California Secretary of State Debra Bowen cleared an initiative Wednesday that would shut down California's two existing nuclear power plants until the federal government figures out what to do with the used fuel—a process expected to take at least 35 Years.
The initiative (pdf) now moves to the signature collection phase. It needs 504,760 signatures to qualify for the 2014 ballot.
The initiative is sponsored by California's "Nuclear Terminator," Ben Davis Jr. who helped write an initiative that shut down the Rancho Seco nuclear plant near Sacramento in 1989.
This is his second attempt to use this strategy to shutter the Diablo Canyon and San Onofre plants. He failed to gather enough signatures for the November ballot after the California Legislative Analyst's office issued a report saying the iniative could result in rolling blackouts, an assertion that Davis and other supporters of the initiative dispute.
The 2014 initiative would prohibit nuclear plants in California from generating electricity until the U.S. has an approved technology for permanent disposal (expected in 2050) or an approved technology for reprocessing nuclear fuel rods (expected to take at least 20 years). In fact, some critics of the federal government believe the Department of Energy's quest for a new permanent disposal site is a stall tactic, which could close the plants for much longer than 35 years.
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