Posted on 01/13/2006 10:43:23 PM PST by NormsRevenge
RALEIGH, N.C. - With guaranteed federal loans and insurance protection promised to the first power companies to build a new wave of nuclear plants, the race is on for construction of up to 10 stations between Maryland and Mississippi.
At least two utilities plan to announce their intended sites within a few weeks. And some communities appear enthusiastic about luring the jobs and tax dollars the plants would bring. One South Carolina county looking to land a proposed Duke Energy Corp. plant has even offered a 50 percent break on property taxes.
But even with the nuclear power industry in an apparent resurgence in the fast-growing Southeast, one traditional participant in the debate over nuclear power has remained largely silent. Environmentalists, mostly mum so far about the potential dangers and pitfalls associated with this proposed round of reactors, say they're just taking a long view.
"The nuclear industry has tried to revitalize itself a number of times in the past," said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy in Atlanta. "Just because the political climate is favorable for the next couple of years, these things take 10 years to build and the climate may not be favorable then."
No nuclear reactor has been ordered for construction since 1973, and the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 killed interest in anything beyond completing plants then under construction. The United States now gets 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors.
In North Carolina, where Charlotte-based Duke Energy and Raleigh-based Progress Energy Inc. expect to announce their preferred sites for nuclear plants within weeks, environmentalists want to have a broader conversation before getting into a debate over new plants.
"We do not want to jump the gun and put out a bunch of incendiary comments," said Ivan Urlaub, executive director of the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, a nonprofit advocacy group. "We haven't done an honest evaluation of the role energy efficiency can play in our economic development and our energy future as a state. Until we do that we think it would be bad policy to approve any new nuclear or coal plants."
Urlaub's group is working with at least a half-dozen others in compiling data to support their argument — that environmental and economic prudence dictates using existing energy supplies more efficiently rather than spending to increase supplies. Their report will be used to fight plant licensing efforts in hearings before state regulators across the Southeast, environmentalists said.
"The utilities have to demonstrate that the facilities are needed. The first step is assessing demand and what are the opportunities to meet it," said Molly Diggins, executive director of the Sierra Club's North Carolina chapter.
The Energy Department forecasts that the consumption of nuclear energy will increase 5.3 percent between this year and 2015 — the earliest date when any of the proposed new plants might come on line — and by almost 11 percent by 2030.
Renewable energy, excluding hydroelectric, now produces less than half as much power as U.S. nuclear plants. But that source is predicted to grow by 29 percent in 2015 and 76 percent in 2030, says the Energy Information Administration, the government's energy statistical agency.
In an environment where coal, oil and gas prices remain unstable following recent spikes, nuclear supporters say the world needs a variety of power sources that don't contribute to global warming.
"In a carbon-constrained world ... nuclear plants have got to be in that mix," said Andy White, the president and chief executive officer of Wilmington-based GE Energy, the nuclear engineering and consulting business of General Electric Corp.
White expects lots of business over the next decade until the first plants open and beyond the middle of the century as old plants are replaced. After 2015, White said the nuclear industry will need to build two plants a year to replace the power lost as aging, first-generation reactors go offline, translating to 60 or more new reactors. The U.S. has about 100 existing plants.
Progress Energy, which has almost 1.4 million customers in North Carolina and South Carolina, expects to announce a preferred site in one of the two states this month, spokesman Keith Poston said. A site for a second nuclear plant in Florida, where the company has an additional 1.5 million customers, should be announced by April, he said.
Before clearing the way for construction, state regulators are expected to investigate whether the utility can squeeze more production out its existing plants.
"Certainly conservation and energy efficiency has a role to play, as does the continuing exploration of renewable resources," Poston said.
Progress added 69,000 homes and businesses in its three states over the past year, Poston said, and expects to add 600,000 new customers over the next decade as the population boom continues in its service area.
The options for the heavy-duty plants needed to supply all those customers come down to natural gas, oil, coal and nuclear, he said.
"We think that nuclear may end up as the best option for a variety of reasons, but we're always going to have a mix of fuels to protect customers from volatility in supply and price," Poston said.
Duke Energy's utility division, Duke Power, is preparing to add up to 60,000 customers a year in its two-state service area of North Carolina and South Carolina, spokeswoman Rita Sipe said.
Duke will select a site in one of the states soon, but even that milestone isn't expected to draw much response from environmental watchdogs, said Jim Warren, executive director of the anti-nuclear North Carolina Waste Awareness & Reduction Network.
"There's a lot of organizing going on. I don't think as much of it will be geared around when they make an announcement. Most of the opposition will come in a phased type of way," he said. "It will especially be geared toward the need for a full-blown public debate."
Southern Alliance for Clean Energy: http://www.cleanenergy.org/
American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy: http://www.aceee.org
Energy Information Administration: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/forecasting.html
Progress Energy: http://www.progress-energy.com/index.asp
Duke Energy: http://www.duke-energy.com/
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
General Electric: http://www.gepower.com/businesses/ge_nuclear/en/index.htm
Good news! This is just another sign of how the RATS are losing.
Every time I see the saffron colored haze settle in from the stacks of the huge coal powered plant 40 miles north of here, I think just how much I owe to the environmentalist who saved me from the partially completed nuclear power it replaced. (sarcasm off)
Tyson
Hearing the word "debate" in this context reminds me of a statement by the late Dr. Petr Beckmann, who said, "There is no nuclear 'debate' in this country, only a monologue."
How times have changed.
Actually you should save your thanks for Jimmy Carter.
The double digit inflation brought on by Carter’s economic policies, Carter’s disastrous foreign policy and the legacy of Carter’s long term political appointments crushed industrial growth and drove up the cost of nuclear power plants and stifled the growth of demand for electricity.
For some electric utilities state politics also prevented passing on the rising construction cost to consumers.
Actually having been in the industry from the early 80’s I did not see that the environmentalist were at all effective in stopping construction.
However, again Carter’s appointees to the EPA did manage to push up the cost of construction from the environmental end. I point to the entirely useless cooling towers which came to be associated with Nuclear Power (they were also forced on to Coal Fired Power).
That's right...coal ash is radioactive.
L
The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear
It completely crushed the enviro Kooks morality and economic arguments.
"Environmentalists, mostly mum so far about the potential dangers and pitfalls associated with this proposed round of reactors, say they're just taking a long view. "
Nah, they are just waiting for them to break ground, start the process of building it, than filing a lawsuit.
You missed Carter's most significant blow to nuclear power. He banned the reprocessing of spent fuel in the U. S. as part of his non-proliferation policy. Well, that certainly worked well, no new players in the arms race. It doesn't take a "nookier" engineer to know that if spent fuel is hot enough to be dangerous, it is a richer source of new fuel than any natural ore.
The French have reprocessed as a matter of course as long as they have used nuclear power. Instead of arguing about how deep hole to bury it in where, we need to be turning spent rods into new ones with a greatly reduced volume of waste to be sequestered.
The infamous Three Mile Island melt down just shows how poor our risk assessment is. The actual exposure to radioactivity for anyone outside the perimeter fence was less than that of a single medical X-ray. No one I have found bothered to collect statistics, but it is a certainty that more people were killed and injured in traffic accidents during the panicky evacuation of 200,000 deluded nuclear-phobes from the Harriburg area than even the gloomiest, least substantiated forecasts of radiation linked cancer deaths. Actually, if any of those ecavacuees fled to stay with uncle Ed in Denver, they exposed themselves to twice as much radiation increase than they would have received camping out beside the perimeter fence.
The anti-nuke crowd also state that chernobyl is a reason why we shouldn't use nuclear power. Never mind that soviet style nuke reactors is not the safest ones in the world.
One of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits was the "Pepsi Syndrome" when a pepsi was spilled onto the keyboard at a nuclear power plant. The brought Jimmuh in to take care of it.
From what I know about Jimmy Carter, he knew nothing about nooky, and was definitely not a nooky engineer. :-)
Even the Soviet designs are decent.If the operators at Chernobyl had not been ordered to do unsafe procedures by the political hack in charge-that whole disaster would never have happened.
Not even when the dumbest bastard ever to occupy the Whitehouse was interviewed by Playboy?
Yeah Jimmie was/is every bit the idiot that skit made him out to be. His decisions about nuclear power prove he was just as a poor nuclear engineer as he was a President.
Yes your right it was a stupid decision on Carter’s part, a pointless gesture to nuclear wannabees n the world. “We’ll sell you nuclear power, but don’t you reprocess the spent fuel.”
Yes Jimmy that will work. Everywhere except India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea (we didn’t sell to them but I believe they had the same restrictions), probably Turkey and others.
While I don’t believe that the ban on reprocessing has really been a burden on Nuclear Power, the ban with the added failure to the government to build a waste depository for spent fuel has been a great financial burden.
Many if not most plants have had to build onsite storage facilities. Those that haven’t will have to in the future.
France had little choice but to go into nuclear in a big way. France has no native energy resources to speak of.
All of France’s fossil fuels are imported as is her Uranium. Her Phoenix breeder reactor program set up in the early 70’s was one of France’s few success stories. With 80% (last I heard) of her electric generation coming from nuclear power France is a world leader in nuclear power
Nuclear is a major profit center for France as well. France is the “Go To” country for fuel reprocessing and fuel fabrication for much of the world.
I don’t like France but I have to respect their nuclear know how, which is another reason to hate Jimmy Carter. He did nothing during the Three Mile Island to dispel the irrational fear that crippled Nuclear power in this country for decades. The after effects are just now beginning to dissipate.
I was a concrete worker on one of the, maybe THE last plants built, Shearon Harris, New Hill NC. Appropriate NC should be on the leading edge of a new and long overdue push to build. As it was Shearon Harris was scaled back from four reactors to two.
The spent fuel storage onsite was designed to safely house all the fuel projected to be used over the life span of the facility in water filled containment. The nuclear waste "problem" is waved like a red flag by the nuclear opponents. My point is that we are looking at the problem from the wrong end of the telescope when we look only at the option of finding a deep enough hole to put the stuff away in for 100,000 years+.
I am reminded of a consultant called in by a battery company which had been cited by EPA for dumping cadmium waste in a local river. He looked at samples of silt downstream and told them instead of looking at it as a hazmat disposal problem they should mine it! Way better concentrations of free cadmium than found in any natural ore.
I am convinced there is a core group of "environmentalists" who use their issues in pursuit of a rebulatorily based command and control economy. If such an economy cannot be sold based on discredited economic theory, scaring the hell out of the electorate will do. ANWR? We gonna kill all the caribou (absurd). Nuclear? The waste will crawl out of storage and our great grandchildren will have three eyes and gills.
I share your general opinion of the French, but they do nuclear right. They settle on a limited number of repeated designs, if less than cutting edge, at least safe and reliable. We, both from engineering and regulatory sides, were re-inventing the wheel every time we built a plant. The French give regular tours of nuclear facilities as part of the school curriculum and for the general public. The result is that their people do not reflexively run screaming into the night as soon as the word "nuclear" is mentioned.
Granted, being utterly destitute of domestic energy options, the French had little choice. That we have had the luxury of being able to afford the environmental vapors that have had too much limiting influence on our domestic policy does not mean that is how we should plan our future.
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