Flash back 30 years and review the mood about nuclear power. Hollywood had just come out with its prescient anti-nuke film “The China Syndrome” with such A-list actors as Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas. Just a few months later, a real meltdown did occur at the Three Mile Island commercial plant in Pennsylvania.
Here in Virginia, yours truly was a reporter at The Virginian-Pilot investigating Vepco’s Surry Nuclear Station, which resulted in a front page article with two full inside pages of text. At the time, Vepco’s badly managed nuclear program had earned the highest level of federal safety fines ever.
So, it was an eerie sense of deja vu that I was being escorted around at Dominion’s (formerly Vepco’s) North Anna nuclear station for an article I was researching in Style Weekly. Dominion officials seemed willing to let a photographer and I see just about everything. Underlying the post 9/11 trauma, from time to time tough-looking men in black flak jackets and evil looking assault rifles sauntered about.
Dominion is considering adding a third unit at North Anna. It needs about 4,600 extra megawatts of power over the next decade or so, thanks in part to the extra heavy loads that the ordinary household demands for our cell phones, desktops, big screen televisions, Wii games, iPods, among other devices. Another issue is that big search engine firms such as Google plan huge server farms in Northern Virginia which is a switching center for half of the Internet traffic in the U.S. The server farms are huge electron hogs.
Another reason is that Its North Anna and Surry units are 1970s vintage, like most of the 104 operating reactors in the U.S. Utilities are scrambling to upgrade aging units while some 17 power companies, including Dominion, are planning 21 new units with newly-designed reactors that may reflect three decades worth of technical improvements. Dominion has applied for a license for North Anna Unit Three and is considering bids from six reactor builders with a winner expected by this spring.
One plus is that as environmentalists concerned about greenhouse gases decry new coal-fired
generation, nukes seem to be getting a clean bill of health globally. Unlike coal, the nukes don’t emit much in the the way of carbon dioxide and that has changed the minds of some ecologists around the world, according to a piece in The Washington Post.
True, experts among nuclear critics point out that nuke’s still have a lot of unsolved issues, such as where to permanently dispose of the extremely toxic waste fuel that is now kept on plant sites. And while there hasn’t been a Chernobyl-style accident since 1986, there have been some near misses.
A notable one had its roots in 2001 when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided to delay inspections of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio. In March 2002, an inspection revealed that boric acid had almost eaten through the 6.5 inch thick pressure vessel enclosing the 32-year-old reactor owned by FirstEnergy of Akron.
Had inspections been delayed by another five to 12 months, the vessel would have been completely breached, causing a loss of coolant accident similar to Three Mile Island. Fixing it took two years and $600 million. The NRC rated the incident as one of 10 that could have resulted in a TMI-style disaster.
For Dominion, which has greatly cleaned up its nuclear program since the Vepco days, the biggest hurdle is cost. Utility officials won’t give a price estimate for Unit Three but experts believe it might be about $8 billion.
That’s a much bigger price tag than Dominion’s highly controversial $1.5 billion Wise County coal-fired plant although it will generate 585 megawatts or about half the power.
Given the complexity and lingering potential for a radioactive disaster, few investment banks are willing to fund multi-billion dollar nuclear stations without federal loan guarantees. Congress did grant $18.5 billion for such guarantees in 2005 but that’s only enough for about four new nukes nationwide. But 17 electric utilities have applied for the guarantees to build 21 new reactors at a cost totaling $188 billion, or many times what Congress originally provided for.
Dominion had been considering a reactor design by GE Hitachi called an ESBWR, but talks broke down early this year. Dominion opened up bidding from six reactor makers, including the firm Areva, which is owned by the French government and has a big Virginia footprint in Lynchburg and Newport News. But the delay meant that Dominion was not included in the first four reactors that were picked in May from across the country to get the federal loan guarantees. That’s a major setback.
Critics have long noted that commercial nuclear power has a lot of hidden costs and trip wires. The loan guarantee issue is just one of them. Much of the development cost of developing nukes has been hidden in Defense Department budgets that funded early reactors in Chicago and at arms plants such as Hanford and Savannah River. Many of today’s reactor designs still are pretty much based on Navy submarine and aircraft carrier reactors originally developed when the testy Adm Hyman Rickover was in charge. And commercial nukes could never have gone forward back in the 1950s and 60s without the Price Anderson Act which capped liabilities for utilities that had an accident at $560 million.
Gov. Time Kaine has noted that nuclear power could play a key role in the state’s energy future. Curiously, GOPers like Bob McDonnell would rather play their Sarah Palin card of “Drill Here, Drill Now,” regarding offshore oil development when nukes seem a much surer bet since they’ve been int he state since the early 1970s while offshore oil is still highly speculative.
True, nukes have a lot of dangers. But if the concerns of global warming are as serious as so many believe, they do deserve another look.
Peter Galuszka