SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — California’s last nuclear power plant will close by 2025 under an accord announced Tuesday, ending three decades of safety debates that helped fuel the national anti-nuclear power movement.
The state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., and environmental groups announced the agreement on the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which sits along a Pacific Ocean bluff on California’s central coast.
Environmentalists had pressed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for years to close Diablo, given its proximity to seismic faults in the earthquake-prone state.
Under the accord, PG&E has agreed not to seek relicensing for the plant, which supplies 9 percent of the state’s power. The deal will replace the plant’s production with solar and other forms of energy that don’t emit climate-changing greenhouse gases.
“The important thing is that we ultimately got to a shared point of view about the most appropriate and responsible path forward with respect to Diablo Canyon, and how best to support the state’s energy vision,” the utility’s leader, Tony Early, said in a statement.
The move ends a power source once predicted to be necessary to meet the growing energy needs of the nation’s most populous state.
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Hmm…I grew up a few miles from the Rancho Seco plant and, as a kid, always thought it was kind of cool. As an adult, I’m on the fence about nuclear power. On the one hand, fossil fuel-based power generation is horrible, no matter how “clean” we can make it; alternative sources are required. On the other hand, California is a pretty wobbly state and maybe nuclear isn’t a great idea for that part of the country. On the third hand (did I mention I grew up near a nuke plant?) I don’t have serious concerns about nuclear power’s safety, if it can be located in a safe place and properly regulated.
Ideally, we’ll get to an all-renewables energy future some day, and CA is a great place to start with plenty of opportunities for solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, who knows. But in the meantime I’m on the fence about, say, replacing a coal plant or three out here in the plains with a nuke plant. What’s worse, a huge concrete bunker full of several tons of nuclear waste, or millions of tons of CO2 and carcinogens being released in the atmosphere? I don’t have a definitive answer, tho climate change appears, to me, to be a more pressing issue than nuclear waste.
It’s not comfortable on this fence.
Efficiency of power storage, smart grids, distributed storage and renewables might be able to achieve energy goals. Remember, this plant is going to be online for most of another decade, lots of things coming along in that time frame.