It passed the Senate 29-10. Then the Assembly Energy Committee trimmed it, swapping a five-year commitment for two years funded out of existing PG&E volumetric performance fee revenue.<\/p>\n
Laird said on July 8<\/a> that the trim was a trade: “these amendments will better position the bill to become law.” It now waits in Assembly Appropriations for the August return.<\/p>\n Meanwhile the Bay Area Council has built a coalition it calls Diablo Canyon 2045, which by its own second-quarter count runs to more than 40 organizations and over 30 public officials, all asking lawmakers to pass an extension this year.<\/p>\n No such bill has surfaced. The deadline to introduce new legislation this session was February 20.<\/p>\n Not everyone in the building is enthusiastic. State Sen. Ben Allen, who chairs the energy, utilities and communications committee, told KQED<\/a> he wants a frank conversation about clean energy buildout so the state is less reliant on what he called a “money pit that requires subsidies by ratepayers statewide.”<\/p>\n Underneath the politics there is a very large, very specific piece of hardware. Two Westinghouse four-loop pressurized-water reactors, licensed at 3,411 megawatts thermal apiece, producing more than 2,200 megawatts of electricity between them, per PG&E. The California Energy Commission logs annual output at roughly 18,000 gigawatt-hours, about 8.2 percent of California’s in-state generation.<\/p>\n PG&E frames the same plant as nearly 9 percent of the state’s total electricity supply and 17 percent of its carbon-free power. Both numbers are defensible. They measure different denominators, which is worth knowing before anyone waves one at you in an argument.<\/p>\n The cooling is where it gets strange. Diablo Canyon uses once-through cooling, which means no cooling towers and no recirculation.<\/p>\n Four 13,000-horsepower motors pull roughly 1.7 million gallons of seawater a minute, up to 2.5 billion gallons a day, through an intake structure 240 feet long that reaches about 30 feet below the surface. The water goes back into the cove around 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.<\/p>\n California ordered coastal plants to phase that approach out back in 2010. Diablo Canyon’s compliance date was pushed to October 31, 2030 specifically to line up with SB 846, and the discharge permit the regional water board approved in February is built around that same date.<\/p>\n Which creates a second clock nobody talks about. PG&E has told the State Water Board that dry cooling is infeasible on the site, natural draft towers are infeasible on space and seismic grounds, and mechanical draft towers are likely infeasible too.<\/p>\n Extending past 2030 does not just mean a new law. It means reopening the question of how a plant that swallows a river’s worth of ocean every day is allowed to keep doing it.<\/p>\n Cooling water is not a trivial constraint on nuclear plants anywhere. In July, France idled three reactors mid-heatwave<\/a> because the rivers next to them were legally too warm, not because anything broke.<\/p>\n Diablo Canyon was already going up when geologists found the Hosgri fault about three miles offshore in 1973. In 1975 the NRC, working with the US Geological Survey, concluded a Hosgri quake could reach magnitude 7.5 and shake the site at 0.75 g. PG&E spent 1978 retrofitting structures, systems and components to take it.<\/p>\n A later NRC-mandated review, the Long Term Seismic Program, pushed the modeled ground motion up to 0.83 g and concluded the plant still had margin. The agency accepted that finding.<\/p>\n Then in 2008 came the Shoreline fault, which nobody had mapped and which sits closer than Hosgri does. PG&E’s filings put it roughly 2,000 feet from the power block and about 1,000 feet from the intake structure.<\/p>\n Updated models give it 0.56 g, below what the plant is already built for, and PG&E concluded the existing design covers it. The NRC agreed, including in its post-Fukushima hazard reviews.<\/p>\n None of that is a settled argument in San Luis Obispo County, where opposition to the plant predates most of the people arguing about it. But the licensing record is what it is, and the NRC signed the renewal on the strength of it.<\/p>\n The case for keeping it running is mostly arithmetic about what replaces it. A California Public Utilities Commission analysis found that operating Diablo Canyon past 2030 would save somewhere between $600 million and $3.7 billion a year, largely because the state would need less battery storage and less offshore wind.<\/p>\n PG&E puts the avoided health and climate costs at $450 million annually.<\/p>\n The case against is not really about the plant. It is about the deal.<\/p>\n Researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s 2035 Initiative allege PG&E inflated its operating costs when the extension was negotiated, and that stripping certain fees would leave the plant profitable while saving ratepayers an estimated $1.84 billion, or about $250 for the average PG&E customer, between 2027 and 2030.<\/p>\n PG&E rejects the report, saying it ignored the facts and that its findings were false. The utility says the plant currently costs each customer about $2.23 a month, down roughly a dollar from last year.<\/p>\n Then there is the state money. SB 846 authorized a $1.4 billion loan to PG&E, with the expectation it would be repaid partly through federal support. The Department of Energy award came in with a base of $741.4 million and a ceiling of $1.1 billion, leaving a gap that state law makes forgivable.<\/p>\n Here is the part that lands closest to the driveway. PG&E’s own figure for what extended operations through 2030 achieve is an annual greenhouse gas reduction equivalent to taking 1.6 million cars off the road.<\/p>\n The demand side points the same direction. The Energy Commission expects California’s peak electricity demand to grow by more than 20 gigawatts by 2045, which PG&E translates, not unreasonably, as nine more Diablo Canyons. Electric vehicles, heat pumps and data centers are doing most of that pushing.<\/p>\n California is already sanding down the evening peak with storage instead of gas. Grid batteries hit 12,293 megawatts in a single hour in March<\/a>, several times what Diablo Canyon produces, though for about four hours rather than around the clock.<\/p>\n The reactors and the batteries solve different problems, which is exactly why the 2030 date is contested rather than settled.<\/p>\n Elsewhere in the country the argument is running in reverse. Michigan is trying to restart an 800-megawatt reactor already headed for decommissioning<\/a>, the first time a US plant would be pulled back from the scrapyard and switched on again.<\/p>\n On Thursday, July 30, San Luis Obispo County hosts a public session called “Diablo Canyon 2045: Local and Statewide Implications” at the Katcho Achadjian Government Center on Monterey Street, from 6 to 9 p.m., streamed on SLO-SPAN.<\/p>\n MIT’s John Parsons will walk through the economics of running to 2045. David Roland-Holst of Berkeley Economic Advising and Research covers what the plant means to the county’s economy. PG&E staff will take questions on operations, safety systems, seismic monitoring and spent fuel storage.<\/p>\nThe machine drinks 2.5 billion gallons of the Pacific a day<\/h2>\n
It was rebuilt mid-construction for a fault nobody knew about<\/h2>\n
Nobody agrees on what the thing costs you<\/h2>\n
PG&E measures the plant in cars<\/h2>\n
What happens next is a meeting in a county building<\/h2>\n