The greenest thing on the Central Coast is the one they want to shut down | Opinion

There are three certainties in California. Traffic, wildfires and some well-meaning group of activists making our energy problems considerably worse while congratulating themselves on saving the planet.

This week’s exhibit comes from San Luis Obispo’s own backyard. Three nonprofit organizations, including the perennial objectors at Mothers for Peace, have filed a petition to cut Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant’s operating life short, targeting the Clean Water Act certification that would allow the plant to operate through 2045.

The Mothers and their Sierra Club allies want it clipped to 2030. Fifteen fewer years of the safest, cleanest, most reliable electricity on the Central Coast. Fifteen more years of burning something else instead.

I have tried, genuinely tried, to find the logic. I keep running into the same wall.

Nuclear power kills, per terawatt-hour of electricity generated, approximately 0.03 people. That is not a typo. Coal kills 25. Oil kills 18. Natural gas kills four. Nuclear energy results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal, 99.8% fewer than coal, 99.7% fewer than oil, and 97.6% fewer than gas. It also produces just six tons of CO2 per gigawatt-hour. Coal produces 970, making it 160 times dirtier. These are Oxford University figures, inclusive of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

This is the foundational absurdity at the heart of the anti-nuclear movement. It spent 50 years opposing the one energy source that kills almost nobody, pollutes the least while making us ever more dependent on the energy sources that kill millions. Replacing nuclear energy with fossil fuels kills people every single day.

Michael Shellenberger, the former anti-nuclear activist who became environmentalism’s most inconvenient truth-teller, has made this case relentlessly. Some environmentalists deliberately conflated nuclear power with nuclear fallout to stop plants from being built. That strategy worked spectacularly and locked us into fossil fuel dependency for half a century.

Author Bjorn Lomborg, an ex-Greenpeace activist and a Dane from a country that actually figured out clean energy, and Lord Matthew Ridley, who wrote the definitive history of human progress since the Enlightenment, both agree. Nuclear is the answer.

Higher prices and more emissions

The refusal to develop reliable, low-carbon, base-load energy did not produce a cleaner world.

It produced higher electricity prices, more emissions, more resource competition and the geopolitical dependence on petrostate regimes that rational energy policy was supposed to end.

Now consider where California is heading. The state has mandated electric vehicles. It is committed to electrifying heating and transport. California’s current peak demand is just over 52 gigawatts. By 2045, the state’s own Energy Commission forecasts demand rising to as much as 75 gigawatts, a spike driven by electric vehicles, heat pumps and data centers.

Wind and solar, however virtuous they sound at a planning meeting, cannot carry that load. The sun does not shine at night. The wind does not blow on command.

As Leonard Rodberg, a theoretical physicist and lifelong anti-nuclear campaigner who changed his mind, wrote in CalMatters last December, “A system powered solely by solar, wind and hydro is not an engineering strategy. It is a belief system.”

Battery storage helps, but today’s best lithium systems store four hours of power. While battery technology is improving rapidly, batteries cannot store Monday’s sunshine for Wednesday’s grid.

Independent analysis shows that plan would leave California short of power at least 50 days a year. California can mandate clean energy all it likes. It cannot mandate the sun to shine or the wind to blow.

A Communist dictatorship overtakes the US

To compound the problem, building nuclear plants is unnecessarily expensive, courtesy of environmental regulations purposely designed to make nuclear power cost-prohibitive. In countries such as South Korea, assembly-line construction techniques reduce the cost of newly designed nuclear plants. France generates 70% of its electricity from nuclear at some of the lowest consumer prices in Europe.

California opened the world’s first privately owned commercial nuclear reactor in Pleasanton in 1957. It then spent 60 years dismantling its own invention and now charges residents nearly double the national average for electricity.

The federal regulatory apparatus constructed to satisfy activist concerns has become its own monument to futility.

The NRC’s licensing process has grown from a simple 50-page document to an overwhelming 1,100 pages. Since 1978 the world has built the internet, sequenced the human genome and landed robots on Mars. In that time China has approved 87 and built 58 nuclear reactors. Since 2016, only two new nuclear reactors have come online in the U.S.

We are not being careful. We are being comprehensively overtaken by a Communist dictatorship that has grasped something our activists have not. Nuclear power is not the enemy. It is the answer.

The Mothers for Peace are not villains. They are, in the most precise meaning of the phrases, well-meaning and a walking billboard for the definition of unintended consequences. The movement that believed it was protecting California from radiation delivered it instead to the highest energy prices in America, rolling blackouts and an energy mandate with no credible plan to power it.

Diablo Canyon produces clean, reliable electricity this grid genuinely needs today and even more desperately tomorrow. Shutting it down does not save the planet. It just makes someone else burn something dirtier to keep the lights on.

So file the petition. The fossil fuel industry will thank you for your service.

Clive Pinder hosts CeaseFire on KVEC 920AM/96.5FM and writes at clivepinder.substack.com. He believes the first casualties of ideology are arithmetic and common sense.

This story was originally published April 12, 2026 at 5:00 AM.