Diablo Canyon, California’s cursed nuclear plant, to be put out of its misery
It’s surprising that it ever opened in the first place
Some things are simply meant to be. The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant wasn’t one of them.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. announced recently that the plant, which is California’s last, will be phased out by 2025, but it probably never should have opened in the first place. From its earliest planning stages, Diablo Canyon seemed cursed.
PG&E spent several years scouting locations for the plant in the late 60’s, at one point heavily favoring a 1,121-acre site in Nipomo, California. The Sierra Club didn’t like that, though, and was resolved to protect the Nipomo sand dunes, claiming they should be “preserved, unimpaired, for scenic and recreational use.” The club’s board of directors voted 9–1 not to oppose the plant’s construction at nearby Diablo Canyon, however, where the plant was eventually constructed — a fateful decision.
Just three years after construction began and two years before the plant was expected to begin service, the Hosgri Fault was discovered beneath the Pacific a mere two miles from the plant location, a troublesome development. This was the third time in fifteen years that PG&E had run into trouble with fault lines — two previous locations on the California coast, one in Bodega Bay and the other in Point Arena, had been scrapped due to proximity to fault lines.
Then came the inevitable protests.
Though some environmentalists saw great potential in nuclear power’s ability to reduce air pollution, fear still remained around the issues of waste disposal and proper containment should nuclear materials ever spill. Nuclear plants were being built, but there was no federal regulation on how to manage the highly toxic materials they utilize.
By 1979, protests hadn’t waned and were, in fact, growing larger and larger. In April, just a little over a month before the Diablo Canyon plant was expected to gain approval to start producing power, Ralph Nader addressed a crowd of close to 30,000 in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza at what he referred to as “the largest anti-nuclear rally ever held in the United States.”
He accused Jimmy Carter and his administration of only supporting energy endeavors that were managed by major corporations (an all-too-familiar dialogue these days), and deceiving the public about the feasibility of geothermal, wind, solar, or waste wood sources as alternatives. Nader decried, “Nuclear power is far too catastrophic, expensive, and unrealistic to have a place in our national future.”
Three months later, an antinuclear coalition called Abalone Alliance sponsored a 20,000 person rally at the Diablo Canyon plant site. Even then-Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. showed up and denounced the project.
When PG&E was getting ready to begin testing the plant’s reactors in September 1981, Abalone Alliance struck again, organizing a 3,000-person blockade at the Diablo Canyon plant. They intended to symbolically block the transfer of fuel to to the reactor by land and sea (symbolic because the fuel was already on site).
On the eighth day of the blockade, arrest totals reached a whopping 1,453 as protesters attempted to keep construction workers from entering the site.
As if the seismic issues and ceaseless protests weren’t enough, company engineers found a problem with the residual heat removal system of the plant’s reactor right around the end of the Abalone Alliance’s two-week protest. Plans for loading the reactor with fuel had to be stalled even further as the scope of the problem was determined.
On October 5, 1981, the protests took an unexpected turn when about 80 people showed up to the site to hold a day-long vigil. Turns out the Diablo Canyon plant was also built atop a Chumash burial site.
The uncertainty around the seismic safety of the facility finally seriously caught up with the plant on November 19, 1981. The Nuclear Regulatory Committee voted to suspend the plant’s license after workers had discovered that some piping supports had been installed incorrectly, and those supports were supposed to help the building withstand heavy seismic activity. The license would not be restored until the plant successfully passed a series of seismic tests.
After looking into the case further, the Nuclear Regulatory Committee issued a statement on March 4, 1982 saying that there were hundreds of problems with the Diablo Canyon plant that would need to be resolved before it could function safely. Harold R. Denton, head of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, told the The New York Times, “Every time they look at it, they’re finding more errors.”
It wasn’t until November 8, 1983 that the plant finally got the OK from the Nuclear Regulatory Committee to load fuel into the reactors.
After facing almost every problem imaginable in the realm of nuclear development — close proximity to a fault line, structural design errors, safety inadequacies, huge protests, regulatory issues, and cultural issues — the plant produced its first fission reaction on April 29, 1984, only a decade after it was originally set to start operating.
When the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant closes completely in 2025, it will (hopefully, cross your fingers, everyone) have seen thirty years of success after a decade-long rough start. But with an uncanny history of bad luck and seismologists warning of immense earthquakes in California, it’s worth noting that a lot can go wrong in a decade.
