The massive 2,200-megawatt Diablo Canyon Power Plant, the last-standing nuclear power facility in California, is scheduled to fully shut down operations by 2025, ending the state’s reliance on nuclear energy. Some energy experts, though, warn that shuttering the plant — a goal long sought by anti-nuclear advocates — could ultimately lead to a spike in the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.
According to a recent report from researchers at Stanford Energy, shuttering the San Luis Obispo County facility, which opened in 1985 in the face of fierce opposition, would likely make the state more dependent on natural gas for its electricity production. Natural gas is composed mostly of methane, a climate-warming gas more potent than carbon dioxide when released into the atmosphere.
The report’s findings spurred the Washington Post’s editorial board to declare that shutting the plant down would be the “the definition of climate incoherence.”
The report’s authors recommend delaying the closure of Diablo Canyon by 10 years, to 2035. Doing so, they predict, would yield a 10% reduction over 2017 levels in carbon emissions generated by California’s power sector, while saving some $2.6 billion in power system costs and bolstering system reliability.
The report goes on to suggest several new uses for the plant should it remain open for another decade, including as the power source for a major desalination complex that could produce fresh water at 80 times the rate of the Carlsbad Desalination Plant. It also suggests the possibility of connecting the nuclear facility to a hydrogen plant to produce clean hydrogen fuel.
But some energy experts say the analysis simply underscores the need for California to double down on its clean-energy production.
“You shut down Diablo Canyon, something is going to replace it. We still have electricity demand. People still will use the same amount of electricity the day Diablo Canyon goes offline,” Mark Specht, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told The California Report.
Using only natural gas to supplant Diablo Canyon’s power supply would be the emissions equivalent of adding 300,000 cars to California’s roads, according to research by Specht’s team.
But, he says, that should send a clear message that “there is no time to waste” in creating new clean-energy infrastructure to replace the nuclear plant’s output.
“We are talking about three or four years and then the power plant goes offline, and building new clean resources takes years. Folks have to be working on this right now to make sure we replace the power plant with clean energy,” Specht said.
