Stoked by new federal subsidies and worries over global warming, the nuclear power industry is beginning to glowbrightly once again.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission received seven applications for new power plants last year and is expecting a dozen more by the end of December. Spokesman Scott Burnell said the applications represent 22 reactors, because more than one is proposed for several of the sites.
“Nobody had started the applications process for 30 years until last year,” Burnell said.
Even in California, where state law bars new plants from being constructed until a permanent repository opens to hold the highly radioactive spent fuel, business is picking up.
Westinghouse Electric Co., a Pittsburgh-based Toshiba Group Co. subsidiary, announced this month that it is opening a San Jose office “to support the growth of its boiling water reactor nuclear power business.”
Some companies are even beginning to plan ways around the state’s 1976 moratorium, which has effectively capped the number of operating reactors at four — two at Diablo Canyon and two at San Onofre in San Diego County.
Former labor union leader John Hutson is head of the fledgling Fresno Nuclear Energy Group that wants to build a 1,600-megawatt power reactor on 80 acres of city land, using ef fluent from a wastewater treatment plant for cooling.
“This is not Wall Street businessmen,” Hutson said. “These are farmers. They are salt-of-the- earth guys who know how to get things done.”
Hutson said his idea is to avoid the state moratorium by not producing any waste. Used fuel would be shipped to France for reprocessing, rather than encased in steel and concrete “dry casks” and stored on site until a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is opened. Whether that occurs remains to be seen; environmentalists and Nevada legislators fiercely oppose any waste going to Yucca Mountain.
Pie in the sky?
Is the return of nuclear power being overstated? Maybe. But 30 years ago when Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant sustained the worst nuclear accident in U. S. history, nuclear power looked dead. With a largely clean safety record since then, nuclear power is getting mentioned with wind and solar generation as a solution to the nation’s need for new energy.
The reason is global warming. Most of the power produced in the country comes from plants fueled by coal or natural gas. Coal, when burned, gives off carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming, but even natural gas is not pollution free.
Nuclear plants release virtually no earth-warming emissions. That fact has turned foe into friend.
Patrick Moore was a cofounder of anti-nuclear Greenpeace. Now Moore is an advocate paid by the nuclear industry.
“Burning fossil fuels for electricity accounts for 9.5 billion tons of global carbon dioxide emissions while nuclear emits next to nothing,” he said in a recent op-ed article in The Sacramento Bee.
Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which develops policies to support the industry, said billions of dollars in plant subsidies included by Congress in a 2005 energy bill also are helping power the industry’s revival.
He said the subsidies are needed because nuclear plants are so expensive to build—on the order of $5 billion apiece. The reason many of the new plants are being proposed for sites where plants already are in operation is that infrastructure is in place and local communities have come to accept the safety of the country’s 104 commercial reactors, he said.
“Admittedly, nuclear plants have higher capital costs,” Kerekes said. “But they also have stable production costs — about a third of that from gas-fired production.”
Nuclear critics maintain that federal taxpayers are being zapped, and that the law’s inclusion of $13 billion in subsidies and tax breaks will compound the intractable problem of what to do with all the waste. Some think the cost to taxpayers will be far higher.
“More taxpayer handouts to the nuclear industry are not part of a sensible and responsible energy plan,” complained Public Citizen, a national consumer advocacy organization.
Two San Luis Obispo-based organizations, the Mothers for Peace and the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, have opposed nuclear power because of the waste-storage problem and other dangers associated with nuclear plants.
With the emergence of the global warming debate, however, other environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council have said nuclear power should be part of the discussion as long as it competes fairly. Long-standing nuclear critics such as Sen. Barbara Boxer, the Bay Area Democrat who heads the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, also grudgingly have acknowledged that there may be a role for nuclear power in the fight against global warming.
The race has begun
According to the NRC, the seven new license applications call for 11 new plants in Texas, South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland. Burnell said the agency has streamlined its procedures and ramped up staffing to prepare for the onslaught.
“We have the people and the resources we need,” Burnell said. The first of the new plants could be licensed as soon as 2011, he said.
At a December hearing of the California Senate’s energy committee, state Energy Commission Vice Chairman James
D. Boyd made clear that this would be one race that the state sits out.
Boyd said that with the waste problems unsolved and popular opinion running 54-37 against more plants, a ground-breaking in California is many years away.
“The likelihood of a new nuclear power plant being built in California within the next decade is low,” he said.
