The likelihood of such a disaster is now being actively promoted by Gov. Gavin Newsom, with legislation he wants rubber-stamped in less than two weeks. Concerned citizens must call California legislators to stop Newsom’s plan and prevent disaster.

Within five hours of the first explosions, southbound winds have blown lethal isotopes over all living things—human, plant, animal—coating them with radioactive emitters guaranteed to kill, wound, burn and mutate for countless generations.

Diablo’s twice-bankrupt owner, Pacific Gas & Electric, has twice pled guilty to federal manslaughter charges. In 2010 it incinerated a neighborhood in San Bruno, killing eight people. Later it sparked northern California fires that turned hundreds of square miles of forest—-plus the town of Paradise—-into deadly ash, slaughtering more than eighty humans.

After negotiating for two full years, in 2018 a broad coalition—including labor unions, local officials and citizens, environmental groups, state regulators, the legislature, and then-Governor Jerry Brown—approved a popular good-faith deal phasing out Diablo by 2025, vastly reducing the odds on such an apocalypse. Newsom now wants to trash that deal within two weeks, without public hearings, while extending the peril at least through 2035, if not longer.

There are no viable plans for evacuating Los Angeles to flee this down-bound apocalypse. Diablo was designed in the pre-digital 1960s and licensed by the old Atomic Energy Commission, which promoted and protected the nuclear weapons industry.

As construction began, chemical runoffs poured into Avila Beach, devastating indigenous abalone.

In 1973 the Hosgri earthquake fault was found dangerously close to Diablo’s cores. No significant structural safety adjustments were made.

The Shoreline and other nearby intertwined seismic faults have since been found.

Some 10,000 citizens (including me) have been arrested trying to stop Diablo, more than at any other US reactor.

In 1984-5 a major installation error was found that threatened a catastrophe right at critical mass.

The NRC has since warned that Unit One is critically embrittled, meaning its core could shatter in a melt-down, feeding steam, hydrogen and fission explosions, spewing apocalyptic quantities of radiation from the core and spent fuel pools.

In 2011 the massive earthquake/tsunami that shook and sank Fukushima caused three meltdowns and four explosions. A potential fire in Unit Four’s spent fuel pool threatened the entire Pacific Ocean.

The San Andreas is half the distance from Diablo as was the seismic epicenter that destroyed Fukushima, from which immeasurable radioactive poisons still pour into the Pacific.

Fukushima’s cesium releases have exceeded those at Hiroshima/Nagasaki by a factor of more than 100. Its lethal clouds largely missed Tokyo’s 15 million people. But most breezes from Diablo aim straight at LA.

New Line Cinema’s 2015 disaster film “San Andreas,” with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, portrayed the seismic demise of Los Angeles, the Central Valley and the Bay Area while ignoring the San Onofre and Diablo Canyon nukes, which such a quake would likely level.

NRC site inspector Dr. Michael Peck warned that year that Diablo—where he worked for five years—might not withstand a credible seismic shaking. His report was dismissed; he’s no longer with the Commission.

Today Diablo loses $1 billion or more per year in over-market charges. Expenditures needed to meet local, state and federal safety, engineering and environmental standards are also in the billions.

In its two-year negotiations with unions, state and local officials and citizens, regulators, legislators and environmental groups, PG&E agreed to an orderly 2024-5 retirement for the two reactors.

It now defers critical maintenance and gambles with the San Andreas.

But the shutdown plan has been deploying cheaper, cleaner, more reliable and more job-producing renewables.

Now Newsom wants the legislature—in two weeks, with no public hearings—wants to trash all that.

His plan means we face accelerating deterioration of the reactors’ internals, a lack of waste storage space, the loss of billions in wasteful power production, chaos for Diablo’s 1500 employees’ work plans, escalating environmental destruction and far more.

Newsom’s intervention has become its own nuke disaster.

Most terrifying, it prolongs the time frame in which random seismic shocks could forever render LA a radioactive dead zone.

While shells fly at Zaporizhzhia and atomic reactors worldwide ride a down-bound spiral into chaos and catastrophe, California’s fossil/nuclear utility industry refuses to give way to technologies it cannot control.

Deeply grounded studies from Stanford’s Amory Lovins, Mark Jacobson and others have long shown that at least since 2018, the clearly marked transition to rooftop solar, off-shore wind, battery arrays, LED efficiency are more than ready to power the state and nation cleanly, reliably and efficiently into a Solartopia reality.

This quickly deployable green transition means plummeting power costs, booming employment and general prosperity.

But it also dooms a fossil/nuclear/utility industry more than willing to sacrifice the likes of Los Angeles to keep its death grip on centralized power.

Now its “liberal” governor gives us just two short weeks to avoid the inevitable atomic apocalypse.

So please immediately write/call/confront Newsom and your California reps/senators to stop this horrific bailout that could so thoroughly fry us all.

To help shut Diablo write Harvey Wasserman (solartopia@gmail.com) for free pdfs of SOLARTOPIA! & PEOPLE’S SPIRAL OF US HISTORY, plus links to the Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Zooms (www.electionprotection2024.org) that convene most Mondays at 2pm PT. 

Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman’s radio show are Green Power & Wellness podcast at prn.fm 2-3pm Eastern time Thursdays, and California Solartopia broadcast at KPFK-Pacifica 90.7FM Los Angeles, Thursdays 6:30-7pm Pacific time. His 20 books include SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, Harvey Wasserman’s History of the US, A Glimpse of the Big Light: Losing Parents, Finding Spirit and The Life & Death Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to the Trumpocalypse to Rebirth, all at www.solartopia.org. With Bob Fitrakis he’s co-authored six books on election protection including The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections. He’s also about solarizing LA, and would be glad to hear about your roof.