[Rhodes22-list] Energy - While You Were Sleeping

[Brad Haslett]

The Senate passed a new energy bill last night.  While searching on the net
for more details I stumbled across a lengthy NYT Magazine article on nuclear
that I'll attach so you don't have to register. I'd say the NYT piece is
fair and balanced. Last nights Senate bill was a mixed bag and here is my
"quick and dirty" take.  CAFE standards were raised from 25 to 35 mpg, the
first such increase in decades.  Good.  Raising taxes on 'Big Oil' was
defeated.  Even better! The Republicans will take a public black eye for
this but they behaved like responsible adults and economic literates.
Senators from both sides of the aisle from farm states bowed down prostrate
before the Corn God and got more goodies for ethanol.  No surprise there,
just more smoke and mirrors.  Switchgrass (ethanol) got some funding.  Mixed
bag.  Mandated minimums for utility companies use of solar and wind got
defeated. Good! These alternatives need to stand on their own economic feet
and they will.  Mandating minimums means the clowns in Washington, now at an
all time low approval rating of 14%, declare the winners instead of the
marketplace. We won't know what the bill will look like when it goes through
the house but I doubt it will change that much.  If anything, the Farm Belt
will get some more bones thrown their way in exchange for some pork thrown
the other way.  BTW, pork, as well as chicken, corn flakes, and just about
everything else you eat is rising in price due to the increased demand for
corn for ethanol.  You 'pays' at the pump or you 'pays' at the plate.  Ain't
no such thing as a free lunch.  Brad

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[image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>
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July 16, 2006
 Atomic Balm?  By JON
GERTNER<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=JON%20GERTNER&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=JON%20GERTNER&inline=nyt-per>

*A Nuclear Renaissance?*

[image: W]orkers at the Alvin W. Vogtle nuclear-power generating station
sometimes describe it as being in the middle of nowhere, and in many
respects they're right: situated on a bend in the Savannah River, in the
thick pine forests of central Georgia, the plant is an hour south of Augusta
and a two-hour drive, if you disobey the speed limit, from the outskirts of
Atlanta. On the final approach to Vogtle, a narrow country road cuts through
vast stretches of undeveloped land punctuated with small ranch-style homes;
in some places, you can still discern remnants of convenience stores and
cheap motels set back from the pavement, all now shuttered, some barely
standing. When Vogtle (pronounced VOH-gull) was being built in the 1970's
and 80's, it was more aptly described as the middle of everything, a
bustling, improvised city of engineers and tradesmen, some 14,000 workers in
all, many of whom lived nearby in tents and trailers. It was one of the
largest construction projects in the history of Georgia. An entire concrete
factory, now defunct, was built here during that time; so was a factory to
manufacture ice, a necessary ingredient in making the superdense
nuclear-grade concrete required for the reactor-containment buildings. To
Ellie Daniel, a local man who has worked as an administrator at Vogtle for
more than two decades, only two significant things have happened in the
history of Georgia's Burke County. "One is the Civil War," he told me. "The
other is Plant Vogtle."

The boom that swept through the region as Vogtle rose from the forest floor
— its immense cooling towers are each 548 feet tall — ended somewhat badly,
however, at least in a financial sense. The plant took almost 15 years to
move from blueprints to being operational. And by the time it began
producing electricity in the late 1980's, its total cost, $8.87 billion, was
so far overbudget that Vogtle became yet another notorious example of the
evils of nuclear energy. In the public mind, the issue was safety. For the
industry, the larger concern was economics. Indeed, as originally designed
in the early 1970's, Vogtle was intended to generate a total of around 4,500
megawatts of electricity, enough power to serve the needs of several million
homes. The grand plan was to have four reactors. Instead, it was scaled back
to two, Vogtle Unit 1 (finished in 1987) and Vogtle Unit 2 (1989). Today
these reactors together produce about 2,400 megawatts, satisfying about 15
percent of the state's power needs.

One day this May, on a brisk morning so clear that I could see its cooling
towers from 20 miles away, I visited Vogtle on one leg of a tour to assess
what many in the energy industry are calling a nuclear renaissance. Thanks
partly to large government incentives and to market forces that have pushed
the price of other electric plant fuels (especially natural gas) to historic
heights, the prospect of starting a new nuclear reactor in this country for
the first time in 30 years has become increasingly likely. By early summer a
dozen utilities around the country had informed the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, which oversees all civilian nuclear activity in this country,
that they were interested in building 18 new facilities, nearly all of which
would be sited next to existing nuclear reactors. Vogtle was in this group
of 18. In fact, the Southern Company, the large utility that runs Vogtle,
also announced that it would formally apply to the N.R.C. next month for an
early site permit, the first step in readying the community for a nuclear
project that would complement the existing reactors. Whether Vogtle will
turn out to be the 1st, 5th or 10th next-generation plant to break new
ground is difficult to say; trying to predict which utility will be able to
overcome formidable obstacles — public approval, regulatory scrutiny,
billions in financing and complex engineering challenges — is akin to
predicting the winner of a presidential election years in advance. Still, if
things move smoothly (a rarity when it comes to nuclear power in this
country), the Southern Company will receive a license to build and operate a
new plant in 2010. Construction will take five years. Electricity will begin
to flow to the residents of Georgia in 2015.

Over the past year, the debate over nuclear power has increasingly been
framed as an environmental one, as several commentators — most notably
Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace (and now estranged from the
organization); the British conservationist James Lovelock; and the Whole
Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand — have stepped forward to assert
that global
warming requires an embrace of new nuclear plants, because unlike gas- or
coal-powered plants, nuclear reactors produce electricity without emitting
greenhouse gasses. The nuclear industry, in turn, has capitalized on the
chance to adopt a green tinge, or at least greenish one; among its recent
slogans is the exhortation to "Go nuclear: because you care about the air."
Most environmental groups have not softened their opposition, however. "This
is more a propaganda exercise than a serious discussion of the viability of
the industry," Jim Riccio, the nuclear policy analyst at Greenpeace, told
me. By using global warming, he added, "the nuclear industry is trying to
find some fear greater than the nuclear fear to be their selling point."

Nonetheless, whether any new nuclear plants are built in the United
Statesdepends less on the sentiments of the American public than on
the country's
individual utilities. And for conglomerates like the Southern Company, which
runs Vogtle as well as two other nuclear plants in Georgia and Alabama, the
determining factor is not air quality. It's money. Over the next 12 to 24
months, as utilities like Southern determine what to do, their fundamental
concern is the bottom-line cost. And the feeling among many in the industry
is that the financial prospects are almost certainly looking up.

One afternoon at Vogtle, Ellie Daniel took me just west of the plant. The
reactors here sit amid 3,150 acres of wilderness; the snap of pine in the
air and the low hills that roll toward the riverbank lend it the serenity of
a fine vacation spot. We drove past the old concrete factory, past the
crumbling foundation of the ice works and halted by a clearing at the side
of the road. At the edge of the clearing, small pine trees had been planted
in neat lines, stretching like vineyard rows up the hill to Vogtle Units 1
and 2. The ground beneath our feet was covered in a carpet of fallen
needles. It's all part of the effort to preserve the area as a pristine
environment, Daniel explained to me: "We're trying to return the area to how
it looked before we built here."

Much of this will be swept away, though, if plans progress the way the
Southern Company hopes. In the clearing, some engineers at Vogtle had
painted a green circle, about 60 feet in diameter, to mark the location and
size of the planned reactor building. And in the center of the circle was a
pole, also painted green, to mark the hot reactor core. This would be Vogtle
Unit 3, Daniel said. Not far off, perhaps a few hundred yards, was another
pole and another green circle. If you can imagine it, he added, this would
be Vogtle Unit 4.

*Hard Times After T.M.I.*

On the evening before my visit to Vogtle, the prospect of new reactors at
the site was the subject of a public meeting, convened by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, at a technical college in Waynesboro, Ga., a small
town about 30 minutes from the plant. Anyone intrigued or appalled by the
idea of new construction could come to ask questions. These kinds of
community gatherings have become a frequent occurrence around the country
over the past year as utilities have shown a renewed interest in building
reactors. "We're in what's called the preapplication space for Plant
Vogtle," David Matthews, the head of new-reactor licensing at the N.R.C.,
told me as people milled about before the evening meeting. Matthews brought
a dozen colleagues with him — engineers and science advisers, mainly — to
address any technical points that might arise after he made a few brief
remarks explaining the N.R.C. licensing process. But some attendees had come
not so much to ask questions as to encourage the Southern Company to build
Units 3 and 4. "Can you do it any quicker?" asked one representative from
the local chamber of commerce. Meanwhile, a number of antinuclear advocates
wanted to quiz the commission officials about the possible hazards of a new
plant design and the plant's radioactive (and highly toxic) spent fuel; some
had even set up tables to distribute brochures alongside the agency's own
informational pamphlets. The rancorous debates that defined these sorts of
public meetings two decades ago were largely absent: the exchanges followed
a protocol that kept tempers in check while lending the meeting a formality
that N.R.C. representatives, all dressed in formal business attire, tried to
promote. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 were serious business.

The received wisdom about the United States nuclear industry is that it
began a long and inexorable decline immediately after the near meltdown, in
1979, at Three Mile Island in central Pennsylvania, an accident that — in
one of those rare alignments of Hollywood fantasy and real-world events —
was preceded by the release of the film "The China Syndrome" two weeks
earlier. To be sure, the events at T.M.I., as those in the industry
invariably refer to it, as well as the radioactive steam explosion at
Chernobyl seven years later, galvanized public opinion against nuclear power
as never before. In the case of Long Island's Shoreham plant, steadfast
community opposition eventually stopped a newly finished plant from ever
operating. But the fortunes of the nuclear business have been defined by
many factors that aren't so conspicuous. Several years before T.M.I., the
growing expense of new nuclear projects, coupled with the realization that
many predictions for future electricity demand were overblown, had already
hobbled the business. New orders for plants had fallen off drastically by
1978. "The industry was in a depressed state," says J. Samuel Walker, the
historian at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "And what T.M.I. did was
finish things off."

In fact, T.M.I. didn't kill the industry. It killed the growth of the
industry — ensuring, in a way, that nuclear power would not assume more than
a fraction of the U.S. electric business. The last year a plant was approved
for construction by the N.R.C. was 1978. But interminable construction
schedules meant that many facilities approved before T.M.I., like Plant
Vogtle in Georgia, were finished long after the accident. Some didn't even
start generating power until a few years ago; the last was the Watts Bar
plant in eastern Tennessee, which began operations in 1996. Since then the
contribution of nuclear energy to our electrical grid has remained fairly
steady. All told, the 103 active nuclear reactors in the United States
supply about 20 percent of our electricity. And in some places the
contribution is much larger. New York gets 29 percent of its power from
nuclear energy, New Jersey 52 percent. Abroad, nuclear energy has its hot
spots too — in France, for instance, 78 percent of the electricity comes
from nuclear energy. There are currently 337 working reactors in 30
countries outside the United States, and there may soon be many more, as
India and China embark upon ambitious plans to build dozens over the next
decade to satisfy their thirst for electricity.

In the U.S., each of the commercial nuclear plants has been granted a
40-year operating license by the N.R.C. This life span was originally based
upon the hypotheses of engineers and physicists in the early 1960's who
weren't sure how long a large nuclear plant could safely operate, because
none had ever been built before. While there have been numerous incidents of
mechanical defects over the past few decades, the 40-year projection has by
and large proved a conservative estimate, and in the past few years, the
N.R.C. has been granting 20-year extensions so that some older plants that
pass workplace inspections can run for a total of 60 years. Even with such
licensing renewals, though, it's doubtful the current fleet of plants will
run for, say, 80 years. When I visited Nils Diaz, the longtime chairman of
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who retired at the end of June, he
pointed out that even if one passed muster for safety, a plant that old
might require so much upkeep as to make it uneconomical.

That means the industry, in a way, is in a race against time. Recently, Paul
Joskow, a professor of economics at M.I.T., sent me a chart that looks ahead
to the output of America's reactors over the next half-century. As the
current 103 nuclear reactors continue to generate electricity for the next
few decades, the line on the chart remains mostly flat. But then the plants'
electricity production falls off a cliff. "I think this is the first time in
many years, perhaps 20 years, that the combination of government policy,
economic conditions and environmental constraints are reasonably favorable
for nuclear," Joskow told me. "If they can't move forward now, it would be
very difficult in the longer run." It may even be more urgent than that. One
conclusion to be derived from the chart is that nuclear power in this
country is dying. Unless someone starts building soon, it will begin to
disappear in 15 or 20 years, as one plant after another exhausts its
operating permit and goes dark. And it will effectively be extinguished as
an energy source by around 2050.

For those with deep misgivings about the safety and expense of nuclear
plants, life without them may indeed be a cause for celebration. Yet their
absence would probably pose tremendous challenges for the United States. The
first is where 20 percent of our power would come from; the second is
whether a substitute fuel for that power would emit carbon dioxide. It is,
in many ways, a long-term dilemma, one closely related to global warming,
and one that is poorly suited to a society that focuses on short-term
results. For Wall Street, which concerns itself with our publicly traded
utilities' quarterly earnings, the primary worry is whether companies (and
investors) that choose nuclear power will quickly be saddled with burdensome
debts. For elected officials, the main concern is whether support for
nuclear energy will hurt or help their standing in the next election cycle.
Yet to spend a few months listening to those who study the earth's energy
resources is to get the feeling that we are in for a very difficult century
— and one that depends on an immediate future of difficult and unpleasant
choices. "If you want a different energy system in 2050, you really have to
start changing it now," says John Holdren, a Harvard professor and one of
the country's most esteemed thinkers on energy and the environment. "You
can't get there and say, 'Oh, I want a different energy system.' "

*Pick Your Poison*

When it comes to America's future energy needs, one of the larger points of
confusion is the somewhat tangled relationship between fossil fuels and
electricity. Current prices at the gas pump, for instance, or the
possibility that we are approaching a moment of "peak oil" — the point at
which the global supply of crude peaks and then diminishes forever, with
cataclysmic consequences for transportation, trucking and the economy in
general — actually have little to do with the future supply of power. Making
electricity is generally about creating a source of heat and steam, and
using that steam to turn giant turbines and generate power. Less than 3
percent of our electric power is generated from oil. Besides the 20 percent
contribution from nuclear power, 50 percent of our electricity comes from
burning coal, 18 percent from burning natural gas and (in a heat-free method
that is often the cheapest) 6.5 percent by harnessing the energy of water
moving through dams. Wind and solar power make up less than one-half of 1
percent of what we use on a typical day. In part because the wind doesn't
always blow and the sun doesn't always shine (and in part because wind
turbines and solar cells are expensive to build) neither technology is yet
good enough to generate large, reliable quantities of inexpensive
electricity, or what utility companies call "base load" power. At at some
point in the future, oil and electricity may fight for supremacy:
Toyotarecently announced it is developing a plug-in car in addition to
its
hybrids, for instance, and electricity has the potential to help manufacture
clean-burning fuels like hydrogen for the future.

Over the past few years, the executives at Georgia Power, a division of the
Southern Company as well as the utility that owns the majority share of the
Vogtle plant, have tracked the population growth of the region and tried to
look ahead, as all utilities do, at what the demand for electricity might be
several decades from now. At the moment, the company's 20-year projections
suggest that power needs in the region will grow by 30 percent. So that's
one consideration. Another is that some outmoded plants in their system will
need to be replaced. Building Vogtle Units 3 and 4 would, essentially, be a
bet that a nuclear power plant will be superior to a new coal or gas plant
in the long run. "I think based on what we know today, it would be the best
option, but there's still a lot of work to be done," Oscar Harper, a vice
president at Georgia Power, told me. Yet even if Georgia Power makes a
decision in favor of nuclear, it still needs the state's public utility
board to agree that it's in the best interest of Georgia residents.

None of this is assured. Moreover, what makes the choice of fuels such a
knotty problem is that something that is cheap now, like coal, may not be so
cheap in 10 years. This isn't because we're running out; we probably have at
least a century's worth of coal reserves in the United States alone. But if
the government were to impose a tax or a cap on carbon emissions, something
that almost everyone I spoke with in the energy industry believes is
inevitable, or if new laws mandate that coal plants must adopt more
expensive technologies to burn the coal cleaner — or to "sequester" the
carbon-dioxide byproducts underground — the financial equation will change:
a kilowatt-hour generated by coal suddenly becomes more expensive. There are
other contingencies at play, too: fuels, like natural gas, could experience
a supply interruption that leads to enormous price spikes. As for the hope
that wind and solar power will generate large amounts of clean, affordable
electricity in the near future? I encountered great skepticism inside and
outside the utility companies. "Maybe in 40 years," Paul Joskow, of M.I.T.,
told me.

Meanwhile, nuclear power has several appealing factors: the cost of uranium
is fairly low, the supply is abundant (and mostly found in countries
friendly to the United States) and big plants like Vogtle can generate large
amounts of inexpensive electricity. The fuel, which takes the shape of
thousands of pellets that are loaded inside long metal tubes and then placed
into the reactor core, is strikingly potent; just a few pellets stacked
together to resemble the size, shape and color of a black crayon can
generate enough electricity for an entire family for a year. On the other
hand, the list of negatives is long. Uranium mining is a messy business, and
some Western states are still cleaning up the detritus of mines and mills
from a half-century ago. A catastrophic reactor accident here or abroad —
one that could be the equivalent of a so-called dirty bomb, killing
thousands and rendering hundreds of square miles of surrounding land
uninhabitable — would immediately destroy any revival of the industry. Then
there are byproducts and proliferation. Until the Yucca Mountain underground
repository in Nevada is completed (and the site probably will not be
approved for construction before 2011), spent fuel has to stay on the site
of nuclear facilities. And the possibility of irradiated fuel in the hands
of a terrorist or rogue government has become increasingly worrisome in
recent years.

The most immediate challenges, at least for the utilities, are the capital
costs of building new plants, which when factored into the cost of the
electricity, as they need to be, have a history of striking terror into the
hearts of public-utility board members. A coal plant costs significantly
less than a nuclear plant — as much as 50 percent less — and a gas plant is
much cheaper than a coal plant. When I asked David Ratcliffe, the C.E.O. of
the Southern Company, about the choice he's facing at Vogtle, he explained:
"When you line up the three fundamental technologies — gas, coal and nuclear
— you're lining them up from lowest capital cost and lowest construction
time to greatest capital cost and greatest construction time. You're also
lining them up from greatest fuel-price volatility to least fuel-price
volatility." Probably the best comparison of gas, coal and nuclear energy
was done with Joskow's help in 2003, when the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology published an exhaustive analysis of the future of nuclear power.
The M.I.T. study concluded that nuclear energy is competitive, but only
under certain circumstances. One instance is if the costs of building a
plant are significantly reduced (by shortening the length of construction,
for example). Another is if coal and natural-gas plants are taxed on carbon
emissions. Because nuclear plants don't produce carbon dioxide and wouldn't
be taxed, their electricity could conceivably cost no more to generate than
that from coal and gas, or even less.

There is a counterargument to building large new power plants. One view —
voiced most forcefully, perhaps, by Amory Lovins, a physicist who runs Rocky
Mountain Institute, which advises corporations and utilities on energy
efficiency — is that we don't need to increase our electrical supply. We
need to decrease demand by rewarding utilities for getting customers to
reduce electricity use by, say, updating their appliances, furnaces and
lighting. Lovins, a longtime critic of nuclear power, contends that it
remains financially uncompetitive and that the 30-year absence of new plants
is proof that the market has rejected nuclear power as a viable technology.
When we spoke about whether utilities need to build more big generating
plants in this country, he told me no — not now, not in 15 years, not even
after that. "I think if you do," he remarked, "your shareholders and
ratepayers will be asking awkward questions that you would really rather not
want to answer." Yet the concern, even among Lovins's admirers, is that if
he is mistaken — that is, if either his estimates on efficiencies can't
accommodate population and industrial growth, or because what is possible in
principle for energy efficiency is not possible in the real world — then the
utilities will require an alternative plan. And that would entail more
supply, likely meaning more big base-load plants (whether they rely on
uranium, gas or coal) as well as large investments in renewable sources like
wind and solar power.

When I asked John Holdren at Harvard whether the potential for efficiencies
is as large as Lovins says, he replied, "The savings could be huge." Yet
Holdren also maintains that creating a clean and reliable energy supply for
the future is going to be so daunting that nothing should be taken off the
table. Clean coal, renewables, nuclear — we'll need them all. To those in
the electricity business, this is known as creating an energy portfolio:
build everything, use everything and rely on nothing exclusively. "I'll be
very happy if Amory's right," Holdren added, "but I'd like to hedge my
bets."

For 30 years the debate has been defined by a perfect and almost maddening
symmetry, not only in terms of opinion but also of facts. The answer to
whether nuclear power is risky can be framed many ways, for instance: you
can tally the number of injuries and deaths to citizens from U.S. nuclear
plants (zero) or consider the potential number of injuries and deaths in a
serious accident (many). Is nuclear power clean because it doesn't produce
carbon? Or is it dirty because it produces radioactive waste? Is it very
expensive? Or are the economics competitive over the long run, especially if
fossil fuels are taxed for warming the planet?

*The AP1000, the Latest Thing in Plant Designs*

For a utility that wants to go shopping for a nuclear plant, there are no
blueprints floating around to help you do it yourself. If you have access to
$2 billion or $3 billion, you pretty much have only three options. You can
begin negotiations with General Electric or a French company called Areva
for their newest designs, known as the E.S.B.W.R. and the E.P.R.,
respectively. Or you can start talking with Westinghouse, as the Southern
Company has done, and check out its new reactor, the AP1000. If the Southern
Company's Georgia Power division decides to build Vogtle Units 3 and 4, this
is the model. Unlike G.E.'s and Areva's models, the Westinghouse design was
approved and certified this year, after a complex multiyear process, by the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Still, as I was reminded during my tour of
Vogtle, an AP1000 has never been built anywhere in the world.

Westinghouse's offices are about 30 minutes outside Pittsburgh, in a complex
of squat, black, glassy modernist boxes that seem to have been dropped
gently from the heavens onto a campus of several hundred verdant acres. The
company continues to license its all-American name for home appliances, and
its switchboard still gets calls every December from homeowners having
trouble with their old Westinghouse Christmas lights. But this is now a
nuclear company, and a nuclear company only, from top to bottom:
Westinghouse services existing plants, sells fuel and sells new plant
designs. All its other divisions have been shed, most of them during a
corporate fire sale in the 1990's. "At that point in time, we didn't
anticipate nuclear coming back here in the U.S.," Steve Tritch, the
company's C.E.O., told me when I met with him in his office. So Westinghouse
looked to Europe and Asia for new plants and concentrated on selling fuel
and consulting services. "Barring some tremendous technological discovery
that was going to produce energy, my own personal belief was that if you
looked at the basic situation with fossil fuels, then nuclear was going to
be used again here," Tritch said. Still, in those days he assumed that
Westinghouse wouldn't see much new business in the U.S. until perhaps 2015.

About two-thirds of the plants in the United States are based on
Westinghouse designs, including Vogtle Units 1 and 2 and the first
commercial reactor ever built in this country, in Shippingport, Pa., which
began producing power in 1957. In the mid-1950's, the Atomic Energy
Commission, the forerunner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, allowed the
development of nuclear power for civilian uses. The fuel was to be far less
volatile than that used in a weapon, which is why a nuclear plant can't be
detonated like an atomic bomb. Yet it took at least another decade before
the industry gained any traction, and much of the early momentum came from
government financing and the willingness of companies like G.E. and
Westinghouse to sell plants for tremendous discounts. Many utilities
couldn't resist. In the early years, most of the engineers who designed
plants came out of the U.S. Navy program for nuclear submarines, which
explains the industry preference for nautical terminology (the "fleet") and
to some extent its nautical design motifs. Walking through the industrial
interiors of Plant Vogtle and of Grand Gulf, a nuclear plant I visited in
Mississippi, I had the odd sensation of being in the hold of an immense
freighter, bound for somewhere.

In retrospect, the nuclear dream of the 1950's and 60's was at least partly
delusional. Those infamous predictions from the early days — that nuclear
power would be "too cheap to meter," as Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission, told a conference of science writers in 1954, or
that the country was destined to have the nuclear power of 1,000 plants by
the year 2000, as the commission predicted in the early 1970's — seem
farcical in light of what transpired in building the plants: the billions in
overruns, the endless years of construction. Steve Tritch told me that
inside the Westinghouse offices in the 1980's, executives kept a list of
domestic plants they expected would be decommissioned even before their
40-year licenses expired. The trend for utilities was to get out of nuclear
power as fast as possible, not in.

The so-called renaissance may turn out to be just a brief flurry of
enthusiasm, entailing the construction of a few new plants over the next
decade. But if nuclear power does catch on again — and there are a number of
reasons to think it might, the most obvious being strong government
encouragement driven by the attitude that a portfolio of energy options
creates a more stable economy — then the seeds of its revival would almost
certainly date back to the late 1980's and early 1990's. At that point, it
was clear that the industry had massive, intractable problems. Most of the
plants in the country were of customized designs, making repairs difficult
and efficiencies of scale challenging. Many utilities had no expertise in
operating a nuclear plant even after purchasing one. Meanwhile, the process
for getting a facility approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was
done in two steps: first a construction permit and then, years later, an
operating permit. The process all but ensured long delays and wasted
resources as N.R.C. regulators identified construction errors and design
shortcomings at very late stages and as legal opponents challenged the
licensing process over the course of many years.

At around that time, a number of nuclear-friendly groups focused on
hammering out a strategic long-term recovery plan for the industry. One of
these, the Nuclear Power Oversight Committee, made up of several utility
executives, created a blueprint for an industry revival that bears an
uncanny resemblance to the way things are turning out today. "They said you
have to have a new licensing regime at the N.R.C., because we can never have
a Shoreham again," Ed Cummins, Westinghouse's chief engineer, told me.
Shoreham, estimated to cost about $260 million in the 1960's, before
construction started, was completed in 1984 for $5.5 billion, sold to New
York State for $1 in 1992 and immediately decommissioned. Cummins also
recalled that the oversight-committee plan listed about 15 other industry
and regulatory changes before anyone would again consider building new
nuclear plants. Many of the resolutions involved safety features and
maintenance. If nuclear power were to ever get another chance, a new fleet
of plants had to be standardized in design, easier to build and simpler to
maintain. Above all, of course, they had to be far, far less expensive.

*The Business of Nuclear Power*

No two factors have been quite so important to the revived prospects for
nuclear power as the high price of natural gas and large incentives offered
by the Department of Energy, amounting to several hundred million dollars,
to help finance the first few reactors. But there have been a great number
of helpful factors inside the industry too. By the late 1990's, for
instance, several utilities, notably Exelon (based in Illinois) and Entergy
Nuclear (Mississippi), had developed specialties in buying and operating
nuclear plants. With Westinghouse's help, the companies proved that
refueling the plants, a complex choreography that occurs every 18 months or
so and results in the temporary shutdown of the plant, could be done in
about 35 days rather than the customary 60 or 70. The profits in decreasing
that refueling period (many nuclear plants take in revenue of about $1
million a day) have been tremendous. Indeed, the companies became so adept
at refueling and day-to-day operations that they began acquiring old nuclear
plants whose owners either didn't want them or couldn't manage them. And
they have proved that building a nuclear plant and buying a nuclear plant
are entirely different business propositions. A company like Entergy, for
instance, has purchased plants like Indian Point in Westchester County and
Pilgrim in Massachusetts, updated them, retrained the work force, sped up
the refueling process and reaped a nice financial reward. When I traveled to
Jackson, Miss., to meet with Entergy's executives, its C.E.O., Gary Taylor,
pointed out that the company's fleet, which now numbers 10 reactors,
accounts for about $250 million in annual profits. What's more, it has been
companies like Entergy and Exelon that in the 1990's began to give the
engineers at Westinghouse and G.E. suggestions for the next generation of
nuclear facilities, if they were ever built, rather than the other way
around. According to Tritch, the Westinghouse C.E.O., company executives had
to listen. "They had been operating plants for 25 years," he says. "It was
no longer a core competency of ours. It was a core competency of theirs."

One great challenge in designing nuclear power plants is that making
something safer and making something cheaper are often conflicting
priorities: the less you spend, the less safe it is, and vice versa. This
was what Westinghouse engineers began to wrestle with as they explored
designs that could be built more efficiently. For any new project, the same
basic technology would still be used to produce electricity: uranium
pellets, encased in fuel rods, would undergo a controlled chain reaction in
the core, release energy to heat pressurized water and generate steam, and
the steam would turn giant, magnetized turbines to generate electricity. But
they theorized that if the plant was physically smaller and it used less in
the way of materials, it would help reduce costs and construction time.
Also, a cheaper plant could be built off site from poured concrete modules
and assembled on location, rather than through a huge works project on the
scale of the Great Pyramids, as at Vogtle. Most important, perhaps, the
engineers began to ponder what's known as "passive" safety features. Years
before, the U.S. military had asked Westinghouse to design a small,
underground nuclear reactor to power missile silos. The reactor was never
built, according to Howard Bruschi, the company's former chief technology
officer, but the lessons were not forgotten. Passive safety measures
included backup systems that would kick in automatically in the event of
accidents or mechanical problems. Hundreds or thousands of working pipes and
valves might be replaced by, say, a tank of cooling water mounted high so it
could be emptied by gravity rather than by an electric pump. Complexity
reduced, money saved. And at least in theory, there was an improvement in
safety, too. The company's project was given a name: the AP600. It stood for
Advanced Passive reactor; the 600 represented the output in megawatts.

Westinghouse financed part of the AP600 effort through its research budget,
and the company also received a generous grant in the early 1990's from the
U.S. Department of Energy. But even those sources of money weren't enough to
supply the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to create the large
working models to test the efficacy of the safety systems. "So we basically
went to other countries that had nuclear programs and invited them to help
with their test facilities and engineers," Bruschi says. Within
Westinghouse, I heard it said that Bruschi went around the world, hat in
hand, looking for help. I asked him how many countries he visited. "Italy,
France, Japan, England, Scotland, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland,
Latvia and Poland," he told me. Eventually he went to China and Indonesia,
too. It paid off when the N.R.C. approved the design for the AP600 in 1999.

But there were no buyers. Not one. Ed Cummins, the Westinghouse engineer,
says that one major utility executive set him straight on why. Any utility
could build a gas plant for far cheaper, he was told, and sell the
electricity at a lower rate. So why build this? The AP600 was too small. It
generated too little electricity to justify its construction costs. "He was
right," Cummins says, and in response, he and his staff spent several years
expanding the AP600 into the 1,100-megawatt AP1000. It cost more, but its
larger electric output made it more competitive. When I visited Westinghouse
in late May, the company was just putting the finishing touches on a
simulated control room for the new plant, a sleek space near Cummins's
office to demonstrate for buyers and regulators how operators will monitor
the plant on just a few computer terminals and one large, central screen.
Unlike the control rooms I visited at Vogtle and Grand Gulf, where operators
are in charge of literally thousands of buttons, switches and meters, the
technology at the AP1000 simulator, like the aesthetic, is modernized,
simplified and streamlined.

The look is part of the marketing effort, of course. But the appeal of the
AP1000 remains doubtful, even as 11 utilities, including the Southern
Company, have expressed interest in the design. Westinghouse maintained to
me that the cost will ultimately be somewhere between $1.4 billion and $1.9
billion. "We're negotiating contracts," Dan Lipman, who runs the
new-power-plant division at Westinghouse, told me over lunch at the company
cafeteria. "We're well beyond the should-we-do-nuclear phase. It's now a
matter of, How should we do it?" So I asked Lipman what it would mean to
actually cut a deal with a utility for a new plant, the first in 30 years.
Would it happen a year from now? Two years? "If your definition of a deal
is, when do you first start getting money, then that could happen very
soon," he said. "I look for that this year, with big money committed after
licensing by the N.R.C." From his continuing negotiations, Lipman said, it's
clear that his customers are interested in "off-ramps": clauses in the
contracts that allow them to bow out if they hit an unexpected financial or
construction snag.

Still, if there is some circumstantial evidence that the price of new plants
hasn't hit the point of affordability — the on-ramp, essentially, where
utilities stop negotiating and start signing contracts and building — it
might be the decision by the Tennessee Valley Authority to refurbish an
existing nuclear facility at Browns Ferry in Alabama, rather than sign a
contract for a new one. "The fact that the T.V.A. is spending $1.8 billion
to fix up an old plant, rather than just spend it on a new plant, suggests
that a new one costs well over $2 billion," David Lochbaum, of the Union of
Concerned Scientists, told me in Washington. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer
and former consultant in the industry, agrees that carbon taxes could make a
new nuclear plant financially viable. For now he says that the AP1000 just
costs too much. This is something Westinghouse will not concede, but company
executives did say they are fully aware that it isn't passive safety or
modular construction that will sell their designs. It's the price tag, as
well as proof that for the first time in history, a slew of nuclear plants
can be built quickly, smoothly and within a budget.

*Achieving Critical Mass*

What really keeps the utilities and the nuclear industry up at night is risk
— not just the risk that something will break down at one of the existing
plants and thus wipe out two decades of improvements in operations, but the
risk that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a black hole, an organization
that will accept the new applications for plants and wait (and wait) before
approving a construction-and-operating license. The N.R.C., which has
streamlined its review process since the debacles of the 1970's, fields
criticisms from both sides. Nuclear-safety advocates like Lochbaum, at the
Union of Concerned Scientists, find it too accommodating to the industry;
the industry, in turn, finds it too tough, slow and bureaucratic. But no one
denies that the agency holds extraordinary power over the fate of the
nuclear business in this country. It can shut a facility down, levy fines of
$130,000 per incident per day, bar employees from working in the industry
and delay and deny licenses. In addition to several thousand employees in
its Rockville, Md., offices, the agency places at least two N.R.C. employees
at every plant in the country. (They have total access at every plant to
review day-to-day operations.) The agency is not known for partisanship; the
commission membership is split in party affiliation, and the employees are
civil servants. If anything, the engineers I met at the N.R.C. are a kind of
hybrid scientist-cop, people of formidable intelligence with very little
patience for companies or plants that deviate from the letter of the law.

Nuclear power plants are arguably the most complicated machines in the
history of civilization, and the review process for new plants reflects that
complexity. Essentially, a utility will need three stamps of approval from
the N.R.C. to build a new facility: a site permit, an approved reactor
design and a construction-and-operating license. Only then can a utility
move forward. In the case of Vogtle, the Southern Company is finishing a
site-permit application this month that will explore the suitability of
those green circles on the forest floor as future reactor sites. The
application will run thousands of pages and include an array of scientific
data — "seismology, meteorology, hydrology, just about all the ologies I can
list for you," says David Matthews, the head of the reactor-licensing
division at the N.R.C. The agency, in turn, will spend two to three years
reviewing it. The Southern Company has already said it would use the AP1000,
meaning that it has chosen a certified design. So an approval of the site
should eventually lead to the next step: a construction-and-operating
application that includes detailed engineering data and every possible risk
assessment. It will probably run more than 30,000 pages. It will take the
N.R.C. at least another three years to review it. The question of whether
various utilities are serious about reviving nuclear power might be measured
by their seriousness in pursuing such an involved process. They're spending
hundreds of millions of dollars to have the chance to build a nuclear plant
within a few years. Just for the option of building Vogtle Units 3 and 4 —
not for any construction at all — Georgia Power expects to spend $51
million. As David Ratcliffe, the Southern Company's C.E.O., put it: "We're
marching down this road."

I asked many people in the industry whether the N.R.C. can grant licenses
with the kind of speed that would preserve the integrity of its safety
reviews and still satisfy the utilities. Nils Diaz, the recently retired
chairman of the commission, told me that with new management procedures and
employees — the N.R.C. is hiring hundreds of scientists and engineers to
ready itself for the blizzard of work — the agency is up to the task. But
most of the utilities, and many financial analysts who cover the electricity
business, maintain a more guarded attitude. In fact, the industry has tried
to create several cushions to insulate itself from potential hang-ups, since
a delay doesn't mean only that it will take longer for a plant to produce
revenue but also that a utility will have to pay interest on any money it
borrows to finance a plant. (At Vogtle, for instance, nearly $3 billion of
the final $8.87 billion cost was the finance charge on debt.) For starters,
the Department of Energy has created a kind of risk insurance available to
utilities that are the first movers in building a new plant. If one of the
new plants hits regulatory delays during construction, the D.O.E. will
reimburse the utility for at least a part of those costs.

The second cushion is the creation of an industry consortium, called
NuStart, to test the licensing process. NuStart is filing several
applications for nuclear plants, on behalf of its members, with the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. These applications — for the Grand Gulf plant in
Mississippi and the Bellefonte site in Alabama — have preceded all others
and may end up being built first. One goal of NuStart is to prove to Wall
Street that utilities can get a license in a timely manner. Another goal is
to establish a way for the industry to pool risk and information. If
NuStart's construction-and-operating applications for its two sites are
approved, in other words, any utility in the consortium (including Entergy,
Exelon and Southern Company) can copy huge parts of the approved application
for its own use, thus saving time and money. The Southern Company would do
this for Vogtle.

The hypothetical nuclear plant then hits the next set of obstacles. In the
South, at least, there appears to be little in the way of community
opposition. When I spent the day in Port Gibson, Miss., the tiny town next
to the Grand Gulf plant, the local politicians were adamant in support of
any new reactor. "We've not been able to prosper like other communities,"
James Miller, the country administrator, told me. "We see this as our golden
opportunity." The industry seems more concerned about the logistics of
building a plant — that is, the actual construction. Several executives told
me that they worried most about finding enough craft labor to work on the
special aspects of plant construction. They also worried about steel orders,
since the domestic industry that long ago forged the massive reactor vessels
no longer exists. Only Japan Steel Works, these executives say, has such
capacity now. "This country hasn't built really a lot of whole
infrastructure in 20 years, and it hasn't licensed a new nuclear plant in 30
years," Gary Taylor, the Entergy Nuclear C.E.O., told me. "Most of the hard
manufacturing moved offshore. In many ways that may be a bigger challenge
than anything else."

Then there's the question of safety. The performance of American plants in
this regard has improved markedly over the past 10 years; the industry,
moreover, has gone to great lengths to help operators at plants around the
world share information on mechanical or safety issues. Yet the specter of
an accident has never really disappeared — nor will it. Nils Diaz told me
that the role of the National Regulatory Commission is not to regulate the
industry to a "zero-risk factor." That would be impossible, he said. It's to
make sure there is the "reasonable assurance of adequate protection." Many
industry critics wonder if even this goal is achievable. David Lochbaum, of
the Union of Concerned Scientists, has pointed out the existence of a
"bathtub curve" that applies to the safety of nuclear plants: statistically,
they are most dangerous either when they are first brought online (as was
the case with T.M.I. and Chernobyl) or at the very end of their life cycles.
Many of our existing plants, Lochbaum points out, are edging closer to old
age. As for the next generation of plants, the risk assessments on the
AP1000 suggest its design is between 10 and 100 times safer than existing
models. But until one is actually built, this remains a hypothetical.
Engineers at the N.R.C. told me they will retain a healthy skepticism for
passive safety until there's a track record in a working plant. They also
noted, as a separate concern, that design safety (in any plant) does not
necessarily translate into operational safety. "It's difficult to model and
predict human action," Jerry Wilson, an N.R.C. analyst, told me. "It's much
easier to model the technical details."

Finally, what about a wild card — that is, the remote possibility of an
attack on a plant? It is not easy to get into a nuclear facility these days.
It took me several weeks just to gain access to report this article, and I
was first subjected to a thorough background check. At the gates of both
Vogtle and Grand Gulf, I was met by heavily armed guards; later, I was
escorted through many phalanxes of protective structures — razor wire,
concrete blocks, fences, steel turnstiles, security doors, explosives
sensors and so on — before ever getting near the reactor. At Grand Gulf,
guards even patrolled inside key buildings with AR-15 semiautomatic rifles.
Walking unescorted was out of the question. At least from the ground, the
plants seemed impregnable. And the reactor-containment buildings, where the
core resides — the small domed buildings that are the heart of a nuclear
plant (the high cooling towers carry no radioactivity) — are some of the
strongest man-made structures in existence. They're engineered to withstand
earthquakes, fires, floods, internal explosions.

Yet the details of the N.R.C.'s own security reviews of plants (the agency
periodically stages "force on force" mock attacks) have not been made public
since 9/11 for reasons of national security, so there is no way to know how
some facilities, if any, are deficient in protective measures. In 2000 and
2001, the last set of statistics the N.R.C. made public, 6 of 11 plants that
were tested failed to prevent reactor damage when defending against the
simulated attacks.

*A Different Sort of Wedge Issue*

To John Holdren of Harvard, the essential problem with nuclear power is that
it is "too unforgiving of either human error or human malice." At the same
time, Holdren points out, every source of electricity has its negatives. In
the case of oil and gas, the question is whether there are enough reserves.
For other fossil fuels like coal and tar sands, the question is whether our
atmosphere can tolerate the emissions. For ethanol, the question is whether
there is enough land to grow the necessary crops. For wind and hydropower,
the question is whether there are enough good sites. Enough sunlight hits
the planet to power civilization 2,000 times over, Holdren says, but solar
power from photovoltaic cells is too expensive. "I can design a world that
runs on photovoltaics," he says, "but at current costs, electricity would be
three or four times what it costs today." That would wreak havoc on the
world economy.

What complicates things further is the specter of great climate changes.
This month, Jim Hansen, a NASA scientist, declared that we have, at most, 10
years to alter the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Holdren,
similarly, says he believes that the problems from global warming could
become so acute so quickly — as in a few years, rather than a few decades —
that there really isn't much time to decide which way to go.

Among the most influential ideas these days about how to change the system
are those from the research of two Princeton professors, Stephen Pacala and
Robert Socolow, who wrote an academic paper in 2004 on what they called
"stabilization wedges." It is an encouraging document, in that it presents a
manageable way to think about how to address global warming — basically, to
approach it on many fronts simultaneously — without suggesting we need one
big, magical fix. Pacala and Socolow looked at what we can do now, using
current technologies, and barring any sort of startling new scientific
developments, to freeze carbon dioxide production and thus slow down global
warming. They assert that we could reduce carbon emissions incrementally. In
pursuing one of these "wedges," we would reduce carbon emissions slightly;
but in pursuing all of them, we could succeed in flatlining the growth of
carbon emissions entirely by the century's midpoint.

There are 15 different wedges. These include increasing vehicle efficiency,
reforestation, improving the efficiency of buildings, capturing carbon in
power plants, replacing some coal power with wind power and replacing some
coal power with solar power. Nuclear power is a wedge, too. It is curious,
though perhaps unsurprising, that to various advocates some wedges have
proved more appealing than others: supporters of nuclear power, for
instance, stressed its environmental wedge potential to me while playing
down the viability of wind and solar power. The opposite is true as well. In
the film "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore refers to the Pacala and Socolow
research, citing several wedges, but not the nuclear one. He stresses
renewable energies.

To consider nuclear energy in the environmental framework, though, may be
the same as asking whether the utilities that pursue new plants might be
giving us a valuable wedge. Because without the environmental contribution
from new nuclear plants, we may need to find a wedge somewhere else. And
ultimately, the essential, agonizingly difficult question of nuclear power
is not whether it's good or bad, or whether it's worse than wind and better
than coal, but whether we will have a better future with or without it. "By
2015, I think everyone in the world will be convinced that our interventions
in climate are going to be intolerable," Holdren says. "I'm often asked,
'Can you solve the climate problem without nuclear energy?' And I say, 'Yes,
you can solve it without nuclear energy.' But it will be easier to solve it
with nuclear energy." Of course, that does not necessarily address the
questions of plant security, proliferation and operational safety. Or
economics. But it does suggest, as the M.I.T. economist Paul Joskow told me,
that "there is a value" in the development of at least a few new plants and
in keeping the nuclear option alive. This line of thinking might ultimately
bring you to a cautious support for nuclear power simply because allowing it
to die seems more dangerous than keeping it alive. You are against its
demise, rather than for its advancement.

There are many in the nuclear industry, meanwhile, with far grander visions.
Gary Taylor, for instance, the C.E.O. of Entergy Nuclear, says he believes a
doubling of the number of nuclear plants around the world is inevitable,
both to satisfy energy demands and to counter global warming. As Taylor puts
it: "The reality is, what is scalable in the time frame that addresses the
issues? If it isn't this technology, I don't know what it would be." Diaz,
the former head of the N.R.C., told me he sees a similarly bright future for
nuclear. "The world is going to go nuclear, because they do not have any
other real alternatives," he says. I met plenty of other engineers within
the industry who went even further. Their feeling about nuclear power is
close to evangelical, in that they seem to approach the technology with
moral certitude while being loath to acknowledge any of its many negatives.
Would that include the utility executives who will ultimately decide if —
and what — to build? I'm not sure it would. To those I spoke with in the
uppermost ranks, nuclear power isn't a belief system. It's a business. And
to them, what might come out of, say, Vogtle Units 3 and 4 — the waste and
the power and the profits — would be nearly identical to what comes out of
Units 1 and 2.

At least that was my conclusion in Georgia, where Jeff Gasser, the Southern
Company's chief nuclear officer, took me through a long tour of the plant.
He was smart, meticulous and intensely committed to the obscure safety
protocols that go on at nuclear power facilities. Most of all he was
forthright about the advantages and disadvantages of the nukes business.
When we went to visit the spent-fuel pool in Vogtle, where the used fuel-rod
assemblies are stored under 20 feet of protective water, Gasser let me know
that we would die if we pulled one of the fuel assemblies out of the pool.
"We would receive, before we could get to the exit door a few feet away, a
lethal radiation dose," he said. I quickly had to check the radiation
dosimeter I was wearing — another legal requirement of the N.R.C. — to see
if I was already glowing. (It read zero.) "The communications people hate it
when I use words like 'lethal' and 'irradiated,' " Gasser continued. "But
the fact is, there is no perfect way of generating electricity. There are
byproducts for every type." Like many others, he went through the positives
and negatives of coal, gas, solar, wind and nuclear. In his opinion, he
added, with Vogtle's engineering, redundancy of safety systems and its
trained operators, it was a safe, reliable and efficient way of making
electricity. That was his sales pitch.

We had already passed through the containment buildings, where the reactors
heat the pressurized water. So Gasser took me through the turbine building,
an enormous room the size of a soccer field, where the steam turns the fan
blades. Eventually, we went out a back door into the sunlight. The deafening
sounds of turbines and machinery subsided to a dull thrum. We removed our
earplugs and walked over to a small forest of electrical transformers, our
backs to the plant. The electricity from the turbines inside comes out here,
Gasser explained, its voltage is transformed, and it is then put into the
grid.

Gasser made a pushing motion toward the green hills before us.

"Once the power is sent out of here, it can go everywhere," he explained.
And I could see that it did go everywhere. The high-tension wires stretched
away from where we stood, in several directions, through deep cuts in the
pinelands, as far as I could see.

Jon Gertner, a contributing writer for the magazine, last wrote about
student-loan forgiveness.