Nuclear power provides a fifth of America's electricity. It provides close to all of the power in France and Japan. China, now one of the most rapidly developing nations, has announced plans to build nuclear plants in its country at a pace of nearly one every two years for the next two decades.
TOLEDO, Ohio — Nuclear power provides a fifth of America's electricity. It provides close to all of the power in France and Japan. China, now one of the most rapidly developing nations, has announced plans to build nuclear plants in its country at a pace of nearly one every two years for the next two decades.
But almost since the dawn of the nuclear age began with former President Dwight Eisenhower's famous "Atoms for Peace" speech on Dec. 8, 1953, nuclear power has been an emotional issue in the United States.
Why? Hasn't it established itself as a safe, clean, and affordable form of energy? Yes and no.
President Bush is sold on it. In his State of the Union address, he said that "safe, clean nuclear power" remains a cornerstone of his national energy policy.
The remark drew a swift response.
Joe F. Colvin, Nuclear Energy Institute president and chief executive officer, said that nuclear is poised to help the United States meet a demand for electricity that is expected to rise 45 percent by 2025. The industry in recent years has been touting nuclear power as an emissions-free technology that deserves another look in light of efforts to address global warming.
But Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said there is nothing safe or clean about nuclear power. While nuclear plants do not emit greenhouse gases that cause global warming, they leave behind tons of radioactive waste for future generations, he said.
The industry comes off as euphoric in its anticipation of the next generation of reactors. The new breed has been licensed elsewhere but is still under review in the United States. Advanced reactors are to have "cookie-cutter" designs for engineering consistency, someday making today's hodgepodge fleet of 103 plant designs a thing of the past.
But engineering aside, the nuclear industry has other issues: Money.
No new plants have been authorized for construction since the Three Mile Island Unit 2 partial meltdown near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission points out, though, that the stoppage wasn't ostensibly because of Three Mile Island. Wall Street pulled the plug on nuclear power before Three Mile Island because almost every plant had come in millions of dollars over budget. Just this past October, a U.S. Department of Energy official told members of the Society of Environmental Journalists that Wall Street is still so fickle about nuclear power that utility boards know their company stock could plummet if they even hint about financing new plants.
"American capitalism is brutally honest," mused Eric Epstein, chairman of a Harrisburg-area watchdog group called Three Mile Island Alert.
Though one of the industry's fiercest critics, Mr. Epstein told The Blade that eastern Pennsylvania wasn't emotionally conflicted about nuclear power before Three Mile Island. He said it was decidedly pro-nuclear, caught up in the era when the industry had promised future electricity that would be too cheap to meter.
Attitudes changed with Three Mile Island. Among the things that weren't immediately revealed was the presence of a potentially explosive hydrogen bubble in the plant's reactor. To this day, the amount of radiation that was vented to the atmosphere -- and its effect on the population -- remains hotly debated.
Many people think of Three Mile Island as America's only reactor meltdown. It's not. While it's the only one on U.S. soil that has involved a commercial-sized power plant, the first meltdown actually was a scarcely-noticed event in 1960 near New Stanton, Pa. It involved an experimental reactor at Westinghouse's Waltz Mills complex southeast of Pittsburgh.
David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who grew up in Pittsburgh and is the son of a retired Westinghouse employee who worked at Waltz Mills, acknowledged that nuclear power is a complex technology that "cannot really be fault-free."
Mr. Lochbaum followed his father into the nuclear industry by becoming a nuclear safety engineer. He is among the skeptics who wonder if the industry has been given an unreasonable amount of latitude by the NRC and, consequently, been allowed to teeter on the edge far too long. They question if problems can be expected to rise as plants continue to age, costs rise, utilities keep trimming their staffs, and the generating capacity of each facility is increased.
In other words, at what point is doing more with less unacceptable to the NRC?
The agency has been grappling with that issue since at least 1982, when the concept of minimal staffing requirements was first taken up by its headquarters. Concerns were raised again in 1999 by U.S. Rep. John Dingell (D., Dearborn) and others, resulting in the current move to develop a rule for regulating worker fatigue under fitness-for-duty laws. A proposal is to be presented to the NRC's governing board by December.
Nuclear plants are typically licensed to operate 40 years. With no plants lined up to replace the existing fleet, utilities are seeking 20-year extensions for existing facilities.
NRC officials have said there's nothing magical about 40 years from an engineering standpoint: The length of time was almost arbitrarily chosen, based on the anticipated time required to pay off bonds that were used to build the facilities.
Mr. Lochbaum said his group's concern is that the NRC and the industry have a history of downplaying events, including those at FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ottawa County and Detroit Edison Co.'s Fermi II nuclear plant in Monroe County. Both are along Lake Erie, each about 30 miles from Toledo.
At Davis-Besse, FirstEnergy admitted that a profit-ahead-of-safety mentality had become pervasive in the 1990s. The result: The plant's old reactor head nearly blew open in 2002, which would have allowed radioactive steam to form in containment.
The utility has acknowledged that too much work had either been neglected, done inadequately or postponed to save money. The plant was shut down for scheduled maintenance Jan. 17 for the first time since the NRC had authorized restart 10 months earlier. But operators apparently didn't compensate for sub-zero weather and freezing rain. Ice chunks formed inside the plant's massive cooling tower and fell, breaking a lot of fiberglass parts. That will require more costly repairs.
On the afternoon of Jan. 24, control room operators at Fermi II noticed the plant's radioactive containment area was experiencing unexplained leakage.
The NRC blew a sigh of relief because Detroit Edison assumed nothing and shut down Fermi II's reactor.
The most pressing question -- whether the leak involved radioactive coolant that passes through the reactor, a symptom of a potential meltdown -- was answered a few hours later, when chemistry tests on water samples pointed to a non-nuclear secondary cooling system. Fermi II restarted Wednesday night and was expected to be back at full power this weekend.
John Austerberry, Detroit Edison spokesman, said the safety record of America's nuclear plants "stands up very good against any major industry in the country."
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
