California's attorney general has announced that the man who led a successful drive to shut down the Rancho Seco nuclear plant in 1989 can begin gathering signatures for an initiative that would close all of the state's power reactors.
On Thursday, the attorney general's office announced that Ben Davis Jr. has until July 8 to gather 504,760 signatures to place the measure on the ballot. New nuclear plant construction is already prohibited under California law until the federal government approves a repository and/or reprocessing system for spent fuel. If enacted, the initiative would extend that moratorium to the state's four operational reactors at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre. As the Obama administration has halted work on a geologic waste repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain, finalization of any alternative for spent-fuel disposal is likely decades off.
Southern California draws a substantial portion of its power from nuclear. Writing on the measure's potential economic effects, the attorney general's office said its passage would have "potentially major impacts on state and local finances in the near term in the form of decreased revenues and increased costs due to near-term disruptions in the state's electricity system and electricity price increases. The magnitude of these impacts would depend on the time to develop replacement power, the frequency and duration of rolling blackouts, and various related factors, such as electricity demand and weather conditions."
The initiative's proponents have called the state's analysis misleading.