Thirty years after Three Mile Island spooked the American public, many signs – including concern for carbon-emitting energy sources – point to a new chapter for the nuclear energy industry.
The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week announced final approval for the two-reactor Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, a new nuclear facility to be built in eastern Georgia for a cool $14 billion. It is the first nuclear construction permit approved since 1979, and more could follow with 18 prospective nuclear units under NRC review.
President Obama has set an ambitious goal – by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity should come from clean-energy sources – and with the U.S. Energy Information Agency forecasting the nation will need 24% more electricity by 2035, nuclear advocates say the industry’s renaissance comes at an opportune time.
James Haldeman of Bechtel Power Corp. and John Williams, a senior engineer with Southern Co., whose system includes the Vogtle plant, are making the rounds at four University of Wisconsin campuses – including UW-Green Bay, UW-Oshkosh, UW-Milwaukee, and UW-Madison – to discuss what they call the revival of nuclear energy and what it could mean for Wisconsin, especially for engineering students looking for work in the industry. They represent Clean Energy America, a group of professionals within the nuclear industry who advocate for nuclear energy.
Haldeman believes the industry’s comeback is strong, even though some utility applicants have asked the NRC to put their review on hold. “It’s a fair statement to say that the nuclear industry is growing stronger in the United States,” he said. “Maybe not as strong as some would like, but we’re making progress.”
Wisconsin plants
The newer plants are more powerful than existing ones. The constant rate of output of the old units ranged from 600 megawatts of electricity to 800 or 900 megawatts. The new units generate roughly 1,200 megawatts for each unit, enough to provide energy to about 300,000 homes, Haldeman said.
Wisconsin’s two nuclear power facilities, the Kewaunee Power Station, owned by the Virginia-based Dominion, and the Point Beach plant, located near the Manitowoc County town of Two Creeks and owned by Florida Power & Light, are responsible for nearly 20% of the state’s total electric generation. Coal-fired power plants, the bane of those seeking lower carbon emissions, account for 43.1% of total energy generation, and natural gas provides 37.1%.
The 18 planned nuclear units still under review are concentrated on the East Coast and in the South, including Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. On the surface, these are areas where political support for new plants would appear to be the most favorable, but Haldeman suggested the most salient “selling” factor is building new facilities on an existing nuclear plant site.
In the case of the Vogtle unit, there are two existing units on that site, which comprises hundreds of acres of land. “Typically, the communities around the site are very supportive of the plant,” he said. “The men and women who work there are dedicated to providing the public with energy, and doing so safely and efficiently.”
Despite the potential setback that could have resulted from the 2011 tsunami and flooding in Japan, which damaged the Fukushima nuclear reactor, the NRC approved Vogtle less than a year after the tsunami. There still is doubt about whether U.S. reactors can withstand natural disasters like earthquakes and floods, and NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who cast the commission’s lone dissenting vote against the Vogtle application, cited the lack of a binding commitment to avoid the Fukushima plant design mistakes.
“I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima never happened,” Jaczko stated. “I believe it requires some type of binding commitment that the Fukushima enhancements that are currently projected, and currently planned to be made, would be made before the operation of the facility.”
Haldeman contends that the Fukushima disaster has not damaged the industry’s cause here because of the enhanced design of American plants. He said new American nuclear plants are based on a passive design, which means the design relies on natural forces such as gravity, convection, and circulation to provide cooling to the reactor in the core itself. That gives the U.S. plants additional systems, strategies, and procedures to address the situation that took place in Fukushima, also known as station “blackout” because plant operators didn’t have alternating current, or AC power, to run the pumps.
“The reactor design approved for Vogtle is the Westinghouse AP1000 design, and that design actually can reach a safe shut down, relying on those natural forces,” Haldeman explained. “They can do that without relying on any applied power, or alternating current, which is what Fukushima was lacking.”
Minding the storage
Another issue that has held back the American nuclear industry is concern over where to store waste generated from nuclear plants. The process being used in the existing fleet of U.S. plants involves storing used fuel rods in containers designed to provide storage for roughly 100 years. The containers now are stored on the plant sites and they are well protected from a security perspective, Haldeman said.
Plant site storage is considered the near-term solution to waste storage, but the long-term answer has been set back by the controversy over the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada. The original plan was to complete the repository and transfer the spent fuel there from the plant sites, but fierce local opposition put the decision on hold. The matter has been assigned to a Blue Ribbon Commission, which has produced a report on the potential sites. It is now the job of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to evaluate them and make a very difficult decision.
“He is looking at all the potential sites,” Haldeman said, “to evaluate which one is the most feasible.”
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