An environmental coalition’s “last-ditch attack” on California’s only operating nuclear plant is riddled with legal errors and willfully disregards the state’s plans for the plant, Pacific Gas and Electric wrote in a recent court filing.
The lawsuit does not belong in court in the first place and the anti-nuclear groups’ argument rests on a faulty assumption about a 2022 California law that ordered PG&E to keep the plant’s two reactors online for five years longer than their current operating license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) wrote in a brief filed Sept. 28 with the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Diablo Canyon’s Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors are respectively licensed by the NRC to operate until Nov. 2, 2024 and Aug. 26, 2025. In a lawsuit filed in April, San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace and two other environmental groups argued that the California legislature wanted PG&E to close down Diablo Canyon if the utility could not get the plant’s license renewed before they expired.
But in a law passed in 2022, the state ordered PG&E “to take all actions necessary and prudent” to keep the plant online. That includes seeking NRC’s permission to operate the two reactors beyond the expiration dates of their licenses, PG&E said.
Usually, utilities have to ask NRC for a license renewal five years before a license runs out. However, because California waited until 2022 to reverse a 2018 decision to shut down Diablo Canyon in the middle of this decade, PG&E could not meet the usual deadline.
The state of California itself said essentially the same thing in a brief it filed with the Ninth Circuit in mid-September.
“The need for the exemption arises from California’s new determination…that Diablo Canyon remains vital to the reliability of the state’s electrical grid, not from ‘vacillations’ by PG&E,” the company wrote in the filing, quoting the environmentalists’ complaint.
PG&E also poked holes in the lawsuit on legal grounds.
The environmentalists say they are allowed to sue the NRC in court because the agency’s timely filed exemption amounted to an illegal, de facto modification to the Diablo Canyon operating license that lets PG&E keep the plant online if the NRC is still reviewing the utility’s license renewal application after the licenses expire.
PG&E, in its filing last week, says that is not so, and that “the NRC itself (to which deference is owed) is urging that exemptions are different” from a license amendment.
NRC has given PG&E until Dec. 31 to file for a license renewal for both Diablo Canyon reactors. If the company files by then, the commission will let the reactors stay online after their licenses lapse. In such a scenario, NRC has estimated that Diablo Canyon Unit 1 might stay online for nearly a year beyond the expiration date of its operating license while the commission reviews PG&E’s application.
Unit 2 might stay online for about a couple of months beyond its license’s sunset date, NRC has said.
To help it remain online, Diablo Canyon has gotten about $2 billion in financial aid from California and the federal government.
