Locals Furious Over Closure Of Dupont Circle [VIDEO]

Locals Furious Over Closure Of Dupont Circle [VIDEO]

The Washington Post reports:

Mayor Muriel Bowser addressed the closure for the first time in a public radio appearance Friday afternoon. She called the closing an “unfortunate error” and said she would “continue to try to lean on” the National Park Service “for a different decision.” At the same time she appeared to defend the decision, saying police had “a lot of events to be responsible for” and that “unfortunately, the public safety issue rose to the top over the public celebration.”

A cyclist draped in a rainbow Equality flag chanted “shame” as she rode loops around the park. Passersby, turned away by police from entering the circle, shouted expletives. A man, driving top-down in a convertible through the snarled traffic around Dupont Circle, shouted, sarcastically: “Oh no! I’m a heterosexual man, and I must be protected from Pride!

The park has been a historic gathering place that has hosted celebrations following the first Pride events in the 1970s, AIDS protests in the ’80s and ’90s and vigils after violent attacks on the LGBTQ community, including a vigil for the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting and a Black Trans Lives Matter rally.

The Advocate reports:

Earlier this week, D.C. Council members Brooke Pinto and Zachary Parker announced that the Metropolitan Police Department had withdrawn its request to close the park following backlash from community members. But federal officials proceeded with the shutdown anyway and have not responded to requests for comment.

“I am extremely disappointed and frustrated that Dupont Circle Park will be closed this weekend despite MPD’s commitment to keep folks safe there,” Pinto said in a statement to The Advocate.

“This closure is disheartening to me and so many in our community who wanted to celebrate World Pride at this iconic symbol of our city’s historic LGBTQ+ community. I wish I had better news to share.”

News radio station WTOP reports:

Underscoring their desire to implement the closure, USPP highlighted criminal incidents that were initially pointed out in Smith’s April 22 letter. Those incidents, which took place during the District’s Pride celebration, included damages to the park’s historic fountain in 2023 that amounted to approximately $175,000.

In 2019, panic erupted at the park after loud popping sounds were perceived as gunshots being fired. However, it was later determined no firearm had been discharged. Seven people were transported to the hospital for non-life-threatening injuries prompted by the chaos that had initially broken out.

Washington’s ABC affiliate reports:

Police responded to recent incidents of vandalism to Pride decorations in D.C. The suspects tore down rainbow wraps from poles in the area, according to two incident reports from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). One incident is listed as a suspected hate crime. The suspects got away in both cases, according to MPD.

Chris De Anda said he wrapped himself around one of the poles to block the suspect from ripping off the rainbow wrap, thinking that would stop him. It didn’t.

“He starts to rip down the flag, rips my arms off trying to get into them to pull down the paper a little bit more, but the entire time I basically hold on to it,” de Anda described, saying the man scratched his arms a bit to get to the flag.

Watch the videos.

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The lawless, corrupt occupation regime in DC is doing this on purpose as a way to inconvenience, snub and insult the lgbt community. Their long term goal is to silence, cancel and eradicate lgbt Americans, so expect increasing instances of these kinds of things, and worse.

““unfortunately, the public safety issue rose to the top over the public celebration.””

But not for celebrations with red-blooded, patriotic, straight cis het christians, for some reason.

And as mentioned this morning in the comments, if they were really worried about the fountain, they would just block that off, not thole damn circle

So…a bunch of bigots have been vandalizing things in Dupont Circle, so they close it all off so the people who AREN’T the bigoted vandals can’t go there? Kinda sounds like they’re letting the bigots win here…

Childish petty thin skinned MAGA cultists in the White House just can’t let anyone celebrate anything that isn’t specifically a “Christian” event. I wonder what would happen in Thousands just show up to DuPont Circle enmass, what are they going to do, arrest them all???

 

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, newly returned to US, appears in court on charges of trafficking migrants

First you know this man was threatened all the way back to the US that his family would be rounded up and tortured if he told of what happened to him in that prison.  I wonder if they had to wait until injuries healed before they could let the public see him?  Ron says they maybe starved him and had to feed him again to build up his weight and looks.   Poor man I hope he is able to safely get his story out. It is clear the charges against him are fraudulent and made up.   Just like the government kept saying he was an MS 13 gang member which two courts found he was not. Also he was living in Maryland and his court case is being heard in DC so why is the Justice department trying his new charges in Tennessee?  Why not add the charges to the case being heard now in DC.   Clearly they hope to get a much more conservative and racist court there than they would in the northern states.  I am surprised they did not charge him in Texas.   Hugs.


https://abcnews.go.com/US/mistakenly-deported-kilmar-abrego-garcia-back-us-face/story?id=121333122

The Salvadoran native was brought back to the U.S. from El Salvador Friday.

June 6, 2025, 7:26 PM

Mistakenly deported Salvadoran native Kilmar Abrego Garcia appeared in a Tennessee courtroom Friday, hours after he was brought back to the United States to face criminal charges for allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the U.S.

More than two months after the Trump administration admitted it mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia from Maryland to his native El Salvador, a two-count indictment unsealed Friday alleges that he participated in a years long conspiracy to haul undocumented migrants from Texas to the interior of the country.

The return of Abrego Garcia from his native El Salvador follows a series of court battles in which the Trump administration repeatedly said it was unable to bring him back, drawing the country toward the brink of a constitutional crisis when the administration failed to heed the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate his return.

MORE: Justice Department investigating 2022 Abrego Garcia traffic stop: Sources

He made his initial court appearance Friday evening in the Middle District of Tennessee, answering “Yes, I understand” in Spanish when U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes asked him if he understood the charges against him.

Judge Homes set a hearing for June 13, where Abrego Garcia will be arraigned on charges and the judge will take up the government’s motion to hold him in pre-trial detention on the grounds that he “poses a danger to the community and a serious risk of flight” He will remain in federal custody in Tennessee pending next week’s hearing.

“If convicted at trial, the defendant faces a maximum punishment of 10 years’ imprisonment for ‘each alien’ he transported,” said the government’s motion for detention, which also contained an allegation — not included in the indictment — that one of Abrego Garcia’s co-conspirators told authorities that Abrego Garcia participated in the murder of a rival gang member’s mother in El Salvador.

Abrego Garcia’s attorney, in an online press briefing, called the charges against his client “an abuse of power.”

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is placed in the back seat of a truck by ICE agents after arriving in Nashville, Tenn., June 6, 2025.
ABC News

“They’ll stop at nothing at all — even some of the most preposterous charges imaginable — just to avoid admitting that they made a mistake, which is what everyone knows happened in this case,” said attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg.

“Mr. Garcia is going to be vigorously defending the charges against him,” the attorney said.

The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.

Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.

The alleged conspiracy spanned nearly a decade and involved the domestic transport of thousands of noncitizens from Mexico and Central America, including some children, in exchange for thousands of dollars, according to the indictment.

Abrego Garcia is alleged to have participated in more than 100 such trips, according to the indictment. Among those allegedly transported were members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13, sources familiar with the investigation said.

MORE: Timeline: Wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador

Abrego Garcia is the only member of the alleged conspiracy charged in the indictment.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, at a Friday afternoon press conference, thanked Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for “agreeing to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.”

“Our government presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant and they agreed to return him to our country,” Bondi said.

Bondi said that if Abrego Garcia is convicted of the charges, upon the completion of his sentence he will be deported back to his home country of El Salvador.

“The grand jury found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring,” Bondi said. “They found this was his full time job, not a contractor. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. He made over 100 trips, the grand jury found, smuggling people throughout our country.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche listens during a news conference about Kilmar Abrego Garcia at the Justice Department, June 6, 2025, in Washington.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

In a statement to ABC News, Abrego Garcia’s attorney said that he’s going to keep fighting to ensure Abrego Garcia receives a fair trial.

“From the beginning, this case has made one thing painfully clear: The government had the power to bring him back at any time. Instead, they chose to play games with the court and with a man’s life,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “We’re not just fighting for Kilmar — we’re fighting to ensure due process rights are protected for everyone. Because tomorrow, this could be any one of us — if we let power go unchecked, if we ignore our Constitution.”

Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native who had been living with his wife and children in Maryland, was deported in March to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison — despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country due to fear of persecution — after the Trump administration claimed he was a member of the criminal gang MS-13. His wife and attorneys deny that he is an MS-13 member.

The Trump administration has acknowledged in court filings that Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador in March was in error, because it violated a U.S. immigration court order in 2019 that shielded Abrego Garcia from deportation to his native country, according to immigration court records. An immigration judge had determined that Abrego Garcia would likely face persecution there by local gangs that had allegedly terrorized him and his family.

The administration argued, however, that Abrego Garcia should not be returned to the U.S. because he is a member of the transnational Salvadoran gang MS-13, a claim his family and attorneys have denied. In recent weeks, Trump administration officials have been publicizing Abrego Garcia’s interactions with police over the years, despite a lack of corresponding criminal charges.

After Abrego Garcia’s family filed a lawsuit over his deportation, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that ruling on April 10.

Abrego Garcia was initially sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison but was believed to have later been transferred to a different facility in the country.

Undated photo provided by Murray Osorio PLLC shows Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Murray Osorio PLLC via AP

The criminal investigation that led to the charges was launched in April as federal authorities began scrutinizing the circumstances of a 2022 traffic stop of Abrego Garcia by the Tennessee Highway Patrol, according to the sources. Abrego Garcia was pulled over for speeding in a vehicle with eight passengers and told police they had been working construction in Missouri.

According to body camera footage of the 2022 traffic stop, the Tennessee troopers — after questioning Abrego Garcia — discussed among themselves their suspicions that Abrego Garcia might be transporting people for money because nine people were traveling without luggage, but Abrego Garcia was not ticketed or charged.

The officers ultimately allowed Abrego Garcia to drive on with just a warning about an expired driver’s license, according to a report about the stop released last month by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Asked what circumstances have changed since Abrego Garcia was not taken in custody during that traffic stop in Tennessee, Bondi replied, “What has changed is Donald Trump is now president of the United States, and our borders are again secure, and thanks to the bright light that has been shined on Abrego Garcia — this investigation continued with actually amazing police work, and we were able to track this case and stop this international smuggling ring from continuing.”

Asked by ABC News’ Pierre Thomas asked whether this should be seen as resolving the separate civil case in Maryland in which a federal judge ordered the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said, “There’s a big difference between what the state of play was before the indictment and after the indictment. And so the reason why he is back and was returned was because an arrest warrant which was presented to the government and in El Salvador. So there’s, there’s a big difference there as far as whether it makes the ongoing litigation in Maryland moot. I would think so, but we don’t know about this. He just landed today.”

As ABC News first reported last month, the Justice Department had been quietly investigating the Tenessee traffic stop. As part of the probe, federal agents in late April visited a federal prison in Talladega, Alabama to question Jose Ramon Hernandez-Reyes, a convicted felon who was the registered owner of the vehicle Abrego Garcia was driving when stopped on Interstate 40 east of Nashville, sources previously told ABC News. Hernandez-Reyes was not present at the traffic stop.

MORE: Newly released video shows Abrego Garcia’s 2022 Tennessee traffic stop

Hernandez-Reyes, 38, is currently serving a 30-month sentence for illegally re-entering the U.S. after a prior felony conviction for illegal transportation of aliens.

After being granted limited immunity, Hernandez-Reyes allegedly told investigators that he previously operated a “taxi service” based in Baltimore. He claimed to have met Abrego Garcia around 2015 and claimed to have hired him on multiple occasions to transport undocumented migrants from Texas to various locations in the United States, sources told ABC News.

When details of the Tennessee traffic stop were first publicized, Abrego Garcia’s wife said her husband sometimes transported groups of fellow construction workers between job sites.

“Unfortunately, Kilmar is currently imprisoned without contact with the outside world, which means he cannot respond to the claims,” Jennifer Vasquez Sura said in mid-April.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who flew to El Salvador and met with Abrego Garcia shortly after his deportation, said Friday that the Trump administration had “relented” regarding his return.

“After months of ignoring our Constitution, it seems the Trump Admin has relented to our demands for compliance with court orders and due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia,” Van Hollen posted on X. “This has never been about the man — it’s about his constitutional rights & the rights of all.”

Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally as a teenager in 2012, according to court records. He had been living in Maryland for the past 13 years, and married Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, in 2019. The couple has one child together.

ABC News’ Laura Romero contributed to this report.

Peace & Justice History For 6/2

June 2, 1783
At the urging of General George Washington, the United States Congress agreed to gradually disband the Revolutionary army following the end of the war. Subject only to the signing of a final peace treaty with Great Britain, all soldiers and non-commissioned officers were discharged; additionally, a full pardon was granted to privates and non-coms in confinement.
June 2, 1863
Abolitionist and former slave James Montgomery led 300 African-American troops of the Union Army’s 2nd South Carolina Volunteers on a raid of plantations along the Combahee River. Meanwhile, backed by three gunboats, Harriet Tubman’s forces set fire to the plantations and freed 750 slaves.

Harriet Tubman
More on General Tubman 
June 2, 1936
General Anastasio Somoza, head of the U.S. Marine-trained National Guard, forced the resignation of Nicaragua’s elected President, Juan Bautista Sacasa. This followed a seven-year U.S. occupation of the country and was followed by Somoza family control of the country for the next four decades.

More about Somoza and other U.S.-friendly Central American dictators
June 2, 1952
The U.S. Supreme court ruled illegal President Truman’s order two months earlier for the Army to seize the nation’s steel mills in order to avert a strike during the Korean war.
The decision 

U.S. citizen with REAL ID handcuffed and held in immigration raid before being released

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/us-citizen-immigration-raid-real-id-handcuffed-alabama-rcna208794

The man told Noticias Telemundo that authorities took his ID from his wallet and told him it was fake before handcuffing him.

A U.S.-born citizen who was wrestled into the dirt, handcuffed and detained in a vehicle as part of an immigration raid had a REAL ID on him that was dismissed as fake, the man’s cousin said Friday.

Video of the arrest, aired by Noticias Telemundo, showed authorities grabbing Leonardo Garcia Venegas, 25, while at a job site in Foley, Alabama, on Wednesday and bending his arms behind him. Someone off-camera can be heard yelling, “He’s a citizen.”

Garcia told Noticias Telemundo that authorities took his ID from his wallet and told him it was fake before handcuffing him. REAL ID is the identification U.S. citizens are required by law to have in order to travel through airports and enter federal buildings. It is considered a higher security form of identification.

“Apparently a REAL ID is not valid anymore. He has a REAL ID,” his cousin Shelah Venegas said. “We all made sure we have the REAL ID and went through the protocols the administration is asking for. … He has his REAL ID and then they see him and I guess because his English isn’t fluent and/or because he’s brown it’s fake, it’s not real.”

Garcia had told Noticias Telemundo that “they grabbed me real bad” and the handcuffs were placed “very hard” on him.

Garcia said he was released from the vehicle where he was held after he gave the arresting officials his Social Security number, which showed he is a U.S. citizen.

The arrest has left Garcia, who was born in Florida, shaken, particularly because the officers also arrested and detained his brother, who is not in the country legally, Venegas said. She added that Garcia lived with his brother. Their parents are from Mexico.

Leonardo Garcia Venegas.
Leonardo Garcia Venegas.Telemundo

“He was actually pretty sore when he got back,” Venegas said of Garcia. “He said his arms were hurting and his hands. His wrists, you could see where he had all the marks from the handcuffs. … The way they put him on the ground, his knees also were hurting.”

She said they have been trying to find a lawyer but local ones have told them that it is nearly impossible to sue a federal agent. It is not clear from the video whether the authorities were federal immigration agents or local law enforcement carrying out enforcement duties.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to NBC News that Garcia interfered with an arrest during a targeted worksite operation.

“He physically got in between agents and the subject they were attempting to arrest and refused to comply with numerous verbal commands,” said Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary. “Anyone who actively obstructs law enforcement in the performance of their sworn duties, including U.S. citizens, will of course face consequences which include arrest.”

The response did not address the dismissal of Garcia’s identification.

Garcia denied that he interrupted an arrest. He told NBC News that he was trying to take out his phone when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent took it and threw it to the ground and then an agent began grabbing him.

Venegas said Garcia’s brother has signed deportation papers because the family didn’t want him detained “forever” as they’ve seen happen to another family member, who was held for months in a Louisiana detention center.

“It’s inhumane, what they are doing to our people. They are treating them as if they were murderers,” she said.

Venegas said the immigration arrests are creating repercussions among Hispanics, even among U.S. citizens.

“It’s about race now. It’s not about whether you are here legally or not,” she said.

Her family owns a fairly large contracting company, she said, “and a lot of the people that work with us are not working. … They are refusing to go to work. They said they are not going to go until this stuff calms down.”

Venegas added that the majority of her family is self-employed and “we do the same thing every other citizen does.”

“It’s just insane we can’t be different, the color that we are. We contribute to this country the same way every other citizen does with their taxes,” she said. “But we have to be the ones that every time we go to work, we are going to be scared that we’re going to get discriminated.”

“I think about my family,” she said. “Even though a lot of them are citizens, I think about how we all work in the same area in construction and they can’t sit out there because they could literally get harassed or attacked the way my cousin did.”

They are doing it. Gross, corrupt, and hateful

WH Official Ordered Redo Of Venezuelan Gang Story

Kent, a twice-failed House candidate and self-professed fan of the Proud Boys, last appeared here when he declared that he would be keeping a $8600 campaign donation from a Capitol rioter then-facing felony assault charges. We first heard from Kent in 2022 when he gave an interview to a white nationalist Nazi podcaster.

New from Julian Barnes, Maggie Haberman and me:Trump Appointee Pressed Analyst to Redo Intelligence on Venezuelan GangThe move followed a disclosure that intelligence agencies disagree with a key factual claim Trump made to invoke a wartime deportation law.www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/u…

Charlie Savage (@charliesavage.bsky.social) 2025-05-16T22:15:47.077Z

Moody’s Downgrades Credit Rating Of United States

Breaking news: The US has been stripped of its top-notch triple-a credit rating by Moody’s on concerns about rising levels of government debt http://www.ft.com/content/e456…

Financial Times (@financialtimes.com) 2025-05-16T21:04:22.468Z

 

Fox Host Agrees With Oklahoma Schools Chief That Students Should Be Taught 2020 Election Was Stolen

Christian Nationalist Pastors To Open DC Church To Help The Trump Administration “Go After Sodomy” [VIDEO]

“And they’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah. Look, we’re doing it.’ But all the sodomites are still there and we’re not going to talk about that. And I need a guy there, I need a minister there who’s gonna say, ‘Oh, but we are. Obergefell is next, we’re coming for that,’ so that you calibrate the Christians in DC by the word of God and not by whatever the present administration can tolerate.

“We’re gonna come for feminism. We’re going to go after sodomy. Those are the sins in that town. Those are sins that are acceptable among both parties in that town. And we want to plant that flag and say the Bible has something to say about this.” – Christian nationalist pastor Joe Rigney.

 

Trump Threatens “Dried Out Prune” Springsteen: He Better “Keep His Mouth Shut, Just An Obnoxious Jerk”

Trump: Taylor Swift Is “No Longer Hot” Because Of Me

Felon Threatens SCOTUS Justices In Birthright Rant

USAID Leaves 66,000 Metric Tons Of Food Relief To Rot

Food rations that could supply 3.5 million people for a month are mouldering in warehouses around the world because of U.S. aid cuts and risk becoming unusable, according to five people familiar with the situation. The food stocks have been stuck inside four U.S. government warehouses since the Trump administration’s decision in January to cut global aid programmes.

 

Trump Is Selling “VIP Access” To Birthday Parade

Those who give to America250, a committee created to support what Trump envisions as a large national celebration next year for America’s 250th birthday, will be given special access to three events, according to a pitch shared with donors. Those include a military parade Trump is planning on his birthday, a “military readiness” event he is leading at Fort Bragg military base with thousands of troops and an Independence Day celebration in Washington, the people said.

https://x.com/jdawsey1/status/1923335215700758761

 

FEMA Head: We Don’t Have A Hurricane Season Plan

On his first day on the job, Richardson threatened staffers, telling them “I’ll run right over you” if they object to his orders.

Duffy: FAA Is Scrounging Replacement Parts On eBay

Yesterday Duffy also posted a video about moving a painting of Jesus “out of the basement” at the Merchant Marine Academy.

https://x.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1923120841413521425

 

Kid Rock: Birth Rate Is Low Due To “Ugly Ass Broke Crazy Deranged TDS Liberal Women” And Gay Men

He continued, “I mean, you look at these rallies, it’s like a bunch of women that no guy wants to sleep with and a bunch of dudes that want to sleep with each other.”

You’ll note that Watters did not ask Kid Rock about sending his undocumented kitchen staff home to evade arrest by ICE.

Trump Admin Fires 600 Voice Of America Employees And Puts Organization’s DC Headquarters Up For Sale

Trump Administration Fires Hundreds of Voice of America Employees – The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/u…

Timothy McBride (@mcbridetd.bsky.social) 2025-05-16T06:24:06.074Z

ICE Barbie And “Duck Dynasty” Producer Plot Reality Show In Which Migrants Compete For US Citizenship

 

 

 

 

Trump Claims Hitler Gave “Speech At The Eiffel Tower”

https://x.com/atrupar/status/1923053942759358935

This is as close as Hitler got to the Tower. He couldn’t go up it because the French had cut the elevator cables.

Thumbnail

3 Clips from Rev Trevor

 

Here’s A Useful Tool

from the Center for American Progress (remember them?) This gives us the info by congressional district, including the congresscritter’s names so we know just who to call about our concerns. There are options for pagination or a table.

An update on the bathroom project.

Peace & Justice History for 4/21

April 21, 1856
Stonemasons and other construction workers on building sites around Melbourne, Australia, stopped work and marched from the University of Melbourne to Parliament House. They advocated eight hours for work, eight hours for recreation, and eight hours for rest. Their direct action protest was a success, becoming the first organized workers in the world to achieve an eight-hour workday, inspiring the celebration of Labor Day and May Day.
April 21, 1989
Six days after the death of Hu Yaobang, the deposed reform-minded leader of the Chinese Communist Party, some 100,000 students from more than 40 universities gathered at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to commemorate Hu prior to his funeral.They voiced their discontent with China’s authoritarian communist government, and called for greater democracy. Ignoring government warnings of violent suppression of any mass demonstration, the students were joined by workers, academics, and civil servants.

Pro-democracy student protesters face-to-face with policemen outside the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square the day of Hu Yaobang’s funeral.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april21

An Unsettling Headline-

For the First Time, Artificial Intelligence Is Being Used at a Nuclear Power Plant

Alex Shultz Published April 13, 2025 | Comments (4)

Diablo Canyon, California’s sole remaining nuclear power plant, has been left for dead on more than a few occasions over the last decade or so, and is currently slated to begin a lengthy decommissioning process in 2029. Despite its tenuous existence, the San Luis Obispo power plant received some serious computing hardware at the end of last year: eight NVIDIA H100s, which are among the world’s mightiest graphical processors. Their purpose is to power a brand-new artificial intelligence tool designed for the nuclear energy industry.

Pacific Gas and Electric, which runs Diablo Canyon, announced a deal with artificial intelligence startup Atomic Canyon—a company also based in San Luis Obispo—around the same time, heralding it in a press release as “the first on-site generative AI deployment at a U.S. nuclear power plant.”

For now, the artificial intelligence tool named Neutron Enterprise is just meant to help workers at the plant navigate extensive technical reports and regulations — millions of pages of intricate documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that go back decades — while they operate and maintain the facility. But Neutron Enterprise’s very existence opens the door to further use of AI at Diablo Canyon or other facilities — a possibility that has some lawmakers and AI experts calling for more guardrails.

PG&E is deploying the document retrieval service in stages. The installation of the NVIDIA chips was one of the first phases of the partnership between PG&E and Atomic Canyon; PG&E is forecasting a “full deployment” at Diablo Canyon by the third quarter of this year, said Maureen Zawalick, the company’s vice president of business and technical services. At that point, Neutron Enterprise—which Zawalick likens to a data-mining “copilot,” though explicitly not a “decision-maker”—will be expanded to search for and summarize Diablo Canyon-specific instructions and reports too.

“We probably spend about 15,000 hours a year searching through our multiple databases and records and procedures,” Zawalick said. “And that’s going to shrink that time way down.” (Emphasis mine- A. I worked at the nuke plant in my state in my 20s. I did Records Management. I’m not going to explain it all from back then the way I trained people, but it involves reading and interpreting what one has read in application to the function, part, area, etc. a document records, which is learned by reading the document, then coding it so it is efficiently retrieved later. So far, I don’t know that AI does that. Others who are more knowledgeable about records management and retrieval in this era and context may see better things than I see. The best worst I see is really angry and impatient engineers and inspectors in all the disciplines still at the plant. That’s no fun, anyway.)

Trey Lauderdale, the chief executive and co-founder of Atomic Canyon, told CalMatters his aim for Neutron Enterprise is simple and low-stakes: he wants Diablo Canyon employees to be able to look up pertinent information more efficiently. “You can put this on the record: the AI guy in nuclear says there is no way in hell I want AI running my nuclear power plant right now,” Lauderdale said.

That “right now” qualifier is key, though. PG&E and Atomic Canyon are on the same page about sticking to limited AI uses for the foreseeable future, but they aren’t foreclosing the possibility of eventually increasing AI’s presence at the plant in yet-to-be-determined ways. According to Lauderdale, his company is also in talks with other nuclear facilities, as well as groups who are interested in building out small modular reactor facilities, about how to integrate his startup’s technology. And he’s not the only entrepreneur eyeing ways to introduce artificial intelligence into the nuclear energy field.

In the meantime, questions remain about whether sufficient safeguards exist to regulate the combination of two technologies that each have potential for harm. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was exploring the issue of AI in nuclear plants for a few years, but it’s unclear if that will remain a priority under the Trump administration. Days into his current term, Trump revoked a Biden administration executive order that set out AI regulatory goals, writing that they acted “as barriers to American AI innovation.” For now, Atomic Canyon is voluntarily keeping the Nuclear Regulatory Commission abreast of its plans.

Tamara Kneese, the director of tech policy nonprofit Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program, conceded that for a narrowly designed document retrieval service, “AI can be helpful in terms of efficiency.” But she cautioned, “The idea that you could just use generative AI for one specific kind of task at the nuclear power plant and then call it a day, I don’t really trust that it would stop there. And trusting PG&E to safely use generative AI in a nuclear setting is something that is deserving of more scrutiny.”

For those reasons, Democratic Assemblymember Dawn Addis—who represents San Luis Obispo—isn’t enthused about the latest developments at Diablo Canyon. “I have many unanswered questions of the safety, oversight, and job implications for using AI at Diablo,” Addis said. “Previously, I have supported measures to regulate AI and prevent the replacement and automation of jobs. We need those guardrails in place, especially if we are to use them at highly sensitive sites like Diablo Canyon.” (snip-MORE; not tl;dr, though.)