Bush Touch Is a Big Boost to Nuclear Industry
It has been 28 years since a company last ordered and built a nuclear power plant in the United States, but the nuclear industry has been quietly laying the groundwork for new growth. Its engineers have designed new reactors that they say are safer and cheaper to build. Regulators have streamlined a costly licensing process that often lasted beyond a decade.
Now President Bush is proposing what could be the final elements needed to rejuvenate the long-stagnant industry--as well as the anti-nuclear movement that was a feature of the political landscape in the 1970s and 1980s.
Bush on Thursday called for speeding up the permitting needed to build new plants and to extend the life of existing reactors. He proposed reviving studies of a controversial technology that might reduce the nation’s stockpile of radioactive waste. And he encouraged Congress to extend existing liability protections for the industry in the case of nuclear accidents. The protections expire in 2002.
Those proposals could give a boost to the early-stage plans for new plants being drawn up at several companies. Four utilities have started talks recently with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about submitting applications for new plants, the first such talks in 20 years. “The president’s proposal moves all this along,” said Don Kirchoffner, spokesman for Exelon Corp., a Chicago-based utility that runs 17 nuclear plants and aims to build more. “There’s a distinct possibility that you’ll see new construction within five years.”
The proposals can “provide greater certainty for power producers as they consider new nuclear power plant construction,” said Joe F. Colvin, president of the Nuclear But Bush may also be sparking the revival of the anti-nuclear movement. Nuclear power opponents fear that the president will help the industry cut costs by cutting safety features. Even before Bush asked for a faster permitting process, they say, regulators had already accelerated the licensing process by reducing opportunities for the public to challenge plant permits on safety and environmental grounds.
“What’s going on amounts to deregulation of the most dangerous technology on Earth,” said industry critic Daniel Hirsch, president of the Los Angeles-based Committee to Bridge the Gap. Another industry opponent, the Nuclear Information Resource Service, plans an “action camp” outside an Illinois plant in August to “refocus and revitalize the opposition to nuclear power.”
Today the nation’s 103 nuclear plants account for about 20% of electricity generation. But since 1973, no company has ordered a nuclear plant that it eventually completed. High construction costs, as well as public protest after the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island reactor in Harrisburg, Pa., stopped the industry’s expansion. That incident is considered the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, causing 140,000 to flee the area in fear of a meltdown.
In recent years, however, the cost of natural gas and other energy sources has climbed, while the cost of uranium--the fuel for nuclear plants--has fallen. At the same time, the NRC has changed its permitting process. Companies can ask for construction and operation permits at one time, where before there were separate sets of hearings that often lasted for years and ran up costs.
Moreover, the agency has pre-approved three new designs for power plants. Companies that choose one do not have to go through a separate design review.
Companies can also ask the agency to pre-approve the site for a nuclear plant well before they know what type of plant they intend to build. It is widely believed that companies will seek to build new plants at the site of existing reactors, an effort to minimize costs and public protest. The president’s report says that many U.S. nuclear sites were designed to host four to six reactors, but most operate only two or three.
The four companies that have talked with the NRC about possible new plants are Exelon, Dominion Resources Inc., Southern Co. and Entergy Corp., said Jerry Wilson, an NRC official.
Beyond changes that the NRC has already adopted, Bush has made several proposals that might encourage new plants.
Bush’s plan asks Congress to extend the Price-Anderson Act, which spreads the cost of a nuclear accident to the industry as a whole and requires Congress to consider using taxpayer money to cover all damage claims above $9.5 billion. The industry says that the act, which expires in 2002, enables plant owners to get private insurance and ensures that the public will be compensated in the case of an accident.
But industry opponents say the act should not be renewed. “On the one hand, they say that nuclear power is safe, but on the other hand they want taxpayers to pick up the tab if there’s an accident,” said Anna Aurilio, legislative director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the national lobbying office for the California Public Interest Research Group (CalPIRG). “It doesn’t make any sense.”
The administration plan highlights one much-touted new technology, called a “pebble-bed” reactor, and says its design has “inherent safety features.” Exelon is hoping to build a pebble-bed reactor in the United States and has invested nearly $8 million to help another company build one in South Africa. Depending on its success there, the company says it could have a similar plant operating in the United States by 2006.
Exelon says pebble-bed plants are small and can be built quickly and inexpensively. The reactors contain more than 300,000 “pebbles” of enriched uranium oxide fuel, which are covered with graphite to form a sphere the size of a tennis ball. Supporters say the reactors are inherently safe because the fuel never reaches the temperature at which a meltdown could occur. The plants are cooled with helium, which supporters say is less corrosive than the water used in traditional plants.
But industry opponents have attacked the pebble-bed design because it does not include the spherical containment dome, a hallmark of many existing plants, which aims to trap escaping radioactive material in case of an accident. Industry officials say the design contains other containment features. The NRC has not yet approved a pebble-bed design.
The president’s plan is silent on how to resolve the two-decade-old debate about whether to build a repository for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But the plan does call for reexamining a technology called reprocessing, which it says might help with the waste problem.
Reprocessing is a set of methods for extracting plutonium and other material from spent nuclear fuel that can be used again in nuclear plants. After reprocessing, the spent fuel is slightly smaller in volume and remains toxic for fewer years, several people in the industry said.
Reprocessing is a part of the nuclear industry in Japan, France and Britain, but President Carter ordered it halted in the United States in 1977 because of fears that it would create a market in plutonium, which might supply nuclear weapon programs abroad.
Critics said those arms control concerns are even more valid today. They also complained that reprocessing turns solid nuclear waste into a liquid, which is harder to control. “It’s always been a kind of Xanadu, but it’s nuclear alchemy,” said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a longtime industry critic. He said the Department of Energy estimated in 1999 that it would cost $280 billion to develop the technology.
The Bush plan makes several proposals aimed at boosting production from existing power plants.
It encourages the NRC to relicense existing plants that meet safety standards. Today’s plants are operating under 40-year licenses, and many if not all operators are seeking 20-year renewals well before the old licenses expire.
Michael Wallace, a consultant and former nuclear utility official, said the administration had helped the industry merely by making it safe to talk again about boosting capacity. “It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that you never heard the previous president utter the word ‘nuclear’ when he talked about electricity generation,” said Wallace, of the Barrington Energy Partners, a consultant firm.
But Markey said Bush’s plan won’t revive an industry that long ago scared away Wall Street investors. “It’s doomed. They can pass a program of benefits to put nuclear power on artificial respiration, but it will never be a vibrant, growing industry again. They can prop up the corpse, but they can’t reanimate it.”
