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Friday, August 25, 2006
Nuclear power makes sense on all levels
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Drive through a pine thicket in rural Burke County and two markings suddenly appear, spray-painted in bright surveyor’s-tape green, a few feet apart. If all goes well, this spot of ground on 3,150 acres near Augusta will within a decade be the epicenter of a third nuclear reactor, a key element in America’s drive for energy independence.
Nearby will be a fourth — if the numbers work and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves the application by Southern Co.’s nuclear power subsidiary, Southern Nuclear Operating Co., to construct two reactors a short distance from the two that have operated safely at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro for almost 20 years.
To jump-start the industry, which has been skittish for decades because of concern about regulatory obstacles and the willingness of the investment community to take risks on nuclear energy, especially when natural gas appeared to be readily available and cheap, Congress offered incentives. The first two nuclear plants constructed will be eligible for generous tax credits, loan guarantees and insurance protection against delays caused by litigation or the licensing process. The next four would qualify for lesser subsidies.
“There’s a reason there are 25 nuclear applications on the table today when there were six a year ago,” said U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) during a visit to this newspaper Wednesday. “And it is that you can do things by reducing the regulatory burden” and by offering incentives that attract private capital. “There’s no emissions, no global warming, no side effects to it, it’s equally safe and per kilowatt hour is as cheap or cheaper” than alternatives, so “capital will flow there once we reduce the regulatory burden.”
Part of the skittishness, too, is that Vogtle was under construction when the partial meltdown occurred at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979. As a result of shutdowns, design changes prompted by new regulations and other delays, construction stretched to some 14 years and the costs ballooned to $8.87 billion. Its projected cost before Three Mile Island was $600 million. The two units at Plant Hatch near Baxley came on line in 1975 and 1979 and cost about $1 billion.
In the decades since Three Mile Island, design and technology have changed. As one example, the partial meltdown there occurred because several water coolant pumps failed, causing the reactor to overheat. Now, gravity drops the cooling water, replacing the pumping system that failed at Three Mile Island.
Design and construction now are much more standardized, and while as many as 13,000 construction workers were employed in building Vogtle, now about 30-40 percent of the proposed new facilities would be built in modules off site and shipped in, reducing the on-site work force to 1,500 to 2,000.
Safety, though, has not been a question for some time. The issue has been permanent disposal of spent fuel, which is now stored underwater on site at Vogtle. The obvious site is Yucca Mountain in Nevada, where it could be stored a thousand feet below ground. The site has been studied since 1978, and because of objections by environmentalists and politicians, it’s not scheduled to begin accepting spent fuel from the 104 operating nuclear plants until 2017.
“It’s the most studied piece of real estate known to man,” says Lou Long, technical support vice president of Southern Nuclear in Birmingham. Utilities’ customers have paid $20 billion — $90 million by Georgia Power customers alone — to develop Yucca Mountain for storage, $14 billion of which has been spent on studies.
Clearly the nation does need to move promptly to get back into the nuclear power business in a major way. In France, 78.1 percent of electricity comes from nuclear. It’s cheap, clean, safe and efficient. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Belgium gets 55.1 percent, Japan 29.3 and the United States 19.9. About three-fourths of this nation’s emission-free power generation comes from nuclear.
Georgia Power adds 40,000 customers per year, and that’s about half the new customers coming online in Georgia yearly. The two 1,200-megawatt reactors at Vogtle alone generate about 11 percent of its electric-power needs.
The nation has been timid too long. Company officials have made no decision yet on whether to add the two reactors at Vogtle. The correct decision, for Georgia and for the nation, is yes. Build.
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