running beyond the respective expiration dates of their federal licenses: Nov. 2, 2024 and Aug. 26, 2025.
NRC’s Federal Register notice did not address a January petition by a trio of environmental groups, who, citing a 31 year-old NRC rulemaking, said the commission itself believes that a full license renewal is the only way a nuclear reactor under NRC jurisdiction can stay online longer than 40 years, under the federal Atomic Energy Act.
Instead, the NRC on Wednesday summarized the conclusions of commission staff who reviewed PG&E’s October request for license leniency by writing that a temporary Diablo Canyon extension “will not result in a violation of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended, the Administrative Procedure Act, or the NRC’s regulations.”
“The agency will respond to the January petition in due course,” an NRC spokesperson said in an email Wednesday.
The NRC last week estimated that it could take about 22 months to review a license renewal request from PG&E. Assuming the review takes that long, and assuming PG&E submits the license renewal request on the last possible day, Dec. 31, Diablo Canyon Unit 1 might stay online for nearly a year beyond the expiration date of its operating license and Unit 2 might stay online for about a couple of months beyond its license’s sunset date.
In a March 2 press release, NRC said it “typically” takes the commission 22 months to process a renewal application. The commission also said it will not consider PG&E’s extension request timely and sufficient if it arrives any later than Dec. 31.
Under federal law, a timely and sufficient application for a license renewal entitles the bearer of a license to continue previously licensed work while an agency reviews the renewal request. Legally, “the existing license will not be deemed to have expired until the application has been finally determined,” NRC wrote Wednesday in the Federal Register notice, quoting its own regulations.
The wording of NRC’s regulation closely resembles the federal Administrative Procedures Act, which says that “[w]hen the licensee has made timely and sufficient application for a renewal or a new license in accordance with agency rules, a license with reference to an activity of a continuing nature does not expire until the application has been finally determined by the agency.”
In 2022, PG&E decided to keep Diablo Canyon open until at least 2030 after the utility secured billions of dollars in federal and state cash. The bailouts were driven by the Joe Biden (D) administration’s policies to sharply cut U.S. carbon emissions and the about-face of a California law that effectively ended nuclear power in the energy hungry state in 2018.
