If California wants to talk about keeping its sole surviving nuclear power plant online, the Department of Energy would listen, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said this week.
During an interview with Reuters Tuesday, Granholm said that keeping the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in Avila Beach, Calif., open “may be something that [California] decide[s] to take a look at, given that I think there is a change underfoot about the opinion that people may have about nuclear.”
If California does want to reconsider, Granholm told the wire services, DOE would eventually be open to talking with officials in Sacramento.
The Joe Biden administration counts nuclear among the carbon-free energy sources needed for its plan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. President Biden in November signed around $6 billion in nuclear plant tax credits into law as part of his trillion-dollar infrastructure package. DOE is responsible for auctioning off those credits to struggling power plants, but the agency has said it could be a while before it hammers out the details of that process.
The White House isn’t the only player looking to see Diablo Canyon remain online. Prominent nuclear professional association the American Nuclear Society (ANS) said last week that the plant’s shutdown would “inflict grave harm” on California.
“Years ago, California made a decision to shut down the Diablo Canyon [Power Plant] units. However, circumstances have changed,” ANS president Steven Nesbit and CEO Craig Piercy said in the Nov. 24 statement. “The clean energy imperative is even stronger, and the importance of Diablo Canyon to the reliability of California’s current and future supply of carbon-free electricity is undeniable.”
Nesbit and Piercy argued that if PG&E goes through with the shutdown they will “deprive California of its largest carbon-free energy resource and worsen the state’s growing dependency on electricity from out-of-state fossil power plants.” The loss of generating capacity from Diablo Canyon would also worsen rolling blackouts across the Golden State stemming from power supply shortages, they said.
“It is time to revisit outdated decisions made in the last decade in the light of today’s facts and prepare for the continued operation of Diablo Canyon,” Nesbit and Piercy said.
The bid to keep Diablo Canyon humming was backed up Nov. 8 by a university report which concluded that allowing the plant to run through 2045 could save California around $21 billion in operating costs and significantly cut carbon emissions. The joint Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and LucidCatalyst research team suggested that Diable Canyon be used as a “polygeneration facility” for generating electricity, desalinated water and clean hydrogen.
Meanwhile, Diablo Canyon is still slated to close.
Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) has said that it will shut down the site’s Unit 1 reactor in 2024, and that Unit 2 will go dark a year later. A company official said Nov. 1 that more information on the decommissioning process should roll out over the next several months.
Diablo Canyon, located about midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco along the California coast, is the Golden State’s last operating nuclear power plant. The San Onofre, Rancho Seco, and Humboldt Bay plants are all decommissioned or being actively dismantled.
