The Nuclear Regulatory Commission should not vote on environmentalists’ requests to shut down one of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant’s two reactors until agency staff weigh in on the request, staff said Monday.
It is the latest in a series of attempts by the groups to have Diablo Canyon shut down prior to 2030, the date to which the state of California wants plant operator Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) to extend the facility’s life.
The environmentalists, San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace and Friends of the Earth, filed their request with the commissioners themselves on Sept. 14. The groups said the reactor’s pressure vessel may be getting brittle. PG&E said that claim is based on “experimental and untested” methods.
Both NRC staff and PG&E said that the commission’s career technical experts should get first crack at the environmentalists’ hearing request, and the 90-page addendum of claims the groups have filed to support the request.
“The appropriate response to Petitioners’ Request to Suspend Operations is for the Commission to instead refer it to the Executive Director for Operations,” staff wrote in their answer to the environmentalists’ request to the commissioners. The request “would be best resolved by first being considered by the Staff’s technical experts and then being subject to review by the Commission.”
PG&E agreed, writing in its own response to the environmentalists’ request that Mothers for Peace and Friends of the Earth were trying to leapfrog commission staff in violation of NRC’s procedural rules.
To support their claim that the reactor has to be shut off immediately, the environmental groups cited an independent analysis of PG&E data by Digby Macdonald, a PhD staff researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, that found the vessel “could reach an unacceptable level of embrittlement” by the end of 2023. The groups appended a summary of that analysis to their request for a hearing.
In its response to the hearing request, PG&E said Macdonald used “non-NRC approved methodologies and that “[n]otwithstanding the many alarmist characterizations, the Shutdown Request and Macdonald Declaration are conspicuously devoid of any detailed allegation that even a single NRC regulatory requirement is unmet for Unit 1.”
In 2022, California repealed a law passed three years earlier that required Diablo Canyon to shut down after Aug. 26 2025, when the operating license for its Unit 2 reactor expires. Unit 1’s license expires on Nov. 2, 2024. The state also provided $1.4 billion in financial aid for PG&E to fix up the plant and apply for a license extension with the NRC. The Department of Energy kicked in another $1 billion with funding.
