Post-hearing note (added Nov. 6, 2025):
About six hours into the hearing, the two-or three minutes per speaker was cut to one minute for the rest of the speakers, include myself.
I used my minute to point out that the California Coastal Commission says that "safety" is the purvue of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- but the NRC uses earthquake guesswork supplied by the CCC! That information is extremely imprecise, yet the plant is considered "safe"? Next I described the "mitigation" that is being offered as nothing more than a "Tribe Bribe." Basically, PG&E is offering Native Americans in California land their ancestors originally occupied, in return for them not opposing continuing to risk ruining that land forever. And the bribe seems to have worked, for the most part.
I managed to also get in that Australia is now giving away solar power for free "or less" at peak times (yes, they PAY you to take it!). And that China is building a nuclear reactor's worth of solar power "every two weeks."
A number of supporters of keeping the old clunkers running made the claim that over the next decade California will need (according to them) 10 DCNPP's worth of new electricity production. Undoubtedly they're thinking of AI's power-hungry generative GIFs (but are not thinking of quantum computing AI, which should need a millionth as much energy, if it ever comes to fruition).
In any case, if thier energy needs predictions come true, no sane person would expect it to be met by building almost two dozen new reactors in California (or even one!), let alone a few hundred "Small" Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs). And of course: They couldn't be built fast enough, they would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and solar/wind/various storage methods can accomplish the task much more quickly, safely and MUCH more cheaply. And provide more jobs.
The proponents also claimed that DCNPP provides an important 9% "baseload" power to California. Yes, it contributes 9% to the grid. No, it's not good "baseload." Calling it that is preposterous because reactors shut down unexpectedly, as well as on various schedules (usually about every 18 months). Distributed energy sources simply don't do that.
Because reactors remove so much power whenever they go down, whether for hours, months, or years (or forever), hospitals, emergency services, and 24-hour factories have to have backup systems anyway -- nobody trusts nuclear power to always be there. Calling them "baseload" is backwards -- they get in the way of setting up a reliable system because of the huge amount of power they control in one place. With these old reactors, expect many "unexpected" outages if they continue to be operated.
Perhaps the saddest thing about the hearing today was all the pro-nuclear speakers who claimed that nuclear energy is "green" and "clean." Nothing makes more hazardous waste than nuclear energy does! There's nothing clean or green about nuclear energy. Long-haired "hippy-looking" nuclear engineering students may try really hard to appeal to the average California citizen with cute names for their organizations, such as "NICE" (which they say stands for "Nuclear Is Clean Energy") but not one of them dared to discuss what an accident would do to the area, or what could cause an accident.
I would have wanted to ask them to take the toxic nuclear waste at San Onofre, since they have no fear of making as much or more nuclear waste if they keep running the reactors, in addition to what DCNPP already has. Since nothing the pro-nukers said made sense, I couldn't help but hope they'd be dumb enough to accept more than three million pounds of nuclear waste (some of DCNPP's supporters have already stated to me that that would be fine).
So if it's going to stay open, why not consolidate ALL the high-level nuclear waste at DCNPP? And if they don't want SanO's waste, and Humboldt's waste, and Rancho Seco's waste, and Santa Susanna's waste, then they don't REALLY want DCNPP at all.
To: ExecutiveStaff@coastal.ca.gov
Re: 11/6/25 Items 8a and 9a Public Comment
To The Commissioners, California Coastal Commission:
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the folly of continuing to operate the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant (DCNPP) well beyond its designed lifespan of 40 years. Such continuation is dangerous, dirty, expensive and utterly unnecessary.
First, consider the leak a few years ago of the rusted-out ECCS. Consider the embrittlement of the RPVH. Consider the worn and plugged tubes in the SGs, which are now nearing 20 years old and had to be replaced the first time after just 24 years... but were supposed to last 40.
Or just consider how many 40-year-old cars and trucks we see on the road. And how safe it feels if you're coming to a sudden stop with one of those 40-year-old trucks behind you. Besides all the usual worries (Does he see my brake lights?) one wonders: Will his old brake system work? Are his tires worn out? DCNPP is no spring chicken. It's valves are old and leaky, it's pipes are worn thin, its wires frayed and shorting.
Geologists found a new earthquake fault a few years ago just a mile or two away from the reactors -- which would surely never have been BUILT if they had known about that fault at the time. But it's particularly troublesome because one claimed safety feature of DCNPP is a "duplicate early-warning system" to detect earthquakes and "quickly shut the plant down."
After the Great Tohoku earthquake that began the inevitable destruction of most of the reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi, it took 20 minutes or more before the tsunami struck, finishing the destruction. But "early warning systems" don't work when the source is only a mile or two away, if they'll ever work at all. It's certainly unproven technology. Is the threshold set correctly? California has thousands of small earthquakes every year. How does it know a minor tremor from a precursor of a major one? It can't. Nobody can. And SCRAMing the reactor for every little tremor is impractical in California -- that is to say, it would cost PG&E a fortune and the NRC only allows a very limited number of SCRAMs in the life of a reactor (or they may be forced to make an exception!).
Earlier this week a United Parcel Service MD-11 Jumbo Jet loaded with enough fuel for a 4,400 mile flight to Honolulu from Kentucky veered off-course moments after takeoff and crashed into warehouses and fuel storage tanks. It was manufactured in 1991, just a few years after DCNPP. Was it mechanical failure of old parts? Poor maintenance? Something stupid, or something sinister? [Note: It appears now to be a maintenance problem insofar as, the left wing caught fire and the left engine fell off the plane.]
In June of this year, an Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner Jumbo Jet crashed shortly after takeoff from India, bound for London a similar distance away, when the senior pilot apparently suddenly cut the engines off for no known reason. It's possible it was a thoughtless, accidental movement normally done at the end of every flight. But it's at least equally possible that it was done on purpose -- killing 229 of 230 people on board.
It would definitely NOT be the first time a commercial jet was purposefully crashed by one of the pilots (see GermanWings Flight 9525, for an indisputable example).
The United States Navy has lost two nuclear submarines, but hasn't lost a nuclear submarine in 50 years. The Russian record is much worse, having lost more than half a dozen nuclear submarines so far. But maybe we were just lucky: The USS Connecticut ran into an underwater mountain in 2023, and the USS San Francisco did that in 2005, killing one sailor and injuring several dozen. And in 2001, the USS Greenville surfaced suddenly in a demonstration for "VIP civilian visitors" and struck the Ehime Maru, a Japanese 740-ton, 191-foot ship, killing nine on the surface ship and sinking it. (This reminded many Japanese of the Lucky Dragon radiation poisoning event, of course.)
Our Nuclear Navy shouldn't be running into underwater mountains or surfacing suddenly for show without preparing the area. Our commercial planes shouldn't fall out of the sky moments after takeoff. Neither earthquakes nor tsunamis were supposed to be able to destroy the General Electric-built reactors in Japan. But things happen. Why take the chance at DCNPP? For what?
The area is ripe for offshore wind power. The DCNPP electrical switchyard can be used to distribute the offshore power once DCNPP's reactors are shut down. The whales will be much better off swimming around the pylons than if they are constantly irradiated with the daily effluent of two operating reactors, let alone what an accident would bring them.
Side note: Did you know the nuclear navy has a term for when their subs hit a whale? It's called "hitting a cow." They do NOT keep track of how often the Silent Service slices into a "cow."
All of California is ripe for distributed rooftop solar energy -- it won't help PG&E's bottom line though, which is why it hasn't happened. But it HAS TO happen because it's by far the best solution (along with wind and other truly clean solutions).
With rooftop solar everywhere, PG&E would still be in business, taking in excess energy from millions of homes and redistributing it as needed around the state. They can build the wind turbines if they want to -- and energy storage systems, too.
Distributed energy systems don't suddenly loose gigawatts of available energy because one valve somewhere won't shut or won't open when it should (like what happened at TMI). They aren't subject to catastrophic accidents that can render thousands of square miles of the best land on earth poisonous for thousands of generations.
Are the reactors safe from airplane crashes? No matter what anyone tells you, the answer is an unequivocal NO. Are the reactors safe from terrorism such as drone swarms, gravity bombs, or even nuclear war? NO. Is the spent fuel safe from these things? NO.
How about operator error, or purposeful operator-caused destruction? No matter what anyone tells you, the answer is NO.
And all this risk, for what? Certainly not for love or money: If an accident happens, we'll get no love from the Federal government -- not this one, anyway, and it's already planned that we'll get virtually no money, thanks to P-AA, without which, no electric company would ever have opened a reactor.
And without the Federal government's promise to take the waste, they wouldn't have built them, either. And without subsidies galore, which continue to this day, they wouldn't have.
But let's take a good look into the future -- and the past. In California we have some of the most amazing forests in the world -- trees thousands of years old. When Krakatoa exploded and dusted the world with volcanic ash, the tree rings of thousands of California Redwoods and Sequoias recorded the event. When atmospheric testing and use of nuclear weapons began, they recorded THAT in their rings. And when it ended, for the most part, in 1963, they recorded that.
But they also have recorded Chernobyl, and Fukushima, and Three Mile Island and yes -- Santa Susanna.
If Diablo Canyon melts down, the trees will record that too. And even thousands of years from now, the trees will still have a record of precisely when (to the year) that event happened.
Imagine the impact on tourism -- a major industry here, of course -- if California is commonly associated with a severe nuclear accident, one which is permanently recorded for the next few thousand years in the very trees people would have wanted to come see?
I have an interesting point of view right now about that: Around 2018 I posted a review on Google after visiting the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. May 30 of this year, Google sent me congratulations on ten thousand views for that review. After seven years, that's nice. But then today, Google tells me it's now hit 20,000 total views! So imagine the damage to California's reputation if a typical review includes something like this: "My Geiger Counter went crazy as I walked through the forest in California..." or "They say the streets are paved with gold there, but according to my Geiger Counter, they had to use uranium and plutonium-laced concrete to build those streets..."
Future historians will know who allowed it to happen. They will know the moment it could have been prevented. The historic record will be in the trees.
That moment is now, and those people history will blame are you and me.
Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA
Initials explained:
CCC: California Coastal Commission
DCNPP: Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant (an accident waiting to happen)
ECCS: Emergency Core Cooling System (all failed at Fukushima)
MD: McDonnell-Douglas (later versions were manufactured by Boeing, which acquired MD after the UPS plane was built)
NRC: Nuclear Regulatory Commission (cannot be relied on to do their job properly)
P-AA: Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act (which severely limits liability for nuclear accidents, forcing most costs on the victims)
RPVH: Reactor Pressure Vessel Head (see Davis-Besse RPVH rust with bulging stainless steel liner, 2000)
SCRAM: See https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-101/putting-axe-to-scram-myth
SG: Steam Generator (Is Spain proven to be better at building SGs than Japan was when they made SanO's replacement SGs?)
SMNR: Small (not really) Modular (unlikely) Nuclear (usually not included in the name) Reactor
TMI: Three Mile Island, considered the worst nuclear accident so far in America, though Santa Susanna may have been worse.
Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download:
acehoffman.org
Blog:
acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube:
youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at]
acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner,
The Animated Software Company
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