Despite President Obama’s announced support for nuclear power, the press and nuke opponents are piling on, saying it won’t happen.
The latest effort is from Steven Mufson in the Washington Post, who writes that businesses in the South are starting to rebel against the traditional practice of allowing utilities to include construction costs in their rate base while the plants are being built:
Hopes for a nuclear revival, fanned by fears of global warming and a changing political climate in Washington, are running into new obstacles over a key element — money. A new approach for easing the cost of new multi-billion-dollar reactors, which can take years to complete, has provoked a backlash from big-business customers unwilling to go along.”
Even though the Vogtle projects in Georgia were awarded loan guarantees for two reactors last week, Mufson speculates that won’t be enough.
The plants are expensive, and construction tends to run late and over budget. The projected cost for a pair of proposed Georgia plants would be $14 billion; the Obama administration last month pledged to provide them with $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees.
So isn’t that interesting? China, still one of the poorest countries in the world (per-capita income: $6,000) is currently building 21 new reactors, but the United States — supposedly the richest country in the world — can’t build a single one.
Is it because we can’t afford them? Hardly. The barriers are bureaucratic, legal, and environmental. China’s first Westinghouse AP1000, only begun in 2009, is scheduled for completion in 2013. Meanwhile, our Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn’t even approved the design of the AP1000. It’s still worried about what would happen if someone flew a jet plane into the containment structure. (Answer: the plane would disintegrate.)
Nuclear reactors earned a reputation for coming in three times over budget and taking a decade to complete during the 1980s, when the NRC was still requiring design changes after reactors had already been completed and when building a reactor meant putting $5 billion into the ground and then waiting three or four years while environmental groups contested giving it an operating license. The Zimmer plant near Cincinnati was 95 percent complete when the utility finally gave up and converted it to coal.
Congress improved the process in the 1990s by specifying that the NRC must issue a “combined construction and operating license” at the beginning of the procedure. But no one is really sure whether it’s going to work. The first reactor to emerge from NRC licensing procedures — maybe in another two or three years — will be gang-tackled by opposition groups who will try to spend years delaying things in court. That’s why no one will be willing to invest in a reactor project unless there are federal loan guarantees
All we know now is that once a reactor is built, it is a gold mine. The Tennessee Valley Authority has somehow managed to sneak two new reactors past opponents over the last decade, based on licenses issued in the 1970s. Both are doing fine. Browns Ferry I, originally destroyed in a famous 1975 fire, was rebuilt in four years for $1.8 billion, on time and under budget. When the TVA completed the project in 2007, it said the construction debt would be retired by 2017. After running the reactor for two years, the TVA changed its estimate. The construction debt will be retired late this year.
Once they are built, reactors are cheap to run and a dream to operate. The average American reactor is now up and running 90 percent of the time. It’s getting over the slow pace of regulatory approval and the anticipated legal opposition that is the problem.
– William Tucker is author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Long Energy Odyssey.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been amended since its initial posting.