Don’t throw Diablo Canyon into the sea

Take $30 billion. Carry it to the edge of the continent. Throw it in the Pacific. Then spend decades paying to replace what it did.

That’s the plan for Diablo Canyon if it closes in 2030. Building a plant like it today costs about $30 billion. Georgia just did it. California already owns one. It’s built, it’s licensed, it runs day and night. The question is whether the state throws it away.

During the last week in July, San Luis Obispo County heard the evidence, at the county’s public meeting on the plant’s future. Presentation after presentation made the same point: Diablo Canyon matters, to this county and to California’s jobs, grid, bills, and climate goals.

The room told its own story. Labor spoke for the jobs. Business spoke for the local economy. School officials spoke for the tax base that pays for classrooms. A few neighbors spoke against extension, most citing seismic questions. Those questions have answers on the record: The plant’s independent safety committee calls its seismic safety “currently fully adequate,” and review continues in public, as it should.

The stakes: more than 2,200 megawatts, about 18 terawatt-hours a year, power for more than 3 million people, roughly 8 percent of California’s in-state electricity, 6 million to 7 million tons of avoided emissions every year.

Other countries are borrowing billions of dollars and waiting decades to build what California already owns.

And the paychecks. The economic assessment presented at the hearing counts 3,785 jobs statewide, $901 million a year to the state economy, $249 million in taxes. More than 1,300 people work at the plant, another 1,100 come in for outages, and the average salary is about $154,000, nearly 69 percent above the county median. Those paychecks hold up homes, shops, and hospitals across the region. When jobs like these go, the damage doesn’t stop at the plant gate.

The hearing’s modelling also found continued operation could save the power system $8 billion to $20 billion, depending on what replaces it. Guess who pays if it closes.

The federal regulator has renewed both licenses, to 2044 and 2045. State law cuts the plant off in 2030. The Legislature decides.

Before it does, remember what firm power is. Solar stops every evening. Wind comes and goes. Demand doesn’t. Hospitals, factories, water systems, and data centers run whatever the weather is doing. Today the backup is mostly gas plants that sit idle and get paid anyway. Batteries help shift power around the day, but they generate nothing and last a few hours. They can’t carry California through a bad week. And the grid leans on the steadying physics of Diablo’s big spinning turbines. Retire them, and the state buys that stability somewhere else.

Customers pay at every stage. The solar farms, the transmission, the batteries, the standby gas, the imports on the worst days. That’s a central finding of our report, “Lower Bills. Stronger Grid.” The advertised price of generating electricity is not the full cost of delivering it every hour of the year. In May, California households paid 33.25 cents a kilowatt-hour. The national average was 18.44 cents. That’s 80 percent more, and it leaks into the price of everything made or sold in this state.

And the replacement? There isn’t one. No public, project-by-project plan. No full price for the generation, storage, transmission, backup, and grid services it would take. Meanwhile the Energy Commission expects peak demand to grow by more than 20 gigawatts by 2045. That’s nine Diablo Canyons. California needs nine more and is debating whether to keep the one it has.

Other countries are borrowing billions of dollars and waiting decades to build what California already owns. Diablo Canyon is the crown energy jewel of the West Coast. Only a fool throws the crown jewels into the sea.

The Legislature’s window to act this year closes Aug. 31. Keep Diablo. ∆

Cristina Talacko and Jeffrey Donovan are the co-founders of GLOW Strategies and the authors of the report Lower Bills. Stronger Grid. Respond with an opinion piece of your own by emailing it to letters@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in 40th anniversary edition.