Restarting Reactor Could Boost Nuclear Power Industry

[Susan L Gawarecki <loc@icx.net>]

Is there any reason to expect that a 1960s-vintage boiling water reactor

could have significant performance, reliability or safety problems?



--Susan Gawarecki



Restarting Reactor Could Boost Nuclear Power Industry - TVA Board to

Vote on $1.7 Billion Proposal To Switch On Mothballed Unit in Alabama 



See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23504-2002May15.html

for the article and graphics.



By Dan Morgan

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, May 16, 2002; Page A03 



The U.S. nuclear power industry, in a holding pattern for years because

of concerns about safety and costs, could get a strong boost today when

the

Tennessee Valley Authority takes up a $1.7 billion proposal to restart a

reactor that has been shut down for 17 years.



There have been strong indications that the TVA's three-member board

supports the plan to revive the 1,280-megawatt unit at the Browns Ferry

plant in

Decatur, Ala. An ultimate decision to restart the unit -- where the

target date is 2006 -- would mark the first go-ahead for bringing a U.S.

nuclear reactor on line in well over a decade.



Browns Ferry's Unit 1 was mothballed in 1985, during a broad

reassessment of nuclear power by the federal government, which owns the

TVA. Its resurrection could signal that nuclear power is beginning to

emerge from its status as the pariah of the U.S. energy industry.



William Baxter, a Knoxville businessman appointed to the board last

year, told a local interviewer this month that restarting the unit would

be a good business decision. The TVA's professional staff supports the

proposal, as do some key politicians, including Senate Minority Leader

Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.).



But in a letter to TVA Chairman Glenn L. McCullough on Monday, White

House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. urged a careful approach.

"We agree

on the goal," he said, but added: "The question of how to complete it is

a big one."



Daniels, who met with McCullough on Tuesday, said he had not seen a

financial analysis of the proposal, adding that the White House would

prefer that the

TVA delay a final decision until it has revised its long-term business

plan.



Whatever the board decides at its meeting today in Huntsville, Ala.,

critics and advocates of nuclear power agree that a reconsideration of

the nuclear option is underway in the public and private sectors.

Driving it are rising demands for electricity and increasingly tough

environmental controls on the coal-burning power plants that account for

nearly half of the nation's electricity output.



"We have got to be open in this country to nuclear power," said

Sessions, who has lobbied hard to bring the unit back on line. "Many

politicians just seem to take it as a given that there cannot be any

more nuclear power. That is just wrong."



Sessions estimated that the four-year construction project at the Browns

Ferry Unit 1 reactor would provide 2,400 jobs for northern Alabama. The

plant's other two reactors were brought back on line in the early 1990s,

thanks to decisions made several years earlier.



A white paper produced last year by Vice President Cheney's energy task

force declared that expanded nuclear power production was "a major

component of

our national energy policy." It said there was room at many nuclear

facilities for additional reactors.



To underscore that nuclear power plants do not emit greenhouse gases,

acid-rain-causing chemicals or health-threatening particles, the task

force called on the Environmental Protection Agency "to assess the

potential of nuclear energy to improve air quality."



No new reactor has been ordered in the United States since the 1979

accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. But three major utilities

-- Exelon Corp., Entergy Corp. and Dominion Resources Inc. -- have said

they are looking at possible sites for future reactors.



Once considered white elephants, some reactors recently have been

snapped up by investors and independent power companies that are betting

they can run

them profitably in the nation's newly deregulated wholesale electricity

market.



The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has renewed the licenses of eight of

the nation's 103 reactors and is considering renewal applications from

15 others. Last year, the NRC allowed 22 reactors to increase their

generating capacity by installing new technologies, a process called

"uprating."



"For a decade, the performance, reliability and safety has been getting

better," said Marvin Fertel, vice president for business operations at

the Nuclear Energy Institute.



TVA officials say they believe the mothballed facility at Browns Ferry

can be brought on line safely and relatively quickly. "As we look down

the road we need the power, and because the unit has been licensed, and

because we know exactly what has to be done, there is a confidence

level," said John Scalice, chief nuclear officer for the TVA.



The TVA is the country's largest public power producer, providing

electricity to 8.3 million people in seven states while also managing

the 652-mile Tennessee River system of dams and hydroelectric stations.



Any effort at a nuclear renaissance will face strong opposition from

environmental organizations, scientists and those skeptical about the

commercial viability of nuclear power. Environmental activists recently

picketed TVA offices in Tennessee, protesting the plan to restart the

Browns Ferry unit. In 1998, the Union of Concerned Scientists petitioned

the NRC to revoke the license for Unit 1, arguing that the TVA had no

basis for keeping it in mothball status indefinitely. It asked that Unit

1 be decommissioned or subjected to the same rigorous inspections and

controls as operating units. The NRC denied the petition after the TVA

said some parts of the unit were needed to support the operations of the

two functioning reactors at the site.



Unit 1 began generating electricity with a 1960s-vintage boiling water

reactor in 1973. In 1985, the TVA voluntarily shut it down and removed

its fuel after discovering that the designs used to operate it did not

precisely match the physical layout. The NRC placed all TVA plants on a

"watch list" in 1986.



The two other Browns Ferry reactors, Units 2 and 3, were also shut down

for the same reasons in 1985, but they were restarted after corrections

were made.



Only five of the 17 reactors started by the TVA after the 1960s are

operating today. Eight were subsequently canceled after the expenditure

of billions of

dollars. Several, such as the two units at Bellefonte, have never

produced power. The last to come on line was Watts Bar in Tennessee,

which took 23 years from start to finish and cost about $7 billion.



Reviving the TVA's nuclear program now would be a major mistake, said

Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean

Energy. TVA

officials, he said, "are rushing to do it over any common sense."



Smith said a better use of the $1.7 billion would be cleaning up dirty

coal-burning plants and promoting energy conservation. The TVA's

customers enjoy some of the cheapest electricity in the nation while

consuming more power per household than any other region, he said.



The TVA's debt is $25.2 billion, well above the levels of privately

owned utilities of comparable size. The TVA promised in 1997 to cut it

to $14 billion by 2007, but as a government agency it is under no

pressure from stockholders or credit markets to do so.



"Congress is asleep at the wheel while TVA is about to run up more

debt," Smith said. "No private business could get away with doing this.

That's the

fundamental weakness of TVA."



© 2002 The Washington Post Company 

-- 

.....................................................

Susan L. Gawarecki, Ph.D., Executive Director

Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee

We've moved!  Please note our new address:

102 Robertsville Road, Suite B, Oak Ridge, TN 37830

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