Pacific Gas & Electric’s announcement today that it will shutter Diablo Canyon’s two nuclear reactors by 2025 means nuclear power in California is going the way of the Dodo Bird. But what do we do with the nuclear waste? And what will fill the gap nuclear power leaves behind?
Nuclear waste remains a dangerous reminder of California's nuclear legacy. In Simi Hills, radioactive waste threatens nearby residents with elevated risks of cancer, according to medical studies. In 1959, a small scale nuclear reactor at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory partially melted down and released radioactive gases for weeks. Boeing, owner of much of the land at the site, refuses to clean up much at all, and its toxics regulator has aided and abetted the company.
In 2013, Consumer Watchdog won a motion for preliminary injunction against the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by Strumwasser & Woocher and Consumer Watchdog counsel over illegal demolition and disposal of radioactive waste into area landfills and recycling shops. The lawsuit still isn't resolved, while the DTSC looks for ways to weaken the strict cleanup standard it had promised to uphold. Cleaning up thoroughly would cost Boeing hundreds of millions it doesn't want to spend.
What to do with the waste from the shuttered San Onofre nuclear reactors near San Diego is another question mark. Southern California Edison took some licensing shortcuts on refurbishing steam pipes and a small radioactive leak led to a permanent shutdown in 2013. The law firm of Aguirre & Severson is petitioning the Coastal Comission to set aside a permit for Southern California Edison to bury 1,600 tons of spent fuel in cannisters that will go into a giant tomb under the beach. What could possibly go wrong?
And then there's the question of how we replace nuclear power from Diablo Canyon and San Onofre that together generated around 18 percent of the state's power. So far, the favored fuel has been natural gas--which emits carbon as its waste.
More than two dozen environmental and social justice advocacy groups wrote Governor Brown in 2013 to urge him to reject "new, expensive, dirty and unecessary gas-fired power plants." The groups pointed out that even dring the blackouts caused by market manipulation in 2000-2001, California had generating capacity exceeding demand by 38 percent. "Then, as now, there was no shortage of power plants," they wrote.
We have plenty of overcapacity and plenty of electricity but in the last year the PUC approved five new gas-powered electricity plants for Southern California—one near Anaheim, Long Beach, Huntington Beach, Ventura, and San Diego County. Ratepayers will pay billions of dollars through high-priced, long-term SoCalEdison and San Diego Gas & Electric power purchasing contracts.
Abundant rooftop solar isn't counted in the state's new mandate to generate 50 percent of its power from renewables because the three big investor-owned utilities own their regulators and the legislature. Counting rooftop solar would mean extinction for new gas-fired plants that serve as cash cows.
In approving gas-fired power plants, energy regulators' new mantra is "reliability." But an appeals court put the lie to the PUC's justification for a PG&E gas-fired plant in Contra Costa in 2014. The judge overturned the PUC decision on grounds that the PUC hadn’t persuaded it that the Oakley plant was “needed to meet a specific, unique reliability risk.”
California is the sixth largest economy in the world. To set a new standard for the US, the state should be thinking about not just shuttering nuclear facilities but what it is going to do to replace them with the cleanest, most effiicient renewable power, and the best policy for removal of nuclear waste.
Why not directly finance rooftop solar on residential and smaller commercial buildings? Why not make arrangements to reprocess San Onofre's nuclear waste, or embed spent fuel rods into glass logs for burial, like France does? Eventually, the current utility business model will go the way of the Dodo bird. And in this case, the sooner the better.
