California Just Saved Its Last Nuclear Plant. All 3 Democrats Vying For Senate Want To Kill It.

All three Democrats vying to be California’s next U.S. senator expressed support for closing the state’s last nuclear power station at this week’s final televised debate before next month’s primary election.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the current front-runner in the nonpartisan primary to replace the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said he supports nuclear energy but wants to see the Diablo Canyon Power Plant closed by the end of the decade.

Fellow Democratic Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee ― who are trailing in third and fourth place, respectively ― took hard-line stances against atomic power during Tuesday’s debate. Republican Steve Garvey, the second-place contender in the latest poll , made a vague statement of support for atomic energy before launching into a meandering diatribe about fossil fuels.

The nation’s largest state once supplied its growing population’s energy needs with three nuclear power stations. (A fourth had shut down in the 1970s before the others were built). But an anti-nuclear movement grew throughout the 1960s, fueled in part by misinformation conflating atomic weapons with fission energy, sincere ideological desires to limit economic development, and Hollywood movies that sensationalized and exaggerated the safety risks associated with modern reactors. Despite the increasing need for the steady carbon-free electricity reactors generated as climate change worsened, the state prioritized shutting down nuclear plants over fossil fuel stations.

Since the San Onofre nuclear plant in San Diego shut down in 2013, leaving only Diablo Canyon, electricity rates skyrocketed in California. In 2016, state officials pressured Diablo Canyon’s owner, the utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric, into an agreement to