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In a conversation with the LA Times’ editorial board on Thursday, Newsom said the state might pursue federal funding the Biden administration made available in its Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to keep uneconomic nuclear power plants open. The power plant, located in San Luis Obispo County and operated by utility company PG&E, is slated to cease operations by August 2025. PG&E said its priority was clean and reliable energy for California. “The people of PG&E are proud of the role that Diablo Canyon Power Plant plays in our state,” Suzanne Hosn, spokesperson for PG&E told CNBC. “We are always open to...

Cronyism in Energy Production “Diablo Canyon produces twice as much power as all of California’s solar panels, 24 percent more than all of its wind, and 40 times more than its largest solar farm. Also, Diablo Canyon provides power to 3 million Californians on a patch of land the size of three football fields. Achieving the equivalent from a solar farm would require 145 times more land; from wind, 500 times more.”—Michael Shellenberger, Breakthrough Institute co-founder, and Peter Raven, former Missouri Botanical Gardens head The announcement last week from PG&E that it was closing Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, rudely...

March for Environmental Hope A real thing, Jimmy. If truth is stranger than fiction, it should come as no surprise that Friday marks the start of the first-ever pro-nuclear power march — probably in world history — and it all starts in San Francisco. The March for Environmental Hope, a four-day trek from the City by the Bay to Sacramento, is being pitched as a family-friendly event — and in this case that means more than funnel cakes and bounce houses. Organizers are hoping to tug on the collective heart strings of America by making this about the children, as...

Now that many environmentalists and climate scientists have realized that nuclear energy is essential for addressing global warming, a coalition of environmental groups is sponsoring a multi-day March for Environmental Hope in California in support of nuclear power

California’s last nuclear power plant will close by 2025 under an accord announced Tuesday, ending three decades of safety debates that helped fuel the national anti-nuclear power movement. The state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., and environmental groups announced the agreement on the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which sits along a Pacific Ocean bluff on California’s central coast. Environmentalists had pressed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for years to close Diablo, given its proximity to seismic faults in the earthquake-prone state. …

Diablo Canyon is the last operating nuclear power plant in California — and arguably the most controversial. The plant sits along the scenic Central Coast and is surrounded by fault lines — one of which runs as close as 2,000 feet to the nuclear reactors. Many fear that a single earthquake could cause a repeat of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, when a tsunami devastated a nuclear plant. But despite decades of public protest, the plant's operator PG&E insists that the facility is not only seismically sound, but essential.

Rats chewing on electrical wire inside a mobile home likely caused a wildfire near the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, authorities said. "The most probable cause of the fire is related to rodents and the electrical system," Andy Anderson of the California Department of Fire and Forestry said in a statement. The 332-acre blaze, which burned within two miles of the nuclear plant, was surrounded Wednesday, forestry spokeswoman Laura Brown said. It is expected to be fully extinguished Saturday. The blaze began Sunday on land owned by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. when a mobile home ignited and flames spread to...

Anti-nuclear and environmental activists, backed by California and three other states, asked a federal appeals court on Monday to shut down a new storage facility for nuclear waste at Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s Diablo Canyon plant until a federal agency studies the risk of a terrorist attack. "Everything has been done in secret that relates to security at Diablo Canyon,'' Diane Curran, lawyer for San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace and the Sierra Club, told a panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Referring to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's current security planning review, Curran...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - State regulators have cleared the way for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to charge its customers $706 million to renovate the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. PG&E wants to replace eight steam generators at the San Luis Obispo-area plant. But the plan has drawn fire from environmentalists and consumer advocates, who question spending hundreds of millions on a $5.8 billion facility just 20 years old. On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission unanimously agreed that PG&E's customers will probably be responsible for the costs of the work. The bill could run as high as $815 million if...

FOLSOM, Calif. (AP) - As electricity grid managers prepared for another day of high energy demand Thursday, one of two units at a nuclear power plant was shut down so workers could fix a leaky pipe, cutting 1,100-megawatts of electricity from the state power grid. One of the units at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo County was shut down after workers found a crack in a pipe that delivers water to cool a pump, said David Proulx, a senior inspector with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The water was not involved in reactor cooling and there...