A4NR Oral History Project

An Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility Oral History Archive

This project is a video oral history collection and archive that documents the lives of advocates, scientists, politicians, administrators, and journalists who have been involved with the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility (A4NR), focusing on the later history of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant (DCNPP) on the Central Coast of California, and the San Onofre Generating Station (SONGS) on the South Coast.

Over 20 years, A4NR engaged broadly in the economic proceedings surrounding both nuclear plants. A summary of some of their accomplishments includes:

• A4NR won significant victories for ratepayers at the California Public Utilities Commission, saving or returning to ratepayers hundreds of millions of dollars the utilities would have wrongfully collected for Diablo Canyon and SONGS.
• A4NR opposed the $85 million cost of PG&E’s original 2010 NRC relicensing bid for Diablo Canyon at the CPUC, thwarting the utility’s plans.
• A4NR Legal Fund wrote or sponsored successful bi-partisan legislation examining the fiscal impacts of seismic and other failures at nuclear plants as well as legislation examining the consequences of nuclear power on the economics of the host communities.
• The Alliance was a major voice monitoring the activities at SONGS—initially raising objections to major structural upgrades—and then working to secure $500 million in ratepayer relief when those projects failed catastrophically causing the premature retirement of the facility.
• In 2016, A4NR was a key part of a team that negotiated the planned retirement of Diablo Canyon—a precedent setting “just transition” for the energy future—only to see it overturned six years later by a governor’s political ambitions.
• A4NR participated actively in the decommissioning process for SONGS and the planning process for Diablo Canyon

A4NR’s story takes a different path from the majority of “anti-nuclear” actions. Reframing the issues in a dollars-and-cents fashion allowed it to garner bipartisan support. It is a story and a methodology that bears recounting and preserving as lessons learned for our current and future energy and political climate.

Along with the personal recorded narratives, this project will collect and digitize the visual and audio memorabilia related to their stories, creating a single, indexed, and searchable permanent online repository that will be useful for education and research.

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