Environmental groups appeal for public hearing about Diablo Canyon safety issues 

Contentions about the danger in continuing to run the almost 40-year-old Diablo Canyon Power Plant and extending its lifespan by 20 years renewed with an appeal from environmental groups to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, Friends of the Earth, and Environmental Working Group appealed to the commissioners to reverse an Atomic Safety and Licensing Board decision that denied the groups' petition for a public hearing to scrutinize three safety concerns.

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• File Photo By Henry Bruington
• REPEAT ISSUES San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, Friends of the Earth, and Environmental Working Group allege that extending Diablo Canyon Power Plant's operations by 20 years could exacerbate reported problems of embrittlement and seismic core damage incidents.

Outlined in the July 29 appeal, the long-standing alleged issues are the risk of a seismic core damage accident, the embrittlement of the Unit 1 reactor pressure vessel, and questions raised by the California Coastal Commission about whether Diablo operator Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) complies with the federal Coastal Zone Management Act.

"But the NRC has rebuffed the petitioners at every turn, thereby insulating PG&E's unsafe operation of [Diablo] from public scrutiny," the appeal read. "LBP-24-06 [memorandum denying the request for a hearing] constitutes the latest rebuff, barring petitioners from providing any input to the agency's momentous and potentially disastrous decision to approve operation of [Diablo] for another 20 years."

The NRC's July 3 decision found none of the environmental groups' joint concerns admissible.

On the seismic core damage issue, the NRC highlighted that while the environmental groups claimed that the operation of Diablo's two units in the license renewal term has "significant" or "large" environmental impacts, PG&E categorized them as "small" impacts in its environmental report. The utility company also argued that the safety concern isn't sound because the environmental groups failed to challenge any specific portion of PG&E's safety application.

The environmental groups challenged current licensing basis matters and NRC regulatory policy, PG&E said, which are outside the scope of the public hearing proceeding.

"It's not about the actual issues of having an embrittled reactor vessel and having earthquake faults right under the plant," Linda Seeley of SLO Mothers for Peace told New Times. "It's about the technicalities of the process of their rules. It's bureaucracy at its fine-worst."

Similarly, PG&E responded to the embrittlement concern with the argument that the environmental groups didn't identify a specific aging management plan or an adequate time-limited aging analysis that's being challenged. So they reportedly failed to present a genuine dispute of law with the application.

"Instead, PG&E argues, petitioners impermissibly incorporate by reference attachments from an expert, an approach that the commission repeatedly has rejected," the NRC memorandum said.

On the issue of Coastal Commission compliance, PG&E said that the commission requested the utility company to provide more information and that any substantive review of the Coastal Zone Consistency Certification will not take place until the missing data arrives.

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a captured agency or captive agency, meaning that it is not really regulating. It's actually facilitating license renewals," Seeley said. "It doesn't require safety upgrades when there's been an application filled out for relicensing because they say, 'Those things were taken care of in the first license, so we don't need worry about that in the additional 20-year license.'"

The environmental groups' appeal stressed the need for a public hearing especially after a vocal commitment made by NRC Chairman Christopher Hanson before U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California).

In a 2023 hearing of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Padilla questioned Hanson about the scope of the seismic safety review that the NRC planned for Diablo.

"We are going to be looking at updated safety information as part of that license renewal process," Hanson told Padilla, according to the appeal. "We did require all plants to take a look at ... their risks after Fukushima. Diablo, of course, did look at their seismic risk, and we will take another look at that as part of the license renewal process."

Seeley told New Times that the environmental groups haven't heard from the NRC yet. She added that they hope that the commissioners eventually grant them a public hearing but "aren't counting on it." The only other recourse, she said, is persuading members of the oversight committee of the NRC to study the concerns.

"That is a hard climb," Seeley said. "We've never had a hearing before the commission, so this would be an unusual thing, but we have an unusual circumstance. The fact that we have an embrittled reactor vessel that's sitting on an active earthquake fault—it's terrifying." Δ