Reactors have to be part of energy plan

A constant theme of the campaign of 2008 — from the race for president to the state’s Public Service Commission — involves re-embracing nuclear power as a clean and available source of energy.

Unfortunately, the call among candidates for more nuclear power has often been as shallow as the cry to “drill, baby, drill.” Nuclear does need to be part of the nation’s energy-production capacity, particularly given the role of fossil fuels in climate change. But nuclear power still faces long-term issues about cost and safety that have not been addressed or even acknowledged.

Three decades after the last nuclear power plant was commissioned in the United States, 21 companies have indicated they want to build 34 new reactors. In Georgia, workers have already begun clearing old buildings near Georgia Power’s two Plant Vogtle reactors so two new units can be constructed.

Other steps in a nuclear revival won’t be so simple. For example, as Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Dale Klein pointed out last week in Atlanta, the agency needs a new generation of scientists, engineers and skilled workers to ensure the safety and security of the nation’s nuclear generators. The NRC has already awarded $20 million to 60 universities for scholarships and faculty recruitment and retention to ramp up for a decade or more of new nuclear development.

While many older Americans remember the 1979 reactor incident at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant and the explosion at Ukraine’s Chernobyl plant in 1986, nuclear power didn’t fall out of favor in the U.S. because of safety issues alone. Construction of nuclear plants ceased because they were prohibitively expensive to build and ratepayers eventually balked at the higher bills they were forced to pay.

Nuclear plants remain much more expensive to build than coal-fired or natural-gas plants — they take much more concrete and steel and are much more complex, as well. However, costs have been mitigated in recent years in part because designs have been standardized. Most proposed new plants are planned on existing sites, meaning that there will be no cost for land.

Moreover, Congress has pushed the nuclear revival by providing almost $20 billion in loan guarantees and operating subsidies similar to what’s available for companies investing in solar and wind power.

The NRC is also trying to lower costs by streamlining its application and approval process. In the past, that process often took as long as a decade. Under existing rules, the NRC has allocated a 30-month window to review an application followed by 12 months for public hearings. But Klein, the NRC chairman, believes that once the first two or three licenses have been granted, the pace could be accelerated. As always, however, the primary goal must be safety, not speed.

The industry also has no solution to its most daunting safety and security problem, the permanent storage of spent nuclear fuel. The Energy Department’s proposed Yucca Mountain waste repository is a decade-plus behind schedule. DOE only this year filed its license application with the NRC, which is not expected to reach a decision on the safety and suitability of the site until 2011 at the earliest. Meanwhile, spent fuel is kept on plant sites, many of which are approaching 30 years of age. As an interim solution, the industry wants an above-ground centralized storage site — probably in a desert facility — until underground storage like that planned for Yucca Mountain is available.

That would not come cheaply or quickly, and anti-nuclear groups raise a valid point in questioning whether the money might be more efficiently invested in alternative energy and conservation. Even with more standardized construction and joint ventures to share the cost of creating reactor components, the cost of nuclear-power capacity is about $8,000 a kilowatt compared with about half that for coal, according to a recent Florida Power & Light estimate.

Investments in conservation and alternative sources should be given priority, particularly if they are cost-competitive, but inevitably, additional sources of energy are going to be needed. The threat of global warming demands that safe and affordable nuclear power helps meet that need.

— Mike King, for the editorial board (mking@ajc.com).