Remembering the Diablo Canyon protests

My angry young man days were far behind me by the time I returned to college in the fall of 1980 to honor a promise I made to my mother a decade or so earlier that I would get an education if I wasn’t a rich and famous guitar slinger by the time I turned 30. I turned 30 still playing guitar in smoky bars up and down the central valley, and I decided it was time to quit the scene.

So, in September 1981 (my third semester at Fresno City College) I passed when many of my college friends decided to join the Abalone Alliance’s protests of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant then under construction. These protests were completely peaceful and the protesters caused no damage as I remember. They just made some ladders to climb the fence, and nearly 2,000 of them were arrested, mostly for trespass.

They even had a silly nolo contendere song (a no contest plea in which the defendant accepts the consequences of a guilty plea without admitting guilt) they sang to the judge during their day in court. My friends wore their arrests as a badge of honor, and if my memory serves me well, none of them served any time behind bars. I was happy not to participate and focus instead on my studies.

Now here’s a little-known and seldom shared story about the Sierra Club and Diablo Canyon I remember from my childhood.

It must have been the early or mid-1960s when my parents dragged us kids to a Sierra Club tour of the Diablo Canyon site, and believe it or not, the Sierra Club favored the project that supposedly would provide PG&E customers with almost limitless power for next to nothing in cost.

Just imagine that for a moment — the Sierra Club supporting a nuclear power plant on a hill just above the breakers. We kids joined my parents of the tour, but we were really looking forward to spending the weekend camping out and body surfing at nearby Pismo Beach. I don’t remember any mention of an earthquake fault at the site back then (according to AI it wasn’t discovered until 1971 during the plant’s construction).

Today, PG&E says the plant can withstand an earthquake 10 times larger than one expected on the four nearby faults. Is that enough? Who knows?

The Diablo Canyon plant — originally scheduled to be decommissioned in 2024 and 2025 — was given new life to operate until 2029 and 2030.

According to a story in the Fresno Bee — “President Donald Trump’s changes to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — which give the White House de facto control over the agency — should be a wake-up call for California’s governor and the state legislature.”

According to that Fresno Bee story, it will cost PG&E at least $8 billion to keep the plant in operation, and it alleges nuclear power is actually “the most expensive way to produce electricity due to high capital costs and necessary safety measures. That is why the nuclear industry is dependent on government subsidies,” including a $1.4 billion “forgivable loan” from the state of California.

We’ve seen the destruction wrought by nuclear power plant disasters. I pray the next one won’t come on that beautiful stretch of California’s coastline just because we failed to shut Diablo Canyon down as originally planned.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.