Utilities eye revival of nuclear production

TENNESSEE - Nearly 30 years after the Tennessee Valley Authority began building America's last new nuclear reactor, TVA and other Southern utilities again are preparing construction plans for more nuclear plants.

"Nuclear power plants are operating with more reliability, safety and economy than ever before," said Adrian Heymer, senior director for new plant deployment at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry-backed trade group in Washington, D.C. "These new plants will be designed to operate even easier and simpler to provide a clean source of power to meet the growing demand for electricity."

Most of the sites being considered for the next generation of nuclear plants are in the South, where hot weather is pushing up power demand and the political climate is more favorable to nuclear power. Among the 15 sites where utilities are preparing preliminary plans for new nuclear units, 13 are in the South.

"The South is being targeted for all of these nuclear plants, and I'm afraid we may also end up with all of the nuclear wastes," said Stephen Smith, executive director of the antinuclear Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Last week, the Southern Co. met with federal regulators to discuss plans for adding two reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Southern, which owns 45.7 percent of Plant Vogtle, plans to apply for an early site permit by 2008 under a partnership that could include Dalton, Ga., Southern Nuclear Operating Co. spokeswoman Carrie Phillips said.

Southern also is part of a consortium of utilities and engineering firms known as NuStart Energy Development LLC, which is preparing an application for two new reactors at TVA's Bellefonte nuclear site in Hollywood, Ala.

NuStart plans to ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by October 2007 to allow TVA to build a Westinghouse AP-1000 plant with two 1,100-megawatt reactors.

If the request is approved, TVA could begin construction on Bellefonte by 2010 and electricity production could be added as soon as 2015, TVA spokesman John Moulton said.

"No decisions have been made yet to build these new reactors or how and who would fund their construction," Mr. Moulton said. "But we are pursuing this application to give us the option of adding more nuclear power should be we decide to do so in the future."

Because of the decade or more it takes to plan, design and build a nuclear plant, many utilities are pursuing preliminary plans to get more nuclear generation by 2015 to 2025, officials said. Mr. Heymer said he expects a half dozen nuclear reactors to be added by 2015 and at least 20 more units to be online by 2020. In the next 15 years, electricity demand is projected to grow by 30 percent in the Southeast, according to the North American Electric Reliability Council.

TVA activated the last new nuclear reactor in the United States at Watts Bar near Spring City, Tenn., in 1996. The Unit 1 reactor took more than two decades to build and ended up with a price tag of more than $6 billion for construction and financing.

The excessive cost of nuclear reactors - Watts Bar was originally forecast at only one-tenth its final cost - forced TVA and other utilities to scrap future nuclear plant construction in the 1980s and 1990s.

To encourage the building of new plants, Congress has approved legislation to provide up to $1 billion in tax credits, $500 million in insurance against regulatory-caused construction delays and tens of millions of dollars more of loan guarantees for the first six new reactors built in the 21 st century.

"These utilities are all rushing to get literally hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies," Dr. Smith said. "But unfortunately, we still don't have a place to permanently store the radioactive wastes that these plants will generate."