Michael Blood reported that federal regulators Thursday turned away a request from environmental activists to idle the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California to determine if its reactors can withstand strong shaking from nearby faults. However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decision left unresolved questions about whether the agency allowed owner Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to operate outside the requirements of its federal license. That issue was referred to an administrative judge at the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, an arm of the NRC. The decision asked the board to consider whether the NRC granted PG&E greater authority than that provided by its existing licenses, or otherwise altered the terms of PG&E's existing licenses. The 12-page order stemmed from a petition filed last year by Friends of the Earth, [a professional adversarial group of attorneys paid for by anti-nuclear groups with opposing agendas, such as wind, solar, coal, and other energy sources, which argued the company was concealing earthquake risks]. The ruling was released about a week after the NRC directed Diablo Canyon and the Columbia generating station in Richland, Washington, to conduct additional, in-depth analyses into earthquake risks by June 2017, part of a broad review of seismic threats following the Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster in Japan, which again Blood slips into his report the claim that it was a disaster, which it was not. The tsunami was the disaster that caused damage to the plant but no deaths or radiation sickness. The company said the ruling reaffirmed that Diablo Canyon is seismically safe. The commission found that the professional adversarial group failed to show there was an imminent threat to safety that would justify suspending operations at the plant on a coastal bluff about midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. This Blood piece is another example of the not-so-subtle bias against the nuclear industry.
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