Home Care In Diablo, CA

Miles of pristine hills and valleys along California’s Central Coast have long been off-limits to the public to shield the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant. But not for much longer.

A nonprofit land trust has struck a deal to acquire 2,060 acres of wildlands above Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County and turn what has been part of a sprawling buffer for the oceanfront Diablo Canyon Power Plant into a nature preserve. The move shuts down a competing plan for high-end homes at the site and sets the stage for trails and campsites.

On Thursday, the state agreed to finance the endeavor, giving the San Bernardino County-based Wildlands Conservancy the $42 million needed to proceed with the purchase of the area known as Wild Cherry Canyon. The land is owned by a subsidiary of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which operates the nearby nuclear facility. The acquisition money from the State Coastal Conservancy is one of the agency’s biggest-ever grants for conservation.

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“We’re excited about the opportunity to establish public access here,” said Tim Duff, project manager at the Coastal Conservancy. “This scenic access is what we call absolutely world class.”

The Diablo Canyon Power Plant and its radioactive fuel have, for decades, been a subject of controversy. The debate has surged recently as Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature decided to extend the life of the nuclear facility beyond its scheduled 2025 closing, due to high electricity demands. The energy complex is now scheduled to run until 2030, though an additional extension is under consideration.

The lands next to the plant, which have been closed off, have also generated discussion. While developers have floated the idea of building housing there, county residents and local and state leaders have advocated for protecting the PG&E-controlled properties and opening them to visitors, a bid that has intensified as the nuclear facility approaches retirement.

As a condition for temporarily continuing nuclear operations, state officials established a requirement that PG&E help permanently protect the surrounding lands and eventually provide public access to them. Wild Cherry Canyon is poised to be the first of three major properties to meet these demands.

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The three properties, taken together, would create an extraordinary 12,000-acre belt of preserved open space, extending from Montaña De Oro State Park in the north to Avila Beach in the south and running along 14 miles of coastline.

“This is a really exciting vision, and we don’t want it to slip by,” said Kaila Dettman, executive director of the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County, which has been rallying for decades to protect and win public access to the lands around the power plant. “It’s a special part of our county and, frankly, the state. It really gives you a sense of wild California, old California.”

Known collectively as the Diablo Canyon Lands, the properties span a stretch of the Irish Hills that includes rugged cliffs above sandy beaches and tide pools, peaks that rise sometimes 1,500 feet and undisturbed native grasslands and oak and pine woodlands. Few people have had the chance to see this expanse of the coast.

Wild Cherry Canyon sits at the southeastern corner of the Diablo Canyon Lands, between the communities of Avila Beach and Port San Luis. The area is currently home to cattle that graze the property and a road that leads to the power plant.

Frazier Haney, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, which operates two dozen preserves in California, Oregon and Utah, says his group’s priorities for Wild Cherry Canyon will be protecting Native American cultural sites, namely those of the yak tityu tityu yak ti?hini Northern Chumash Tribe, and providing opportunities for hiking and camping.

His organization envisions building a five- to six-mile loop trail at the site as well as the first segment of an eventual 20-mile coastal trail that will traverse the entire Diablo Canyon Lands. The preserve at Wild Cherry Canyon is expected to open to the public within five years. Guided tours could start as early as next year.

“Once you get up on these hills, this is as beautiful as the California coast gets anywhere,” Haney said. “You’ll be able to go for a hike, then end your hike by going out on the pier (in Port San Luis,) and getting something to eat and drink. It will just be a wonderful experience for people.”

The acquisition of Wild Cherry Canyon hasn’t come easy. Squabbles over price and other designs for the site have scuttled nearly two decades of attempts to conserve the property. Most recently, the owner of the land, PG&E’s Eureka Energy, had been fighting with a longtime leaseholder and housing developer, HomeFed Corporation, over the terms and duration of the company’s lease, which held up any possible changes to ownership.

With the latest dispute recently settled, the Wildlands Conservancy saw an opportunity. Under the deal worked out, the organization will pay nearly all of the agreed-upon $42 million for the acquisition to buy out the lease, expected to be finalized later this year, while the balance will go to the purchase of the property, anticipated next year.

“The community has been dedicated to making this happen,” Haney said. “We just got thrown the ball in the fourth quarter of the game.”

As part of the arrangement, Eureka Energy will continue to hold about 250 acres of Wild Cherry Canyon that includes the road to the power plant and an existing home.

“The fact that this is finally coming together is the greatest news I can imagine,” said Kara Woodruff, a San Luis Obispo resident who helped form the advocacy group, Friends of the Diablo Canyon Lands, and the district director for the local state senator, John Laird. “I’ve been thinking about Wild Cherry Canyon for over 26 years.”

Laird helped secure the funding for the land deal as well as negotiate the requirement that PG&E conserve the properties around the nuclear complex.

“There were plenty of times when it looked like it might not happen, but the Central Coast community never gave up,” Laird said in a statement Thursday. “Protecting Wild Cherry Canyon is a major step toward preserving the incredible lands surrounding Diablo Canyon for generations to come.”

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — Diablo Canyon doesn’t look like a nuclear power plant that’s getting ready to retire.

Beneath its twin concrete domes here on the edge of the Central Coast, neutrons slam into uranium atoms billions of times each second, workers respond to blinking lights in a seafoam-green control room, and thunderous turbines generate steady electricity for nearly 4 million Californians.

At the building’s entrance, a massive banner celebrates the plant’s recently renewed federal operating license, proclaiming “You Made This Possible” above a photograph of smiling staffers.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. A decade ago, the plant’s operator, Pacific Gas & Electric, agreed to methodically shut down Diablo’s reactors in 2025, replacing its 2.2 gigawatts of power with a portfolio of wind farms, solar arrays, battery storage and just plain using less electricity.

But as that deadline neared, state officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, waved a white flag. They weren’t ready to shut down an energy source that consistently provides up to 9% of California’s electricity. They extended its life to 2030.

Now there’s a growing movement to extend Diablo’s life once again — this time to 2045. Nearly 50 groups have joined a coalition that includes chambers of commerce, labor unions, nonprofits and the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors to argue that the plant is a critical bridge to the state’s clean energy future. Nuclear power produces no greenhouse gas emissions, the primary driver of climate change.

Opponents of the plant, many of whom live in the area, are livid and say it is the latest in a string of broken promises. Extending the plant’s life through 2045 means 15 more years of nuclear waste and seismic risk as the 1980s-era plant gets older and more brittle.

Experts say the abrupt about-face on California’s once-heralded nuclear exit reflects a broader trend as the state grapples with an electricity future almost no one saw coming.

Like the rest of the nation, California has seen a remarkable explosion in demand for electricity, driven in large part by the rise of artificial intelligence data centers, electric vehicles and building electrification. The California Energy Commission projects that demand for electricity will increase by roughly 50% through 2045 after decades of remaining relatively flat.

At the same time, the state is legally mandated to switch entirely to 100% carbon-free energy by 2045, meaning it must produce more electricity while simultaneously cleaning up the electricity it produces.

The question of how California is going to make major emissions reductions while keeping electricity affordable and reliable “starts in the 2030s and goes all the way to 2045,” said David Victor, a professor of innovation and public policy at UC San Diego. “And shutting down Diablo in the middle of all that was always going to be a stretch.”

It’s a conversation happening across the United States. Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania — the site of the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history — is slated to reopen in 2027 as part of a 20-year deal to power Microsoft data centers. The Duane Arnold plant in Iowa will start back up in 2029, nine years after its closure, to help power data centers for Google.

In California, extending Diablo’s life through 2045 requires an act of the Legislature, and Newsom has punted the question to the next administration. But the plant’s federal license, which was renewed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in April, technically gives it permission to power on until 2045, when it would be 60 years old.

1. Pacific Gas & Electric operates the power plant. 2. Spent nuclear fuel is stored in lead and stainless steel casks and bolted into concrete at a specially built pad at Diablo.

“It doesn’t make any sense to go through that process of extension and only do it for five years,” Victor said. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if PG&E requests another 20-year extension down the road, because there are “several reactors in the country that already have 80-year licenses, and there may be life even beyond that.”

That’s not to say California hasn’t made great gains in renewables. The state has added an impressive amount of solar power and battery energy storage in recent years, surpassing more than 21,000 megawatts of battery capacity, the largest such fleet in the nation, according to the Energy Commission. It used more solar than natural gas during the first half of 2026 for the first time.

But the grid is missing round-the-clock power to replace Diablo Canyon, said Conor Doyle, chief of strategic initiatives at PG&E, during a recent tour of the plant.

“We have an abundance of renewables, and we’re doing good with procurement, but the sun sets, the wind doesn’t blow, and that’s where reliability and stability come into question,” Doyle said. He noted that there is “not one electron” of always-on power, sometimes referred to as baseload, in the California Independent System Operator’s interconnection queue.

In his opinion, if Diablo were to shut down in 2030 as currently scheduled, it would largely be replaced with natural gas.

Arne Olson, a senior partner with Energy and Environmental Economics who consults on California’s energy planning, said replacing the plant with clean energy may have looked “eminently doable in 2016,” and is probably feasible today. But it becomes much more challenging as the state gets closer to its 2045 target, when the entire grid must be clean.

Offshore wind power, a complement to solar because it blows overnight, is lagging in California in the face of powerful political opposition. While the state had been aiming for 2 to 5 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, none has yet been built, and the Trump administration recently struck deals with three of the state’s offshore wind leaseholders to walk away from their plans and instead invest in fossil fuel projects.

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Geothermal, which involves tapping into Earth’s underground heat to spin turbines, looks a lot like nuclear in that it can produce clean electricity 24 hours a day. But it’s not yet clear how many geothermal megawatts are available, and few projects are ready, Olson said.

And replacing Diablo’s steady power with a combination of solar and batteries would be technically possible but increasingly expensive, particularly during the periods of highest demand, he said.

The difficulty and expense of the various alternatives increases “the attractiveness of a resource that’s already operating and producing clean energy around the clock,” he said.

But some experts say keeping Diablo online is actually slowing the growth of renewable energy in California. The plant cannot be turned off during periods of high solar power production, so the state ends up cutting back on its solar power or giving it away for free, said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.

“So it’s become like an inflexible albatross that causes a lot of waste of electricity,” he said.

Jacobson said the state can — and should — shut Diablo Canyon down on time and still meet its climate goals through a combination of wind, geothermal, rooftop solar and imported supplies. He pointed to the massive SunZia wind farm in New Mexico, which recently came online and is already sending clean electricity to California’s grid, and a major Google-backed geothermal project underway in Utah that aims to supply 500 megawatts by 2028.

“There’s nothing necessary about keeping it open,” he said.

Some who live in the shadow of Diablo Canyon say a 2045 extension feels increasingly inevitable. At a recent information session hosted by the county, about half of the people who delivered public comments were in favor of keeping the plant open, and half were vehemently opposed.

Among them were plant employees who said they can’t imagine a world in which California doesn’t need Diablo’s electricity, and environmental groups who said they’re concerned about threats to marine life. Diablo Canyon uses 2.5 billion gallons of ocean water for cooling each day, discharging hot water directly into the nearby cove.

Others worry about a Fukushima- or Chernobyl-style meltdown. The plant sits near more than a dozen earthquake fault lines.

“It’s a low probability, but the consequences are so enormous that you’ve got to factor it in,” said Jane Swanson, president of Mothers for Peace, a San Luis Obispo-based nonprofit, in a recent phone call.

She and the group’s vice president, Linda Seeley, question PG&E’s arguments for keeping Diablo open, noting that plant officials often point to the rolling blackouts of 2020 as evidence that the state still needs nuclear to meet peak demand. But California hasn’t seen rolling blackouts since that year in large part due to its massive increase in battery energy storage, Seeley said.

The push to extend Diablo Canyon’s life, she contends, “has nothing to do with whether we need the power. It has everything to do with money, and it has everything to do with political will.”

Plant officials maintain that Diablo is safe and subject to constant seismic studies and layers of redundancies to prevent a nuclear meltdown. Its major components, including reactor vessel heads, steam generator parts and low-pressure and high-pressure turbines, were all recently updated as part of the 2030 extension, said Maureen Zawalick, chief risk officer at PG&E.

She said the facility has the capacity for at least 60 years of nuclear waste storage — including 40 years in dry concrete casks and 20 years in spent fuel pools — which would carry it right up to 2045, although she is optimistic about the prospects of a federal fuel repository offsite.

Asked if there’s any scenario in which a 2045 extension doesn’t make sense, Zawalick said no. Given the forecast for future electricity usage and demand, “Diablo is in a unique situation and position to provide and support that,” she said.

For now, the ball is in the Legislature’s court.

Sen. John Laird (D-Santa Cruz), whose district includes Diablo Canyon, said in a statement last week that he’s not surprised Newsom has pushed the question to next year. Important issues must be addressed before any decisions are made, including PG&E’s repayment of an existing state loan, seismic and nuclear reactor safety, spent fuel storage and continued revenues to local government and schools, Laird said.

“I look forward to having the opportunity in 2027, over a full nine-month legislative session, to thoughtfully consider Diablo Canyon’s future and ensure that the community is protected during any additional years of operation,” he said.

Public invited to commemorate a milestone in California’s surveying and mapping history

MOUNT DIABLO — California State Parks, in partnership with the Mount Diablo Surveyors Historical Society and the Mount Diablo Interpretive Association, invites the public to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Mount Diablo Initial Point on Saturday, July 18, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the summit of Mount Diablo State Park.

“Mount Diablo State Park preserves a landscape that is significant not only for its natural beauty but also for its role in California's history,” said California State Parks Diablo Range District Superintendent Clint Elsholz. “As California celebrates 175 years of statehood, we are proud to partner with organizations that help tell this story and connect visitors to the people, places and events that shaped our state.”

Established in 1851, the Mount Diablo Initial Point became the reference point for surveying property boundaries across much of California and all of Nevada. The Initial Point played a critical role in mapping land ownership during California’s early development and continues to serve as the foundation for property surveys throughout the region today.

The celebration will feature demonstrations of antique and modern surveying equipment, hands-on activities, informational exhibits, and guided tours highlighting the original survey monuments housed inside the Summit Visitor Center. Land surveyors and historians will also be available to answer questions and share the history and significance of the Initial Point.

“Visitors can learn about California’s land surveying history while taking in spectacular views stretching from the Farallon Islands to the west, across the Central Valley and to the Sierra Nevada beyond,” said John Pettley, a local land surveyor and chair of the Mt. Diablo Surveyors Historical Society’s 175th Anniversary Event Committee.

WHAT: 175th Anniversary of Mount Diablo Initial Point Celebration

WHEN: Saturday, July 18, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

WHERE: Summit of Mount Diablo State Park

COST: The celebration is free; however, the park’s standard $10 day-use vehicle fee applies.

State Parks supports equal access. Visitors requiring accommodations are encouraged to contact the park in advance at (279) 587-2850 or 711, TTY Relay Service.

Subscribe to California State Parks News via e-mail at [email protected]

California State Parks provides for the health, inspiration and education of the people of California by helping to preserve the state’s extraordinary biological diversity, protecting its most valued natural and cultural resources, and creating opportunities for high quality outdoor recreation.

Authorities ordered residents to prepare to evacuate due to a fast-growing wildfire in the Mt. Diablo area that has reached 125 acres.

CONTRA COSTA COUNTY, CA — A fast-moving wildfire prompted evacuation warnings shortly before 5 p.m. for residents near Mount Diablo as firefighters expanded air and ground operations to battle flames burning through rugged terrain east of Clayton.

The Morgan Fire started about 2 p.m. near the 2430 block of Morgan Territory Road at Marsh Creek Road, according to the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District. The blaze initially burned about 2 acres before racing uphill through brush and timber on steep slopes.

Firefighters reported the blaze at 50 acres as of 5:48 p.m.

Earlier, a 4:40 p.m., Contra Costa County Fire Protection District officials issued an evacuation warning for residents in Zones CCC-249 and CCC-250, located between Morgan Territory Regional Preserve and Mount Diablo State Park.

No evacuation order had been issued as of Friday afternoon, but officials warned residents to prepare in case conditions worsened.

"Gather any important items you could carry with you, including medications, baby supplies, money, important papers, and photos," the fire district said in its emergency alert. "Locate any pets or animals and be prepared to cage or leash them. If you require additional time to evacuate, you should leave now."

Residents can check evacuation zones at protect.genasys.com and monitor emergency alerts at CWSAlerts.com.

The wildfire is burning in steep, rugged terrain where dry vegetation, hot temperatures, and uphill winds can accelerate fire growth and make firefighting more difficult.

As fire activity intensified, Air Attack requested additional aircraft to support crews on the ground. The response grew to include eight Type 1 air tankers and four helicopters, according to incident reports.

Firefighters from Contra Costa County Fire Protection District and Cal Fire continued attacking the three-alarm fire from the air and the ground Friday afternoon.

As of 3:20 p.m., officials had not reported any structures threatened or damaged, injuries, containment, or the cause of the fire.

Authorities originally reported the fire at 125 acres but changed that figure about an hour after the evacuation warning went out.

"With better mapping, the #MorganFire is now estimated to be at 50 acres, with a retardant line around approximately 75% of the perimeter," CalfireSCU reported.

The incident remained active late Friday, and fire officials said additional updates would be released as conditions changed.

Residents in the affected area were encouraged to stay alert, monitor official emergency notifications, and be prepared to leave immediately if an evacuation order was issued.