Abalone Alliance

The Abalone Alliance (1977–1985) was a nonviolent civil disobedience group formed to shut down the Pacific Gas and Electric Company's Diablo Canyon Power Plant near San Luis Obispo on the central California coast in the United States. They modeled their affinity group-based organizational structure after the Clamshell Alliance which was then protesting the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in coastal New Hampshire. The group of activists took the name "Abalone Alliance" referring to the tens of thousands of wild California Red Abalone that were killed in 1974 in Diablo Cove when the unit's plumbing had its first hot flush.

The Abalone Alliance staged blockades and occupations at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant site between 1977 and 1984. Nearly two thousand people were arrested during a two-week blockade in 1981, exceeding Seabrook as the largest number arrested at an anti-nuclear protest in the United States.

The Diablo Canyon controversy started in 1963 when PG&E scrapped its attempt to build the Bodega Bay Nuclear Power Plant at Bodega Head, 71 miles north of San Francisco. The Bodega struggle started in 1958, but was opposed by a group led by a University of California professor and young Sierra Club activist named David Pessonen. This was the first anti-nuclear power campaign in the US. The main reason that the facility wasn't built was due its location less than 1,000 feet from the fault zone that struck San Francisco in 1906.

Rather than face public opposition at Diablo Canyon, PG&E approached the Sierra Club's president and cut a deal with certain board members where Diablo would be chosen rather than the Nipomo Dunes area. The wife of the Sierra Club president, who worked out the deal, would then be elected to PG&E's board of directors. As part of the plan, the decision was made when Sierra Club board member Martin Litton was out of the country, the only member who knew of Diablo's history and importance. The board was flown down to see the site in Frank Sinatra's Lear Jet with Danny Kaye on board providing entertainment. Kaye would later become opposed to nuclear power.

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