The Nuclear Regulatory Commission officially closed the door Thursday on an antinuclear group’s bid to force a hearing about Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s plans to fund upkeep of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant’s independent spent fuel storage installation.
The writing has been on the wall since the summer, when Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) tweaked a relicensing application for the installation to correct what amounted to out-of-date information. The four remaining NRC commissioners put the final nail in the coffin this week by affirming an order that officially vacated an earlier decision to grant the hearing, which was sought by environmental group San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace.
The commission affirmed the order after PG&E in August eliminated a plan to pay for future upkeep of the spent fuel facility with money from Diablo Canyon’s decommissioning trust fund. That, Mothers for Peace argued, was not allowed at an operating plant, which owing to a state law passed in 2022 Diablo Canyon was meant to be during the period covered by the license renewal PG&E sought for the spent-fuel depot.
But PG&E’s renewal application hit NRC staffers’ desk about six months before California passed the law requiring the utility to keep Diablo Canyon open until about 2030 instead of closing it up in 2025 and starting decommissioning as required under a now-obsolete state law passed in 2018.
But PG&E applied for the spent fuel installation license renewal when the 2018 law was still in effect and the utility was still legally obligated to shut the plant down and pay for most work on site through the decommissioning trust fund.
This spring, after PG&E and NRC began exploring a regulatory route to keep Diablo Canyon open, San Luis Obsipo Mothers for Peace seized on the outdated information in the spent fuel installation’s renewal application and parlayed it into a mandate by an NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board to hold a hearing.
San Luis Obsipo Mothers for Peace has raised at least four legal or quasi-legal challenges to the Diablo Canyon life extension. Aside from its attempt to slow or prohibit relicensing of the plant’s spent fuel facility, these include a state lawsuit, dismissed in August, an emergency petition to shut down one of the plant’s reactors, which NRC commissioners referred to staff in early October and a federal lawsuit that may be scheduled for oral arguments no earlier than January.
Meanwhile, PG&E has until Dec. 31 to file a license renewal application for Diablo Canyon’s two reactors. If the utility files later than that, the reactors’ NRC licenses could expire before commission staff finish reviewing the application. That could mean a shut down.
