Diablo Canyon: The Devil’s in the Details; Part 2: A Mother's Work Is Never Done

Utility owner Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) announced in June 2016 that it would shut down the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant with its two atomic reactors by 2025 due to a joint proposal made by PG&E and several environmental and labor organizations. This action is neither the beginning nor the end to the decades long story of Diablo Canyon’s design, construction, and operation. PG&E’s promise to replace the nuclear power generated by Diablo Canyon’s two reactors with renewable energy and to no longer seek a 20-year license renewal for these atomic reactors still comes with significant costs. The two are reactors located on multiple California fault lines and now will continue to operate for nearly a decade more. In the second part to this Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast series, the Fairewinds Crew will share the troubled history of Diablo Canyon and speak with the leading activists in opposition to Diablo Canyon’s ominous 50-year presence along the California coast. 

The formidable San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace have acted as legal intervenors to the construction, licensing, and operation of Diablo Canyon since 1973. During Part 2 of our Diablo Canyon series entitled “A Mother’s Work is Never Done”, Fairewinds President Maggie Gundersen talks with Mothers for Peace Vice President Linda Seeley about what it means to be a legal intervenor and why this watchdog role is so important when it comes to atomic power reactors.

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LS: It’s just a game of Russian Roulette every day that plant is open now.

MG: Hi, you’re listening to the Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast, hosted by the Fairewinds Crew. I’m Maggie Gundersen, Founder of Fairewinds, and I’d like to welcome you to our show today. Today I’m joined by Linda Seeley, who is a member of the San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace organization that was founded in 1969 and began to be very active in San Luis Obispo County in California on risk awareness of nuclear power plants. The organization’s concerns include the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and waste on national and global levels. Additionally, Mothers for Peace also cares about peace, social justice and a safe environment. The group takes on all of these issues, working to make the world safer and more humane for generations to come. Since 1973, the focus has been on legal intervention regarding the dangers at the Diablo Canyon Atomic Reactor and controversy concerning the construction, licensing and operation of the facility. That’s four decades of making the world safer and more humane. If you don’t know the history about Diablo Canyon, please listen to “The Devil is in the Details, Part I – A Troubled History.” And you can find that on our Fairewinds.org website. Linda Seeley became a member of Mothers for Peace when she moved to San Luis Obispo in 1982. She’s active in the environmental community in several capacities, seeing the need for mutual support and communication among many groups who share the vision of a sustainable future for San Luis Obispo County, as you can tell from this clip from early 1984 in response to the NRC’s approved startup of Diablo Canyon on November 8, 1983: “How we can most effectively say to the NRC that we as people who live here in this community don’t want Diablo to open because we think, really believe, that it’s very unsafe for us. I’m sure all of you have seen the poster that says what to do in a case of a nuclear accident: Kiss your children goodbye.” Linda Seeley really pushed for safety from this atomic power reactor sitting on an earthquake fault near San Francisco Bay. Linda, thank you so much for joining us today. We know that you are a member of Mothers for Peace and we wanted you to fill us in about Diablo Canyon and also how Mothers for Peace began and why.

LS: First of all, thank you so much for inviting me to be on your podcast, and I’ll try to speak for all the Mothers for Peace and not just for myself. We’ve been actually the legal interveners against the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant since 1973. Mothers for Peace was created in 1969 in opposition to the Vietnam War. That’s how we got our name. And then when two of our members in 1973 read the newspaper one morning and noticed that there was an advertisement in the classified ads from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announcing that there was a proposed nuclear plant that was going to be built on the beautiful coastline in San Luis Obispo County, they went what, eh, what? A nuclear power plant? They’d heard of nuclear power plants but they didn’t know much about them. But it was an opportunity to become a legal intervener. They didn’t know what a legal intervener was, but they thought hmm, sounds pretty important that somebody needs to be representing the public. And so they filled out the paperwork, submitted it and lo and behold, Mothers for Peace was approved to be the legal intervener. A legal intervener is a group or an individual that has the same standing as, in our case, PG&E, with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So whenever there is an issue with the licensing or the safety at Diablo Canyon, the legal intervener, Mothers for Peace, is invited to the table. And so it’s a very important role to have, and unfortunately, quite a few nuclear plants do not have legal interveners on their behalf. So Diablo Canyon is lucky that Mothers for Peace decided to do it so long ago. I wouldn’t say Diablo Canyon is lucky; I’d say the people here – the plants and the animals, the fish and the air are lucky that we’re here. So we became the legal intervener and we were first our own lawyer and then we were taken under the wing of the Center for Law & Public Interest, which was a public interest law firm in Los Angeles and they guided us for I think about 9 years. We’ve had the same attorney, Diane Curran, from Washington, D.C., for the past 17 years. She’s the best, most wonderful attorney that we could ever hope for. And we have won in the federal courts under her great guidance. We’ve won in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals about the spent fuel, the dry cask storage at Diablo Canyon, we challenged in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the dry casks were vulnerable to terrorist sabotage, and the 9th Circuit Court ruled in our favor and ordered PG&E to prepare an environmental impact study about the consequences of a terrorist attack on the dry cask storage. And they did, but it was a very inadequate document and we did have the opportunity at that time to challenge that document and go to the Supreme Court, but we realized that our resources couldn’t manage a Supreme Court challenge and so we left it at that victory, which was inadequately addressed, really.

MG: The 2006 Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit, decision – that is the one you’re talking about now? Correct? (LS: Yes it is) Now that Diablo Canyon is planning to shut down, is this a time that there could be new intervention on the dry casks?

LS: You know, we have this end point in sight right now, 2025, to shut down the plant. And we are on high alert right now because since they have announced the closure, what we have learned recently is that attrition has already started at the plant. Because the younger operators and other highly specialized personnel at the plant, even though they’re given retention bonuses and so on, they’re looking out into their future, and if they’re 35 or 40 years old and looking into working for 25, 30 more years, they are wanting to have a future, and they know their future is finite here. So referring back to the dry cask storage, it’s not just the dry cask storage. There are many issues that are emerging now at this time. I learned from Arnie the term running to failure. And what that means is that most nuclear power plants, the way that they shut down is that there is some breakdown in some essential component of the plant, whether or not it’s a nuclear-related breakdown is not the point; but that there is some essential part of the plant that breaks down, causing it to run until it fails. And here we are now with an end point 9 years out for this plant. And Mothers for Peace’ primary concern here is that Pacific Gas & Electric, knowing that this plant is going to shut down, is going to cut corners in the maintenance and the replacement of parts that are needed in order to run the plant safely and effectively. And combined with this fact that attrition has already started, losing some of the younger, brightest people who are working out there, the fact that it’s an old plant, the fact that – Arnie, you’ll know what this is – the stater on unit 2’s steam generator is cobbled together, needs to be replaced, but has a price tag of between $137 million and $151 million to replace it, and they’ve been – PG&E has written a hardship letter to the NRC asking that they not have to replace the stater because of the economic hardship. Then we have all of the Fukushima retrofits that are coming up and that are going to be costly. So our feeling is that these last years are a very, very critical and dangerous time at Diablo Canyon. We haven’t yet seen the final seismic evaluations. We know that at least 13 earthquake faults are there and that most of them are connected to each other, and that two of those earthquake faults are major, active earthquake faults. Those have been proven and we don’t know how many others are active. It’s just a game of Russian Roulette every day that plant is open now. And so because of all of these factors that I have mentioned, we really feel that it needs to shut down sooner than 2025. Today would be a great day for it to shut down, frankly. Barring that, whenever it can happen is a good time. So we are working with some attorneys on a Public Utilities Commission case –

MG: So Linda, what do you feel now about the status of Diablo Canyon now?

LS: Well, every day that Diablo Canyon is on line, we’re playing a game of Russian Roulette because – there are many reasons for this. Number one, the components are old. A lot of them were built in the 60’s; the plant was designed in the 60’s, assembled in the early 70’s, went on line in the mid-80’s. The reactor vessel in Unit 1 is, I believe, the third most embrittled reactor vessel in the United States. You have an embrittled reactor vessel sitting at the intersection of 13 earthquake faults. And we’re only 40 miles from the San Andreas Fault at Diablo Canyon. Remember, the Fukushima earthquake that destroyed those three reactors and caused meltdowns – that earthquake was 50 miles from Fukushima. We’re 40 miles from the San Andreas Fault and there are news reports very frequently about how we’re expecting the big one on the San Andreas. We’ve got over 6 million pounds of highly irradiated nuclear fuel rods sitting out there, some of it in spent fuel pools and some of it in dry cask storage. Our population in our county has grown – oh, at least doubled since the plant was built. We have one road to evacuate on. It runs north and south, highway 101. If you evacuate for the south, you evacuate toward the prevailing winds that would carry the radiation downwind. If you evacuate north, you have to go over a huge mountain where – when in the summer time we have a county fair here. It’s an agricultural area. And during the county fair time every year, you can’t get – what’s called the Questa Grade – you can’t get across the Questa Grade. That’s with the County Fair. Can you imagine how it would be with 250,000 people trying to evacuate? We have a university here with 20,000 students – Cal Poly – which is a very well-known California school, very desirable California school. We have a junior college called Questa College, with 10,000 students. We have a prison called the California Men’s Colony with over 5,000 inmates. These are just right within 10 miles of Diablo Canyon. The evacuation possibilities are absolutely impossible, and yet there’s this charade – we live with this charade that it would be possible to evacuate here. We have these spent fuel pools and the dry casks that are sitting on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, very vulnerable to terrorism. And the environment here on the coast is one of – you know how it is on the coast of an ocean. We have high winds, we have rain, we have tons of moisture, lots and lots of minerals in the air, and the dry casks are in one-half-inch thick canisters. And in the summer of 2014, the Nuclear Energy Institute did an inspection of some of the canisters at Diablo Canyon and they found that there were salts that were deposited on the sides of some of – of one of the canisters – magnesium salts. And when you have a deposit of salts on stainless steel, it can cause etching. And when you have etching, when it’s exposed like this to all of this heat that comes from the canisters, plus the minerals, it can cause the conditions for cracking. And here we’re looking toward a future of storing all of the fuel in these half-inch-thick canisters; and yet the canisters are very susceptible to cracking. The last thing I’d like to say about this is that, as you know, we don’t have a repository for spent fuel in this country. We probably never will. And so spent fuel, highly radioactive, is probably going to be on this coastline for the foreseeable future. And we’re no different from any other nuclear plant. I know everybody’s experiencing the same problem with storing their radioactive waste. Those are the problems that I see today.

MG: (17:08) Linda, I want to thank you for going through that part. It was chilling to me. Our daughter is an emergency room nurse, and she was a paramedic on the West Coast in Crescent City, where they’ve had two tsunamis – in Northern California. And one of our board members, Robert Manning, is a disaster planning specialist and former fire chief. And what you said is really chilling to think about how to evacuate - it’s so impossible. Arnie and I and the crew at Fairewinds have not seen one evacuation plan in the U.S. that works – not one. And that is horrible. And then when you talk about the dry cask storage rusting or deteriorating – the metal deteriorating – when we visited our daughter in Crescent City, which is right on the California coast, the salt water and just moisture in the air was so much that people who had put up metal doors – in a year, their entire front doors were just disintegrating. So I can visualize that, and as you described it, you really gave me chills. So it’s just a lot to try and – even for those of us in this industry and who are jaded by hearing some of these facts, I find what you said extremely chilling.

LS: And another thing, Maggie, that I didn’t mention, is the schoolchildren. Not only the universities, but if there were an accident during the day, if there were an earthquake, we have one road. And then we have these little side roads. And there are bridges on all of these roads. And if the bridges crack and the emergency vehicles can’t get through to evacuate the schoolchildren, they will be staying in their schools. And we have worked trying to get our school system to distribute potassium iodide pills into the schools so that teachers could give them to the students if they were trapped in their classrooms. And so far, because PG&E is – this is kind of a company town, or I would say a company county – PG&E is the largest contributor to nonprofits in our county. They give huge amounts to the Sheriffs Department, to the school system – well, because of their property tax. So they’re very respected as an employer and as a benefactor of our community. And because – we feel that because the school systems are so much aligned with PG&E that they don’t want to frighten the parents. Because many – this is the crazy thing, too – this county has grown tremendously, as I’ve said. And a lot of people who have moved here don’t even know Diablo Canyon is here because it’s completely invisible. It’s on a coastline; you can’t see it from any point in the county. And there’s one sign on a small road that says Diablo Canyon Power Plant. It does not say the word nuclear. So people move here, they have school children, they do not know there’s a nuclear power plant here. And our schools do not want to start getting the parents scared. So they won’t distribute or won’t allow potassium iodide to be stored in the schools for the children to get if there were a release of radiation. And I think that’s unconscionable. I became involved with Mothers for Peace when I moved to San Luis Obispo because Diablo Canyon, as you know, was a pretty famous nuclear power plant and my former husband had been offered a job teaching at Cal Poly at the university here. We have three kids and when – and I had been keeping track of the protests at Diablo Canyon from 1979, I think, and shortly before he was offered the job at Cal Poly, they discovered that the Unit 2 earthquake struts had been installed backwards because the two units were supposed to be mirror images of the other and they had incorrectly built Unit 2 and they had to rip it down and build it all over again. And I said oh, there is no way that a nuclear power plant that was built backwards is going to be able to go online. There had been all these protests and everything. And so – because it was a concern before we moved here. So we decided to move here. And when we moved here, we rented a house up in a canyon and it turned out, lo and behold, that our nearest neighbor just a little bit across the canyon, was a member of Mothers for Peace. And the first day that we moved in, she brought cookies over to us. And we started talking and she said oh – you know, I was asking about what was going on in the town and she said I belong to a group that you might be interested in. And I said oh, yeah, I would be interested in that. And that’s how I joined. And then I was working. I am actually a nurse midwife. And so a couple of years after we moved here, I started working again and I always belonged to Mothers for Peace but my role became more peripheral. And then about 10 years ago, I picked up my involvement and it’s become all I do now, work against nuclear power. And I love it. We’re a local, all-volunteer based organization. We don’t have an office. We use each other’s homes for our meetings. We don’t have any paid staff. We do everything ourselves. Except we raise money to pay our lawyer. A watchdog group is usually a legal intervener, although I don’t think they always have to be. But what we do is we read the safety inspection reports. We’re on lists from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other organizations – state and federal organizations that have to do with regulating Diablo Canyon. We meet with the inspectors at Diablo Canyon and form personal relationships with them so that we feel comfortable calling them with questions. And we just try to basically stay on the heels of PG&E and make sure that they adhere to the rules that they’re supposed to adhere to, and that they comply with the orders of the NRC, which they don’t always do. Because the NRC – Nuclear Regulatory Commission – that is charged with regulating, is what we call a captured agency. They basically work for the industry that they’re supposed to be regulating. Diablo Canyon is situated on the central coast of California. It’s almost midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles – a little bit closer to Los Angeles. And the prevailing winds come out of the northwest. So Santa Barbara and Los Angeles are – they’re down winders from Diablo Canyon. And if you superimpose a map of the radiation, of the fallout from Fukushima over the California coast, which some of our allies have done, it’s pretty shocking to see the amount of radiation that goes not only inland to the main agricultural area of the whole United States, where more fruits and vegetables are grown than any other place in the United States, and down into these gigantic population centers in Southern California. Even though we’re a rather remote location the consequences of a meltdown at the two reactors at Diablo Canyon would be absolutely catastrophic, not only on our health but on the economy. California happens to be the 7th largest economy in the world and so destroying the economy of the 7th largest economy of the world seems foolish when it could be stopped.

AG: There’s two national groups entered a settlement with Pacific Gas & Electric, the unions and the town, to close Diablo at the end of its 40-year license. And now the pro-nuclear zealots are coming out trying to fight the agreement that Pacific Gas & Electric has entered into. So that puts Mothers for Peace in a situation of agreeing with Pacific Gas & Electric. How does that make you feel?

LS: Well, we don’t agree with Pacific Gas & Electric because they want to shut down the plant in 9 years. We want to shut it down tomorrow. And so we substantially agree with shutting it down, but obviously the devil is in the details. And so the Diablo is in these details. We are going to be involved in very soon a public utilities case is going to be starting to – Friends of the Earth National Resource Defense Council – NRDC – two unions, Electrical Workers and the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility – all came to this agreement, which is called the Joint Proposal. And it outlines how Diablo Canyon is going to be shut down over a nine-year period. The great part of it is that all of the power that’s needed for the replacement of the power that’s generated at Diablo Canyon will come from renewable resources. That’s what’s different about this shutdown agreement or any other shutdown of any other nuclear plant that’s ever happened before. And that’s great. However, we know that those renewable resources can be secured prior to 9 years. The main interest that PG&E has is in recouping their expenses. It’s a 1.5 billion-dollar asset and they are going to be receiving all of that compensation in this agreement that they’ve made. I’m sorry, it’s not an agreement; it’s called a Joint Proposal. So that Joint Proposal is being taken before the Public Utilities Commission because it’s a very complex document that has rate changes and payouts and all kinds of economic issues that have to be addressed by the Public Utilities Commission because the Public Utilities Commission is the one that can pass on these costs to the ratepayers. And so that is intrinsic in this agreement that they’ve reached. The thing about the Joint Proposal is that PG&E has the option of backing out at any time that they want. It’s not a binding agreement. It’s not a binding agreement until it’s approved by the Public Utilities Commission. So Mothers for Peace is going to retain a lawyer – a PUC lawyer – who will help us in these proceedings to push the PUC to get the plant shut down sooner. PG&E is already acquiring a lot of renewable resources in their portfolio. They’re buying them up as soon as they become available. And so the shutdown date, we believe, is negotiable. So we are going to negotiate for an earlier shutdown. We don’t know exactly how, but that’s our goal and we won’t give up on that goal.

AG: (30:40) I don’t’ know if you knew it, but I did a report for Friends of the Earth that showed that they were supposed to inspect the nuclear reactor vessel in 2014 for its 10-year inspection and they got the NRC to waive that and push it out into 2025 so that there you have one of the most severely embrittled reactor vessels in the world and the NRC has waived any inspection on it until after it gets its 20-year license extension. So that’s certainly a risk to the people of San Luis Obispo. For the next 10 years, you’ve got an uninspected nuclear reactor out there.

LS: I didn’t know that, Arnie.

AG: Certainly Diablo and the NRC weren’t interested in publicizing it and they tried to sneak it through, and effectively, they did. The license has been amended and there is no inspection between now and 2025.

LS: And there’s probably no way to address that now, because it’s done, right?

MG: Shouldn’t they have been notified?

AG: That’s right. There should have been a process back when they applied for that, but somewhere along the line, the vessel is not being inspected. The NRC gave them a 10-year waiver.

MG: Linda, thank you so much for joining us today and for being a part of this really critical conversation about nuclear power risk, atomic reactors, the West Coast earthquake faults and Diablo Canyon.

LS: Maggie, I appreciate so much your having invited me. I hope that people will pay attention to Diablo Canyon and will pay attention to all of the nuclear reactors that are still online and work as hard as they can to shut them all down.

MG: We at Fairewinds Energy Education would like to thank you for joining us today. This is Maggie Gundersen, Founder of Fairewinds, and my special guest, Linda Seeley, from San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace. We at Fairewinds will keep you informed.