The utility operating California’s last nuclear power plant is proposing to close it within the next decade.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) said Tuesday morning that it wants to close the Diablo Canyon Power Plant and replace its electricity generation with noncarbon-emitting sources such as wind and solar power.
“Our analysis continues to show that instead of continuing to run all the time, there will be parts of the year where Diablo will not be needed,” Tony Earley, PG&E’s president, told The San Francisco Chronicle. “At a plant like Diablo, with large fixed costs, if you effectively only run the plant half the time, you’ve doubled the cost.”
{mosads}PG&E is presenting the closure proposal for federal and state regulatory approval, as part of a coalition with labor and environmental groups including International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, Coalition of California Utility Employees, Friends of the Earth and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The closure would end a decades-old fight over Diablo Canyon, which sits on the Pacific coast near San Luis Obispo.
Since it was first proposed in the 1960s, environmentalists have tried to stop it, citing its impact on the ocean’s water, the risks of catastrophe and its location near a major seismic fault, among other sharp objections.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) has taken up the cause throughout her time in Congress, repeatedly pressing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to crack down on the plant.
Efforts to close the plant ramped up in 2011 after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster in Japan.
It also closes a major chapter in the anti-nuclear movement, which was long centered on California starting in the 1970s.
The movement has succeeded numerous times in both closing plants and preventing construction, such as a proposed plant in northern California that was planned to be the first commercially viable nuclear power plant.
The failure of replaced equipment led in 2013 to the closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in southern California, another top target of environmentalists and Boxer.
Diablo Canyon is now the latest in a string of nuclear plants to announce closure. The utility running two plants in Illinois announced their closures earlier this month, joining plants in New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere.