If you’re tracking the nuclear power revival in America, last
Tuesday, September 25, was a milestone. For the first time since
1973, a new application for building a reactor was placed before
the federal government.
The applicant was NRG Energy, Inc., an 18-year-old “merchant”
corporation headquartered in New Jersey’s Princeton Corridor. A
one-story steel-and-glass structure in the Carnegie Industrial
Park, NRG has the look of a West Coast firm. The 300-or-so
employees work in one vast room sectioned by neat rows of parallel
workstations. The place could be a fine arts classroom, with
employees casually strolling past each other’s computer screens and
kibitzing over their work. “This place has a collegial atmosphere,”
says Lori Neuman, communications manager at NRG. “It’s very
conductive to getting things done.”
David Crane, the 45-year-old CEO, is a cultured Princeton
graduate who looks like he would be at home on the squash courts.
“We’re the new breed of energy company,” he says. “We’re not a
utility, we don’t sell to retail companies, we just generate
energy. We’ve got everything in our portfolio — base load,
intermediate, peaking and cogeneration. We use oil, coal, gas and
nuclear. We’re looking at windmills and even exploring an algae
system that recycles carbon dioxide into a renewable fuel. We’re
going to need all these things to meet the future demand in this
country.”
The proposal submitted Tuesday is to build two new reactors with
a total capacity of 2,700 megawatts at the South Texas Project site
in Matagorda County, where two nuclear units have already operated
for 25 years. The size of the reactors is unprecedented — the
biggest American plants generally produce about 1,200 MW.
“This is a historical event,” said Senator Pete Domenici of New
Mexico, long the Senate’s strongest supporter of nuclear.
“Consumers around the world are benefiting from clean nuclear
power. Finally our nation is on the verge of taking greater
advantage of this technology. I hope it is the first of many.”
The statement has its irony. Nuclear technology, of course, was
invented in this country. In the 1980s we gave it up for fear of
accidents, which caused endless regulatory delays. One common
argument among nuclear opponents at the time was that nuclear
energy was only an illegitimate offspring of nuclear bomb
technology cooked up by scientists who felt guilty about building
the atomic bomb. Over the last two decades, Japan (along with
France) has become the world’s technological leader. Toshiba, which
enhanced its nuclear technology by buying Westinghouse, will build
NRG’s new reactors. The vessel heads will be manufactured by Japan
Steel Works, the only forge in the world now capable of casting
these huge structures. America is playing catch-up on our own
technology.
NRG’s choice of Texas is also a bit of a surprise. For years,
industry analysts have predicted the first new reactors would be
built in the South, where the Progressive tradition continues of
regulating utilities while guaranteeing them a return on their
investment. The argument was that nuclear would need this
regulatory protection in order to attract money from Wall Street.
In Texas, NRG will be entering a freewheeling deregulated market
where the South Texas Project will have to stand and fall on its
own. “We’re confident these projects can be built on schedule and
on budget,” says Crane. “With natural gas prices rising and coal
being pressured to reduce its carbon emissions, nuclear is going to
be competitive.”
Nuclear power has gone through an extraordinary renaissance over
the past decade after the abyss of Three Mile Island. In 1997 the
Clinton Administration’s Department of Energy zeroed out nuclear
research for the first time since World War II. The Federal Energy
Information Administration confidently predicted that existing
plants would phase out over the next three decades. That same year,
however, Entergy Corp. of Jackson, Mississippi, became the first
merchant energy company to purchase one of the supposed white
elephants from a utility company. Exelon, spun out of Commonwealth
Edison of Chicago, and several merchant companies from the South
(Dominion Resources, Constellation Energy, Southern, and Florida
Power and Light) followed suit. Soon these new owners — heavily
staffed with veterans from the nuclear Navy — were revitalizing
the industry.
The results have been stunning. Whereas power plants
traditionally ran at a “capacity factor” of 60 percent — meaning
they are up and running 60 percent of the time — the nation’s 104
reactors now run at a previously unimaginable capacity of 90
percent. (In South Korea, where nuclear provides half the
electricity, the figure is 95 percent.) The average nuclear plant
now runs uninterrupted for nearly two years before shutting down
for refueling. Safety improvements have been spectacular. While
there were 26 shutdowns of more than a year for safety reasons from
1987 to 1997 and 21 in the decade before, there has only been one
over the past decade.
“The utility companies didn’t really understand what kind of
resource they had,” says Gary Taylor, president of Entergy, which
now owns eleven reactors and operates one other for Nebraska Public
Power. “These plants had far more potential than they realized.”
Almost half the reactors in the country have now successfully
applied for twenty-year extensions on their original operating
licenses and many more are standing in line. Meanwhile, reactors
are making money hand-over-fist. Connecticut Attorney General
Richard Blumenthal has become so exercised at the success of
Dominion’s Millstone 2 and 3 that he has proposed a windfall
profits tax on reactors.
And so the question becomes, will the anti-nuclear forces —
Greenpeace, Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, Natural
Resources Defense Council and so forth — be able to mount one
last-ditch campaign against the nuclear revival?
While continuing to play brazenly on public fears (NRDC’s latest
position paper has the word “Radioactive” emblazoned across the
top), environmental groups have also become more circumspect in
their arguments. Rather than conjuring up “silent bombs” and
nuclear holocausts, they now make the following arguments:
1. Nuclear is too expensive. Investors will never go for it.
2. The money would be much better invested in conservation and
solar energy.
3. Nuclear power is not carbon-free. The mining, processing and
transportation of uranium consume vast amounts of energy supplied
by fossil fuels.
Nuclear reactors are indeed expensive to construct. NRG is
projecting $3 to $5 billion with cost overruns likely. But coal
plants currently cost $1 billion and that’s without the least
effort at controlling carbon emissions. If “carbon sequestration”
— essentially digging a hole a few miles deep and pumping the
exhaust into it — becomes a reality, coal plants will become
equally if not more expensive. (The technology is completely
unproven anyway.) In any case, when did environmental groups become
so frugal about protecting the environment?
Energy conservation, on the other hand, has great potential that
is just being fathomed. Last May, Progress Energy of North Carolina
announced it would delay the projected opening of two proposed
reactors from 2016 to 2018 because of more success than anticipated
in conservation efforts. Yet even the best conservation scenarios
only stabilize current consumption. (California has been
able to accomplish this.) That still leaves us producing for 50
percent of our electricity with coal — a billion tons a year that
put three billions tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. That’s 40
percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases and 20 percent of the
world’s. “When it comes to providing our baseload electricity, the
only choice is between coal and nuclear,” says David Crane, of NRG.
“You simply can’t be serious about global warming and against
nuclear power.”
Finally, the argument that nuclear is not completely carbon-free
is puerile. Nothing is completely carbon-free, not windmills, not
solar collectors, not even conservation devices. All involve
capital investment that consumes energy. If the uranium enrichment
plant in Portsmouth, Ohio, consumes the output of two large,
polluting coal plants (a favorite environmental citation), then the
solution is to replace those coal plants with nuclear reactors.
NRG’s courageous proposal is the opening gong for what should be
the most passionate debate of the rest of the decade — can nuclear
power prevent global warming? As Al Gore would say, the fate of the
planet may depend on it.
