Dealing With the Devil

When Jerry 'Moonbeam' Brown was governor of California he signed a deal with Pacific Gas & Electric, the state's hugely influential mega-utility to shut down its Diablo Canyon nuclear power station when its federal permits to operate expired in 2024 and 2025.  Gavin Newsom was then Lt. Governor at the time.  Their power was to be replaced by renewable energy from wind and solar.

Forward to today.  Newsom is now Governor.  He forced the legislature and the California Public Utilities Commission to approve operating the plants for another five years.  His flip has infuriated environmentalists who see the plant as an accident waiting to happen. The two reactors at Diablo Canyon were largely built in the 1960s and 70s.  Unit One was built using copper amalgams that are today considered unsafe because extreme radiation in the reactor core embrittles key components, such as the reactor vessel itself.  If hit with water used to quench a possible meltdown incident, the components will shatter, releasing a radioactive cloud of steam, radiation and hydrogen in a cataclysmic explosion.  Activist groups,  San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace and Friends of the Earth sued to shut down Unit One on September 14th.  The NRC has long been biased towards the industry, allowing reactors without current permits to continue operating. (Indian Point 2 and 3).  It is apparently willing to allow an extension of Diablo's operating permits.  PG&E is seeking a twenty year extension, but the California legislature passed a bill only allowing operation until 2030 [photo credit: Reuters]

Diablo One is scheduled to shut down for about 50 days while refueling.  A petition is circulating demanding that the reactor be throughly inspected for unsafe conditions before being allowed to restart operations.  Gov. Newsom has favored the nuclear industry, allowing a company twice convicted of crimes at San Bruno (gas explosion) and Paradise (wildfire) to skirt maintenance, safety upgrades and environmental regulations on the assumption that the facility will soon close.  He has worked to hamstring California's burgeoning solar industry by reducing homeowner payouts, crippling economics of multi-tenant installations, and taxing micro-grids that would allow neighborhoods independence from monopoly utilities like PG&E.  Why?  Because the sun's energy is free, some might say God-given, and not controlled by a criminal corporation.

In 1991 Yankee Rowe, Massachusetts nuclear plant was hit by lightening causing it to shut down.  At 30 years old Yankee Rowe was among the oldest in the nation. Experts testified at a House hearing that the plant should not be restarted until a test for embrittlement was conducted.  The owners never the conducted a test.  Yankee Rowe stayed shut down.  Diablo Canyon One is a similar circumstance.  Unless PGE is will to abide the public results of a full inspection for embrittlement, it should remain closed and eventually decommissioned.  The lawsuit has major national implications.  More than ninety nuclear facilities operate with with an average age of forty.  Certainly one or more operate with key components made brittle by intense radiation used to boil water.