$3.5-Billion Cost, Safety Questioned : Controversy Mounts Over Mexico’s 1st Nuclear Plant

Slowly, the men in white coveralls and yellow rubber boots maneuvered a giant mechanical arm to lift 400-pound rods of uranium one at a time and gently set them into the bowels of atomic reactor No. 1 at the Laguna Verde power plant.

Amid much controversy and concern over safety, the loading of Mexico’s first nuclear power plant began in the gulf state of Veracruz last month after outgoing President Miguel de la Madrid announced that his government would fire up the facility that has taken almost 20 years to build.

On Friday, the workers finished putting in place all 444 rods--80 tons of enriched uranium fuel. Next, the reactor will be switched on for tests and, barring any snafus, Laguna Verde is expected to be producing 654 megawatts of electricity per hour in six months. The second reactor at Laguna Verde is still under construction and scheduled to be on line within three years.

Mexican officials hail the plant for moving their Third World country into the nuclear age and say it is essential if they are to fulfill the energy needs of a growing population that already tops 80 million. They say Laguna Verde meets safety standards set by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“When the two reactors are operating, they will produce enough energy to electrify Monterrey or Guadalajara,” said Juan Ruiz, tour guide and spokesman for the plant.

But anti-nuclear activists have raised a host of objections to Laguna Verde, beginning with its $3.5-billion price tag and the way the decision was made to turn it on. They point to Mexico’s rich oil and gas reserves and say the country has no business becoming dependent on imported enriched uranium to feed the plant, which is itself imported technology.

Environmentalists charge that the plant, a General Electric boiling water reactor Model 5 and its Mark II containment system, are outdated and unsafe, that the construction is poor and that the government has no long-term plans for disposing of the radioactive waste that Laguna Verde will produce.

Serious opposition to Laguna Verde was ignited among Veracruz residents in 1986 after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union. Now, the start-up of Mexico’s first plant comes as public concern is growing in the United States over the issues of nuclear waste disposal and radiation surrounding nuclear weapons and uranium processing plants.

Construction has not begun on any new nuclear power plants in the United States since 1974, although some facilities already under way at that time have been completed. There are more than 35 boiling water reactors operating in the United States, eight of them with the G.E. Mark II containment system. One of those, the La Salle II reactor in Seneca, Ill., suffered a near-accident last March when a huge oscillation in the speed of a nuclear reaction caused the system to be shut down. Engineers had said that such an incident was impossible.

The restricted Shoreham plant in New York and the William H. Zimmer plant in Cincinnati, which is being converted to burn coal, also are of the same design as Laguna Verde.

In Mexico, several opponents of Laguna Verde expressed a lack of confidence in their government’s resolve to regulate the plant and said they felt that if high-tech countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union have not been able to avoid serious nuclear accidents, then less-developed Mexico should not enter the potentially dangerous industry.

“Some people think we have to keep up with the United States,” said Ramon Perez, a commercial photographer in Xalapa, the state capital of Veracruz. “I disagree. Our gas lines explode here. One of our gas plants in Xalapa was about to explode recently. Imagine what could happen with a nuclear plant.”

Like many of the 3,000 protesters who gathered in Xalapa on Oct. 23 to demonstrate against Laguna Verde, Perez said he did not believe that their opposition could stop the government from firing up the plant.

“It’s kind of like the elections here,” Perez said. “The people can say no, but it’s going to function.”

Anti-nuclear groups have long called for a referendum on Laguna Verde. Shortly before presidential elections last July, then-Secretary of Ecology and Urban Development Manuel Camacho Solis, a close adviser to the ruling party’s candidate, announced that the project was suspended indefinitely, thereby offering hope to opponents that the new administration might kill the project.

When De la Madrid authorized loading the plant last month, just after statewide municipal elections, opponents cried dirty politics. The president gave the go-ahead after the Senate issued its approval, but before the politically divided Chamber of Deputies could vote. Observers said De la Madrid did his successor a favor in taking the heat for the unpopular move and handing him a fait accompli .

Leftist opponents of President-elect Carlos Salinas de Gortari have taken up the Laguna Verde cause. They contend that Salinas won through fraudulent elections, and rallies such as the one in Xalapa combine the two issues.

Laguna Verde was conceived in the 1960s, long before Mexico’s rich oil deposits were discovered, as part of a larger plan for 20 nuclear plants throughout the country. Construction began in 1970 and was delayed through the years by personnel problems, cost overruns, Mexico’s financial problems and protests. The Federal Electricity Commission is expected to seek four more plants under the Salinas administration.

The plant is housed in a cubic red building perched on a picturesque Gulf of Mexico beach. The sparsely populated cattle and farm area is about 50 miles north of Veracruz, Mexico’s main gulf port, and about 570 miles south of the U.S. border. Inside, the plant has the security of an army base and the gray guts of a battleship. It now employs about 4,000 people, including many temporary construction workers at the second reactor site.

Nuclear proponents say that the $3.5 billion already invested in the plant is one of the better reasons for moving forward, that Mexico cannot afford to throw away that kind of money. Opponents call that throwing good money after bad, arguing that nuclear power is turning out to be three times as expensive as coal or gas and that the plant should be converted to burn one of those fuels. It takes $70-million worth of enriched uranium to load the plant and $14 million a year thereafter.

On the issue of safety, nuclear officials say that experts from both the Institute for Nuclear Power in Atlanta and from the International Atomic Energy Agency have inspected the plant and given it a clean bill. Neither report has been made public.

Jim Crow, General Electric’s site manager at Laguna Verde, said he could not comment on details of the reports. “I can say that all items brought up were addressed. There were exit interviews with the Federal Electricity Commission, and to my knowledge they followed up on all recommendations,” he said.

“They have done as good a job here as you can (find) anywhere,” Crow added. “Every country has had their first nuclear plant, and Mexico’s first is a design that’s been tried.”

Tried and dangerous, responds Robert Pollard, an anti-nuclear activist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.

“The boiling water reactors have fewer barriers to release of radioactive material than pressure reactors,” Pollard said. “Under normal operation, the whole steam system becomes contaminated. . . . With the steam, you’re carrying radioactive gases, which are ejected into the atmosphere.”

Mexican opponents of the plant say one of their main concerns is the turnover of personnel on the project since its inception. Jorge Young, a former member of the Federal Electricity Commission and a nuclear foe, said Laguna Verde has had six directors, “many of them fired for incompetence.”

However, Juan Eibenshutz, a senior nuclear official for the Federal Electricity Commission, said that most second- and third-level engineers have worked on the plant from the beginning.

Eibenshutz said the plant eventually will produce 3% of Mexico’s energy needs and will help diversify energy production. The waste, he said, will amount to 165 square meters over the estimated 30-year life of the plant. High-level waste will be stored in a cement pool at the plant for 10 years while Mexico figures out a permanent storage site.

In Palma Sola, a farm and cattle town 5 miles north of the plant, ranchers and housewives said they are most worried about the lack of an adequate emergency plan in the event of a nuclear accident.

The plan handed to them six months ago tells them to close doors and windows at home and not to rush out for their children at school--advice they call ridiculous. The contingency plan says that churches and schools will serve as refuges, but theirs are tropical buildings lacking even windowpanes.

They fear an accident, they say, because they know many of the workers at the plant.

“We had workers in the field,” said Jesus Sosa Melgarejo, secretary of the Palma Sola Cattlemen’s Assn. “When the plant came, these field hands went to work as laborers, and within three months, they were classified as skilled technicians and welders. It’s very doubtful.”