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North Carolina Utilities Begin Planning for New Nuclear Plants

Posted on: Wednesday, 31 August 2005, 18:00 CDT

Aug. 31--Progress Energy's H.B. Robinson nuclear power plant in South Carolina, once a mainstay of the nation's array of nuclear plants, is living on borrowed time. The Nixon-era relic is now entering middle age and, like many of the nation's 103 nuclear reactors, will be retired in the coming decades.

The nuclear plants that Progress Energy and other utility companies are considering building would be twice as powerful as some of the aging models. Driven by population growth and rising energy demand in the Southeast, the utilities are reviewing whether to start building nuclear plants in five years, long before the old nuclear plants are mothballed.

On Monday, Progress Energy, based in Raleigh, announced that it would select a site this year for a new nuclear reactor and pick a reactor design. Duke Power of Charlotte also will pick a site this year and select a reactor model. Both North Carolina utilities could take two years to make the final decision about building a nuclear reactor.

Manufacturers of nuclear plants, for years dependent on European and Asian sales to sustain business, covet the U.S. market.

"It's such a huge market with huge potential," said Andy White, president and chief executive of GE Energy's nuclear business in Wilmington. "With the retirement of plants by about 2040, you're going to need 100 to 200 new nuclear plants in the U.S. to keep up the energy mix."

It has been a quarter-century since a nuclear plant has been commissioned in this country, and such serious talk of building new reactors is reviving anxieties about the safety of nuclear plants.

Skeptics say the new reactor designs are experimental and tested only under simulated conditions. They wouldn't prevent the errors that have led to major fines and 107 plant shutdowns related to enforcement since the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, they contend. More important, the doubters say, the new designs don't alleviate concerns about terrorism.

"It's just a whole lot of hype," said Edwin Lyman, a Washington staff scientist at the Union for Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group long critical of the nuclear industry. "The objective of making something cheaper and safer at the same time just raises red flags for me."

Nuclear proponents say the new designs are not only more efficient, but safer than ever. The models are completely computerized and rely on fewer moving parts. They are equipped with enhanced emergency safety systems -- such as passive systems, which circulate cooling water without heavy machinery or electricity.

"Passive systems, if designed properly, can be more reliable because there's less failure of mechanisms," said William Beckner, director of new reactors and research reactors at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is reviewing the designs. "It would be very hard to imagine how it might fail, absent a structural failure."

The streamlined designs under development feature fiber-optic cable and touch screens. With fewer moving parts, they would cost up to 20 percent less to build, operate and maintain, nuclear advocates say.

"We're approaching five decades of knowledge in this area," said Peter Wells, general manager of marketing for GE Energy's nuclear business. "We're able to leverage tremendous efficiency."

North Carolina, which is heavily dependent on nuclear power, could become the nation's testing ground for the new designs. Nuclear plants generate nearly half the electricity produced by Progress Energy and Duke Power. Nationwide, 20 percent of electricity is generated by nuclear power.

Progress Energy's four nuclear reactors in the Carolinas are among the nation's oldest and newest, a snapshot of where the industry stands today. The H.B. Robinson plant near Florence, S.C., has been generating electricity since 1971. Only five reactors of the 103 now operating were in existence when the Robinson plant was built.

By comparison, the company's Shearon Harris plant is only about half as old. The plant, 20 miles southwest of Raleigh, began operating in 1987.

As the NRC is reviewing the plant designs, Progress and Duke are conducting their own cost-benefit analysis.

"They should be cheaper, but that's what we're trying to decide," said Joe Donahue, Progress Energy's vice president for nuclear engineering and services. "I try not to listen to the hype of the vendors on those things. We need to prove it to ourselves."

The selling point of nuclear power has always been cheap fuel and no air pollution. The main impediment is the lack of a permanent disposal site for radioactive spent fuel, which remains lethal for thousands of years and is being temporarily stored at scores of nuclear plants around the country.

After the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, the NRC toughened standards. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 led to more restrictions.

Plants, for instance, are patrolled by armed guards and tested with mock invasions. NRC cybersecurity rules require internal communications system that control reactor safety to have no link to the Internet or other networks, to keep out hackers and viruses.

Still, basic concerns remain. Despite the lessons learned after Three Mile Island, nuclear plants have experienced serious problems. For example, a reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, had deteriorated and would have burst with radioactive water, if it had not been detected in 2002, according to NRC records. In April, the NRC fined FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company a record $5.45 million for the negligence, and barred one of the utility's engineers for five years from the nuclear industry.

Proponents say that the new reactors will have instruments that are more sensitive and more accurate and could minimize human error.

Progress and Duke are reviewing three plant designs, none of which have yet been approved for use in the United States. Areva, a French company with offices in Charlotte, has a model with four sets of emergency cooling pumps and backup diesel generators instead of the usual two. The company filed for NRC review this year, hopes to win approval in this country by 2009. A plant based on the design is being built in Finland and another is being bid on in China.

Westinghouse, based in Pittsburgh, has designed a passive emergency system doesn't require pumps or electricity to cool a reactor with water. Instead, a 500,000-gallon tank overhead would release water into the reactor below for up to 72 hours. Westinghouse's design has been provisionally approved by the NRC and is expected to win final approval this year.

General Electric, with operations in Wilmington, would use a similar passive system. GE completed filing its design documents with the NRC last week. The NRC takes up to four years to review and test a plant design.

Nuclear advocates express the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown today as once in a million years, or as likely as a comet striking the Earth.

"We have never had events in this country that have progressed to the point where these systems have been required -- except Three Mile Island," Beckner said.

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PGN, DUK, AREVA, GE,

Source: The News & Observer

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