Ben Davis Jr.
Many locals know Ben Davis Jr. as a painter, the resident artist at Santa Cruz’s Sones Cellars. His work is so colorful and bright it almost seems to glow.
But as he sits in the Sones Cellars tasting room, sipping a glass of Cancion Del Mar, he has an entirely different kind of glow on his mind. As he speaks about the dangers of nuclear power, his other passion—one that has put him in the national spotlight—takes over.
“It is just wrong on so many levels,” says Davis.
Davis was recently nicknamed “the Nuclear Terminator” by Forbes magazine, and he’s living up to the billing. He first made his mark leading the successful ballot-initiative campaign to close the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant in 1989, and now he’s going after the two remaining nuclear power plants in the state with the California Nuclear Initiative.
The ballot measure, which is currently gathering signatures, prohibits California nuclear power plants from generating electricity until the federal government approves a plan for permanently disposing of nuclear waste or reprocessing of fuel rods. The broadening of an existing law that bans the state from building any new power plants until there is such a plan, it would effectively shut down California's existing nuclear power plants, San Onofre and Diablo Canyon.
For Davis, this has been a long battle. He originally proposed the initiative to close all of the state’s nuclear power plants in the late 1980s, but at the time the state said that it would cost $5 billion to shut them down.
“Back then, that was such a big price tag that I couldn't get any grassroots support,” he says.
He set aside the campaign for two decades. “I wasn't really lying in wait for the next big nuclear disaster,” he says.
Nonetheless, it seemed to be waiting for him. In 2011, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl in 1986.
With public sentiment toward nuclear power shifting drastically, Davis renewed his push to close California’s plants. But just like when he filed his initiative 20 years ago, the state came back at him with a huge price tag, claiming it would cost tens of billions of dollars annually to close the plants. Suspecting he was being duped, Davis eventually took the state to the California Supreme Court over their fiscal analysis of the bill.
By the time the court declined to hear the case, Davis had already filed the initiative three times. By the fourth though, the state owned up to a drastically reduced price tag.
“The fiscal analysis changed not because the facts changed, but because the evidence changed,” says Davis. “That is unprecedented, as far as I know.”
Unlikely Activist
With no formal education in law, environmental science or justice, Davis may seem like an unlikely activist. However, when asked about how he found himself almost single-handedly trying to close down all the nuclear power plants in California, Davis smiles.
“I was into anti-growth in our community back in the 1970's. I grew up on the (Sacramento) river, and they were chopping up the river bank. It started becoming clear to me that something was wrong with what they were doing to these natural beautiful areas,” he remembers.
As his interest in nuclear activism and knowledge of the law grew, Davis took on what would be a landmark victory: the fight to close down the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant.
“After Three Mile Island, Sacramento County was required to adopt an evacuation plan for the city in case of a nuclear accident…They tried to adopt that without environmental review, and I had learned just enough about environmental law to know what they were trying to do was just silly.”
Davis is also currently sponsoring a ballot initiative that would turn the state of California into an electrical utility district. By creating a publicly owned utility, he hopes to reduce the price of electricity 10-20 percent.
“PG & E would become PG”, Davis explains.
Still, his anti-nuclear work remains his most personal project.
“Of all the environmental issues to fight, this one attracted me the most,” he says. “In fact, to some degree, it feels like it chooses me as much as I choose it.”
