California Legislators Vote To Save Diablo Canyon

California's legislature, by nearly unanimous votes in both the Assembly and the Senate, agreed with Governor Gavin Newsom, to extend the operating life of Diablo Canyon. This was the result of multiple converging factors, the most important of which was that the closure would have worsened the already fragile state of the California energy grid, maing black-outs far more likely. But, behind this looming awareness were many other factors influencing public opinion and political pressure, which include pronuclear advocacy, scientific concerns about climate change, shifting political winds in the face of Russia's invastion of Ukraine and leadership from the Biden Administration. There will be many efforts to understand what tipped the political weights in favor of saving Diablo Canyon, and not all will be correct, but the good news for is that rationality prevailed in California, despite concerted anti-nuclear pressures.

Climate change and Russia's invasion of the Ukraine are looming backdrops to this stunning victory. Yet, most directly, the basis of the success comes down to the fact that Governor Newsom himself became convinced that delaying the closure of Diablo Canyon was both the right thing to do and was politically feasible. It isn't clear exactly how he arrived at this conclusion but it is certain that his political weight made it happen. What caused the politics to shift? Possibly, Newsom found sufficient political cover and acceptable polling data from the fact that Illinois Governor Pritzker and Michigan Governor Whitmer, both Democrats, took action to protect their nuclear power.

Nevertheless, coming out in favor of extending the life of Diablo Canyon, was enormously risky and difficult for Governor Newsom, as it involved making a 180 degree shift from his prior position of working to ensure that Diablo got closed. Yet, with state policy experts warning that the closure would cause blackouts and likely deaths as a result, Governor Newsom bit the bullet and did the right thing.

There were a multitude of pronuclear individuals and groups providing support and political cover for this decision. As far back as 2015, Michael Shellenberger and his organizations, The Breakthrough Institute and Environmental Progress, argued on behalf of nuclear power. Shellenberger split out of TBI, a think tank, in order to engage in more active pronuclear advocacy. He and a group of younger activists organized and held the first pronuclear rally, a three day protest and parade against the closure of Diablo Canyon. From there, numerous groups were formed which contributed advocacy towards the support of nuclear power: Californians for Green Nuclear Power, Generation Atomic, Mothers for Nuclear, Climate Coalition, Rethink Nuclear, Nuclear New York, Protect Nuclear NOW and many others.

Meanwhile, filmmakers Robert Stone and Dave Schumacher produced luscious documentaries that challenged the status quo attitudes about nuclear power. Their films, Pandora's Promise and The New Fire respectively brought new insights into our understanding of both the facts about nuclear power and the reality about the concerted and often nefarious efforts to besmirch nuclear's reputation. These films had surprising reach and helped soften widespread knee-jerk antinuclear reactions. Then, the academics from Stanford and MIT played their parts and issued a report providing evidence that closing Diablo Canyon would cost the state $21 billion.

While, no single person or group can take sole credit for this victory, there was little discernable action until the joining of Isabelle Boemeke to the campaign. Representing the younger generation and signing up to support Diablo Canyon as the first "nuclear influencer," Isabelle served as the spark to ignite public attention to the support that Diablo Canyon had as our largest source of clean energy, and helped turn the tide in favor of saving it. Under the handle "Isodope," she adroitly leverage social media tech platforms, including Instagram, TicTok and Twitter, to send highly stylized, informative and compellingly snarky videos to a broad spectrum of followers. She also acted on the momentum garnered by the Stanford/MIT report to organize an in-person rally in San Luis Obispo, complete with support from local politicians and residents. That turned to be very successful and she then parlayed that success to corral scientific experts to weigh in with a direct letter appeal to Governor Newsom.

Finally, with the introduction of the Biden Administration's Civil Nuclear Credit program and its offer of up to $6 billion in support of saving aging plants, Governor Newsom could no longer afford to ignore the reality that saving Diablo Canyon could help him avoid energy embarrassment and liability from the rash of civil lawsuits that would have followed black-out related deaths.

There are now many articles coming out with their assessments of the factors that enabled this success. None capture the whole picture, which spans much more engagement, work and adroit advocacy in California, across the US and even internationally, that contributed to making ignoring reality of nuclear impossible for Gov. Newsom.

Read the Forbes article, In Big Win For Nuclear, California Legislators Vote To Save Diablo Canyon, by Robert Bryce, September 1, 2022 here. There are many other articles reporting on this significant achievement but we can't list them all here.

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April 29, 2022

Newsom tells L.A. Times editors that he’s reconsidering the Diablo Canyon closure

Governor Gavin Newsom, a consumate politician, finally is willing to declare his support for Diablo Canyon, something he has long refused to do. As the L.A. Times reports in an article titled California promised to close its last nuclear plant. Now Newsom is reconsidering, Newsom has chosen to come out publicly with support for saving Diablo Canyon. It is doubtful that Newsom has suddenly "seen the light" about nuclear. More likely, he's seen recent polling showing that a majority of Democrats and Republican understand the importance of nuclear power for addressing the goal of reliable clean energy in the absence of fossil fuels.

It appears that Governor Newsom is now working to delay the closure of Diablo Canyon. While this will disappoint his fossil fuel donors and those touting renewables (which is a majority of environmental organizations of all stripes), it is definitely the right thing to do.

There are numerous reasons for Newsom having finally found the political will to disrupt what many in California consider a settled matter. As the article mentions, the reality is that shutting Diablo would cause the forthcoming energy shortages that are already projected to be far worse. Back in August 2020, hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses lost power during some of the hotest and smokiest days of the year, and the state narrowly avoided even worse blackouts a few weeks later. Now CALISO is projecting increased grid fragility going forward, even without shuttering Diablo Canyon, given increasing heat waves, more aggressive forest fires and reduced hydropower supply, as a result of California's extended drought.

Additionally, the DOE recently announced their Civil Nuclear Credit program and are now dangling some $6 billion that is earmarked for at-risk nuclear power plants. Gavin recognizes that such funds could help underwrite some face-saving upgrades to the plant, possibly even to the once-through-cooling (OTC) system, the imposed costs of which by the State Water Resources Board were ostensibly the basis for PG&E finally giving up on their plan to re-license the plant.

Then there the small matter of the upcoming election and a Democratic primary where the leading contenders for Gavin's place on the ticket were nearly all expressing strong pronuclear positions and calling Gavin out for his apparent retrograde or donor-induced political ignorance of climate science.

Needless to say, that the joint Stanford/MIT report providing evidence that closing Diablo Canyon would cost the state $21 billion, which was followed by a pronuclear rally in San Luis Obispo, itself followed by the very public letter from 79 high-level scientists, academics and business leader urging Governor Newsom to protect this existing (and paid for) asset, was a triple punch that probably alarmed everyone that he was being seen as being on the wrong side of science.

While the article suggests that Newsom is simply in process of "reconsidering," in fact the word on the street is that a deal has been done to preserve Diablo Canyon, although what that is remains unknown, as no information has yet been officially issued. Needless to say, these are very encouraging signs. Nucleation Capital supports protecting Diablo Canyon, Michigan's Palisades plant and other at-risk plants.

Read the L.A. Times article, California promised to close its last nuclear plant. Now Newsom is reconsidering, by Sammy Roth, April 29, 2022 here. To learn more about what you can do to support Diablo Canyon, see the Save Diablo Canyon campaign at Climate Coalition.

Published by Grant Mills in Carbon emissions, Climate change, Energy abundance, Future of Energy, Government support, History-making, LINKS, Nuclear competitiveness, Nuclear-inclusive energy policy, Politicians supporting nuclear, Reduced ecosystem impacts, Regulatory reform, Scientific debate, Solving climate, US technological leadership, Zero emission energy

December 13, 2013

Rise of the Nuclear Greens

Robert Bryce, a highly respected author and now film producer, who recently released the film "Juice: How Electricity Explains the World," attempted to tackle the counter-intuitive phenomena that was being noticed at that time—approximately two years after the devastating disaster at Fukushima—wherein prominent environmentalists who were anti-nuclear before the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant became pro-nuclear after the accident.

Bryce reports on the emergence of what he calls "pronuclear Greens," and the bifurcation that they represented in the environmental movement. These leading environmental thinkers, it turns out, realized that despite how horrific the earthquake-induced tsunami was, and its ability to eliminate power to the nuclear plant for enough time to cause the meltdown of three of the four reactors at the Daiichi plant, that nevertheless, the actual loss of life from that accident was so negligible, it was almost something to celebrate.

Of course, the tsunami swept away some 15,000 souls. In the lead-up to the meltdown, the fear created by the threat of what would happen, caused unbelievable panic, that hundreds of people died from accidents, heart attacks, the failure to give proper medical treatment, and many other causes. Estimates put the number of deaths related to the ordered evaculation at about 1,000. But the number of people who died from the meltdowns themselves as well as from the amount of escaping radiation? Zero.

Yes, there was a catastrophic failure at a nuclear power plant but, the more you learn about it, the more you realize that lives would have been saved had there not been the evacuation order in the first place. That the damage done was limited primarily to the physical plant and none spilled out to the surrounding community. What radiation did escape was relatively minor and impacts from that would have been highly treatable with iodine and routine check-ups. In fact, the fear of nuclear was more dangerous than the meltdown.

Read Robert Bryce's prescient article "Rise of the Nuclear Greens," published at The Breakthrough Institute.

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