Jim Zim's pictures of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant Located near San Luis Obispo, California

A photo I shot at dawn of goats grazing on the hillside at the Diablo Canyon site.
A large framed copy of this photo hangs in the office of our company President!

Greetings from California's central coast!

My name is Jim Zimmerlin (everyone calls me Jim Zim) and I work for Pacific Gas & Electric Company at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.  I've been working for PG&E since 1992...  and as all classic career tales do, my Diablo Canyon story began with working in the mailroom!  Let me tell you a little bit about my days at DCPP (Diablo Canyon Power Plant)... and share with you a few pictures I've taken over the years with several different digital cameras.

In case you're not already familiar with Diablo Canyon, let me just start by saying that the plant is built around two nuclear reactors which each produce 1,100 megawatts of electricity.  All told, DCPP cranks out enough power for over two million homes!  The plant sits on a gorgeous stretch of the Pacific coast just west of San Luis Obispo, California.  Because the plant site is off limits to the public, it's a section of California's coast that most people will never see.  But as you continue a little further down the page, I'll show you what you're missing.  I'm fairly confident that my view on the way to work in the morning is a lot better than yours!

But before I go any further, I'd just like to say that I've worked at Diablo Canyon for a long time now, in a lot of different roles that have given me a great look at how things work and how the plant is managed.  Over all those years, I've never seen anything that led me to doubt the company's commitment to safe operation of the plant...  and I've seen much that has impressed me.  Diablo Canyon's outstanding track record is something that PG&E can be very proud of...  and the people of San Luis Obispo county can certainly sleep well at night knowing that Diablo Canyon is operating safely.  With that said, let me tell you a bit about where I fit in at the plant...

One thing that has really kept my PG&E career interesting is that I've been able to rotate in and out of different jobs over the years.  Some of the job assignments have been more glamorous than others!

I already mentioned that my years with PG&E began in the mailroom...  it was a great introduction to the company and a great way to meet employees throughout the plant.  After that, I spent several years on a crew that performed hourly fire inspections throughout the plant.  It took me in to the heart of the power plant, and gave me an amazing insider's view of all the little nooks and crannies of plant...  everything from the control room down to all the obscure little electrical room equipment rooms that hardly anybody ever sees.  In later years I had a great time working in the sign-making shop...  was a gopher for the welding crew...  worked the telephone switchboard...  kept a document library up to date...  and I even spent a little time on the "housekeeping" crew doing the real glamorous assignments (!) like emptying trash cans or picking up cigarette butts. 

The most demanding assignment I ever had was during one of Diablo Canyon's refueling outages.  I got to work on a team that actually goes inside one of the most radioactive parts of the plant...  one of the primary steam generators.  It's a big metal tank full of piping that converts hot water in to steam.  During a refueling outage, the tank is drained of water, and someone must go in and install a metal cover to a pipe.  The tank is so radioactive that no one is allowed to stay in it for more than four minutes.

My assignment was to go inside the tank and inspect the cover to make sure it had been installed correctly.  Now I know that sounds easy, but believe me, it was not.  I spent a week training in a mock-up so that I could learn to do the task as quickly as possible, thus minimizing the amount of radiation received.  My part of the job involved two entries in to the steam generator...  each about thirty seconds in duration.  When the whole operation was over, I had received a dose equivalent to about 6 chest x-rays.  Some of the other guys on the crew who spent almost the full four minutes inside got about five times as much radiation as I did...  so I sure was lucky to have drawn the easier assignment.

So, why is it so difficult to go inside a steam generator and inspect a cover?  For one thing, to get in to the steam generator, you have to squeeze through an opening only 16 inches wide!  That's hard enough in itself, but imagine doing this dressed up in a big yellow plastic suit that prevents you from getting contaminated with radioactive particles...  it looks kind of like an astronaut's suit...  with an umbilical cord keeping you supplied with outside air so you breath uncontaminated air.  The suit is called a bubble suit since it puffs up like a bubble from the pressure of the supplied air.  The picture on your left is one of my co-workers being helped in to one.

Here's a funny story about that highly radioactive steam generator that I performed an internal inspection on...
Years after my little visit inside the steam generator, DCPP's steam generators started having some aging issues and needed to be replaced.  It was a massive undertaking that took months of labor and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.  During the project to remove and replace the steam generators, I happened to be out in the parking lot on the day that they rolled one of the old steam generators out on a massive transporter.  As I was standing there, another employee hollered at me from across the parking lot to stand further back as the steam generator rolled by, because it was still somewhat radioactive.  (The more distance you put between you and a radioactive source, the less radiation you will receive.)  I laughed at the irony of being warned about getting too close to the steam generator...  and felt like shouting back "hey, where were you when they asked me to jump inside that thing?!?"

So, that's a little look in to some of the things I've gotten to do at Diablo Canyon over the years.  Perhaps you're wondering what was my favorite job of all.  Well, believe it or not, it was actually that mailroom job that started my whole PG&E career off.  More than any of the other jobs, it involved interaction with a lot of people...  and the ability to give good customer service, which I'm pretty good at!  So, a few years ago when I was given the opportunity to take the mailroom job again...  I jumped at the chance.  With any luck, I may just be the Diablo Canyon mailroom guy until I am able to retire...  sometime, many years from now!

On this page, you'll see many great photos that I've shot at Diablo Canyon over the years...  but let me stress that I'm not a professional photographer, just the mailroom guy!  I think it's pretty funny that a photo by the mailroom guy hangs in the office of the company President.  In fact, that photo (at the top of this page) of the plant at dawn, with the goats grazing on the hillside, is probably the best photo I ever took at DCPP.  It's certainly the one that people comment about the most, and it even made it on to the cover of an industry magazine.  Not bad for an amateur!

You might be wondering if I got a ton of money from the magazine for the use of my photo.  I'm afraid not!  And they even managed to misspell my name when they gave me credit for it!

Here are some of my digital photos of
Diablo Canyon and the surrounding area

All pictures are the copyrighted works of Jim Zimmerlin
(except as noted)

Flowers in bloom during the Spring This photo was actually taken with my very first digital camera...  somewhere around 1998.

The unit 1 steam turbine and generator I've waxed that floor before, and that's not a fun job!

A look at the power plant from the north This is an angle that most people never see, since the area north of the plant is closed to visitors and even to most employees.

The coastline north of Diablo Canyon Those hills are green in Winter and Spring, but brown in Summer and Fall. This area would make one heck of a great state park someday after Diablo is eventually decommissioned.

Another view of the flowers in bloom on the hillside An April 2004 photo

The coastline south of Diablo Canyon The road to the plant lies on this stretch of the coast. It makes for an incredibly beautiful commute to and from work each day!

The sun peeks through Oak trees This beautiful grove of Oak trees is in the canyon behind the power plant. This picture was honored as the "Digital Photo Of The Day" at a very well respected photography web site on May 2'nd, 1999... and again by another photography web site on August 7th, 2001!

A May 2006 photo of wildflowers just north of Diablo Canyon PG&E owns a large amount of property surrounding the power plant. For security purposes, there is no public access to this area... so it is in pristine natural condition. This picture was taken a mile or two north of the power plant. Click on the picture to see a high resolution (3230x700 pixel) version of the photo. Internet Explorer users:  After downloading the large version of the photo, Internet Explorer will most likely resize the big photo to fit your screen.  To see the full sized version, point your mouse to the lower right hand corner of the resized photo, and click on the "expand" button.

Sometimes I hear from people who are concerned about living near a nuclear power plant.  Residents of San Luis Obispo county can rest easy because Diablo Canyon is recognized worldwide as one of the finest nuclear power plants in existence.  Did you know that employees of nuclear power plants from around the world frequently visit Diablo Canyon to learn from PG&E's successes?

You might be thinking:  "Well what about Chernobyl?  Couldn't that kind of accident happen here?  They had to permanently abandon entire towns that were wiped out by escaping radiation from the disaster there!"

You need to understand an important difference between American nuclear plant design and the design that the Soviets used.  Nuclear reactors in the United States are enclosed in massive containment domes, the huge steel-reinforced cement structures that are so dominant in the pictures on this page.  These structures would contain an accident within the dome.  The Soviets were very arrogant and felt that their nuclear plants featured such superior engineering that there was no need for a containment structure...  so the reactors at Chernobyl (and many others in the former Soviet Union) were NOT built within containment domes.  When things went terribly wrong within the Chernobyl reactor, there was nothing to keep the radiation from spewing out in to the countryside.  Only AFTER the accident was a containment structure hastily built at Chernobyl.  (It is now referred to as "the Sarcophagus".)

One only needs to look to Three Mile Island to see the benefits of containment domes.  The accidents at both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were serious enough to destroy the nuclear reactors and to permanently disable the plant, yet at Three Mile Island the accident was contained because of the dome.  The surrounding residents, while scared, suffered no health effects.  Another critical difference between American and Soviet plant safety lies in the design of the reactor itself.  The water moderated reactors in use today throughout the US are inherently much more stable than the design used at Chernobyl.

Besides containing any accidents inside the domes, the containment structures would also be excellent protection against a terrorist attack.  An engineering study recently concluded that a fully loaded jetliner flown directly in to the containment structure of an American nuclear power plant would NOT penetrate the structure.

Speaking of security issues, let me assure you that for years now America's nuclear power plants have been prepared to defend against terrorist attacks.  Security is not something that has been hastily added in the wake of the September 11th attacks...  intense security is something that has been designed in to nuclear power plants since day one.  I'm not going to discuss security issues any further here (heck, there could be terrorists reading this right now) but I would suggest if you are interested in reading more about the subject that you visit the web site of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Another issue that people sometimes ask me about is the safety of working at a nuclear power plant.  In December of 2000 I was diagnosed with Lymphoma, and some people have suggested that there must be a link between my job and the fact that I got cancer.  While it's possible, I really doubt it.  I wore a radiation monitoring device at Diablo Canyon at all times, so I know exactly how much radiation I received during the years prior to getting cancer.  You might be surprised to know that I got more radiation exposure during the two CAT scans they performed in diagnosing my cancer then I did in all the years I worked at Diablo Canyon prior to that!  And that includes the time I had to go in to that highly radioactive steam generator, as described earlier on this page.  There are more than a million new cases of cancer in the USA every year...  it just happens.  Diablo Canyon probably had nothing to do with mine.

By the way, my cancer was successfully treated in the Spring of 2001 and I'm perfectly fine now.  It was an experience I won't ever forget, though!  You can read about it and see some funny pictures of me after losing my hair here.

Another thing people sometimes ask me about is the earthquake that rattled Diablo Canyon on December 22, 2003.  The epicenter of this magnitude 6.5 quake was about 35 miles north of the plant.  I was at home at the time of the quake, so I can't offer any first-hand reports, but I do have several friends who were at Diablo Canyon at the time.  They say that there was very strong shaking at the plant site, but that the plant handled it well.  It was not even necessary to reduce power or take the plant off-line...  both units continued to run at full-power without a problem.

To understand how this was possible, while millions of dollars in damages occurred elsewhere in the county, you have to understand that Diablo Canyon was designed to handle a much stronger earthquake than this.  Would it make you feel better to know that Diablo Canyon was designed and built to handle an earthquake that produces shaking twice as strong as the December 22nd quake?  Well, I've got news for you...  the truth is that Diablo Canyon was designed and built to handle shaking about TWENTY times as strong as this 6.5 magnitude quake produced!  Certain politicians and anti-nuclear groups got all up in arms and called for an investigation of Diablo Canyon after the quake...  I find that hilarious... and I think it just shows how out of touch they are with the truth about Diablo Canyon.  This place has been engineered to the most demanding specifications.  I've seen it up close, from the inside.  You'd be hard pressed to find a safer place to ride out an earthquake than within the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant!

There's one other subject regarding Diablo Canyon that I'd like to mention...  the economic aspects.  There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about this!  Some people have a perception that nuclear power is expensive...  but in the case of Diablo Canyon, this couldn't be further from the truth.  Did you know that Diablo Canyon provides power to California's electric grid at less than half the cost of the statewide average?  The average cost of electricity produced in California is over 3.6 cents per killowatt/hour...  but Diablo Canyon power costs less than 1.6 cents per kWh.

And let's not forget the economic benefits to the local area...  in addition to employing over 1,400 people at the plant itself, the economic activity generated by Diablo Canyon accounts for well over 500 other full time jobs in San Luis Obispo county.  A study by the Nuclear Energy Institute recently concluded that Diablo Canyon's contribution to the economy of San Luis Obispo county in 2002 alone was over $640 million dollars.  Look statewide and Diablo Canyon's impact was over $723 million that year...  nationwide the impact was about a billion dollars.

The power plant is surrounded by a large buffer zone of several hundred acres.  The buffer zone is in pristine condition and hasn't changed much from the days when native Americans lived here.  Public access to this part of the coastline is extremely limited, and the land is used mainly for livestock grazing.  Here are a few photos from PG&E's property surrounding the Diablo Canyon site...

An April 2007 photo from the area north of the power plant

Just a little bit north of the previous photo, I put the camera on a tripod so I could be in this shot

A March 2007 photo from the other (south) side of the power plant, looking north

The Point San Luis lighthouse sits on the far south end of the Diablo Canyon buffer zone.
Click here to see some pretty photos I took on a hike to the lighthouse in 2003

Please note:
All pictures on this page have been reviewed by DCPP security, and have been cleared for display on this site.

If you'd like to see more pictures of the San Luis Obispo county area
that I've taken with my digital camera, please visit my SLO pictures page.

To read a fascinating article about the nuclear power industry,
which discusses the important role that nuclear plays in our nation's energy mix
and also covers reactor safety, the storage of nuclear waste, and how nuclear power
plays an important role in the fight against global warming click here.

If you'd like to learn more about nuclear power plants,
visit some of the web sites listed at the Open Directory Project.

If there are any images here which you admire, send email to me
at jimzim@charter.net and let me know!  I thrive on encouragement!

There is a LOT more to this web site than just this page...
Please explore the rest of the site by viewing our table of contents,
or by clicking on one of the quick links below.