Lhe governor of California, Gavin Newsom, who is not considered a timid person when it comes to defending the environment, has just taken a decision which has revived an old debate among American Democrats: at a time of the energy crisis and the climate emergency, can we avoid relaunching nuclear power?
In front of an electric vehicle charging station, with the Vallejo oil refineries in the San Francisco Bay area in the background, Gavin Newsom announced, on September 16, his 40 measures aimed at accelerating the energy transition to bring to 90%, before 2035, the share of renewables in electricity production in the state (it is currently 59%), in addition to the extension, signed on September 2, of Diablo Canyon, the last nuclear power plant still operating in the state.
This plant is located on the edge of the Pacific, near San Luis Obispo, between San Francisco and Los Angeles, in the area of the seismic fault of San Andreas, underline the associations for the defense of the environment. It was due to close in 2025, when the license granted by the nuclear regulatory agency expires, under an agreement reached between environmentalists, unions and the operator, the electricity company PG & E. Finally, Diablo Canyon will stay in business for five more years.
Quite a symbol. In 1981, the site was the site of one of the largest anti-nuclear demonstrations in the United States, two years after the accident at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania. Singer Jackson Browne was arrested while trying to block the gates. Fifteen years earlier, the project had caused a split in the Sierra Club, the powerful association for the defense of the environment, and its director, David Bower, opposed to nuclear power, had left the movement to found Friends of the Earth in 1969. .
In 2015, Gavin Newsom himself, then lieutenant governor of the state, had estimated that the site was not “not ideal” for a nuclear power plant. Today, he proposes to lend 1.4 billion dollars (as many euros) to PG & E to prepare an application for authorization to practice beyond 2025.
Memories of the blackouts
Pragmatism is essential. “We are no longer in the 1970s, insists the Bay Area Council employers’ group. After a record decade of fires, heat waves, droughts and floods, it’s time to see climate change as the urgency it represents. » During the heat wave in early September, more than a thousand heat records were recorded in California. The air conditioners ran at full speed and blackouts were narrowly avoided.
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