A Nuclear Regulatory Commission board should toss an environmentalist group’s effort to block a license extension for Diablo Canyon Power Plant’s spent fuel storage facility, commission staff recommended Sept. 5.
The group, San Luis Obsipo Mothers for Peace, had successfully used a legal technicality to steer the renewal application toward a hearing with an NRC Atomic Safety & Licensing Board. It was one of at least three legal challenges environmentalists have mounted to California’s plan to keep Diablo Canyon operating at least into the 2030s and it will be the second to fail this year, if the NRC board accepts the recommendation from commission staff.
The environmentalists claimed that plant operator PG&E had identified no way to pay for upkeep of Diablo Canyon’s independent spent fuel storage installation without using funds from the plant’s decommissioning fund. Those funds would not be available if the utility goes ahead with its plan to operate Diablo Canyon’s two reactors beyond 2024 and 2025 instead of decommissioning them as previously planned.
But Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) in August amended its license renewal application so that the utility “no longer relies upon the availability of decommissioning funding” to pay for maintenance of Diablo Canyon’s independent spent fuel installation, NRC staff wrote in their recommendation, published Tuesday.
The utility filed its license renewal application for the spent fuel facility in March 2022, six months before the California legislature approved extending Diablo Canyon’s life by at least five years.
That landmark legislation, packaged with some $1.5 billion in state aid and shored up by a separate federal bailout of $1 billion from the Department of Energy’s Civilian Nuclear Credit program, reversed the state’s 2018 decision to close the plant as part of a wider bid by Sacramento politicians to end nuclear power generation in California until the U.S. builds a permanent repository for used nuclear fuel.
If the NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board accepts the staff recommendation to dismiss San Luis Obsipo Mothers for Peace’s contention, it will avert a hearing that would force PG&E to formally defend its license renewal application in a court-like setting.
If there is no hearing, the environmentalists would also lose their ability to escalate their dispute about the spent fuel facility to the federal courts; without an NRC-approved contention to the application, the environmentalists would get no agency-level hearing and therefore no decision to appeal in court.
In a preliminary June hearing about the Diablo Canyon spent fuel depot, an NRC staffer said the commission probably would not finish reviewing PG&E’s license renewal application for the facility before 2023 ends. Previously, staff thought they might finish in November.
Meanwhile, PG&E faces a Dec. 31 deadline to submit the much more complicated and more important license renewal application for the Diablo Canyon reactors themselves. If the utility doesn’t file by then, NRC staff may not be able to review the application before the reactors’ current operating licenses expire.
