Ex-nuclear plant gathers dust
Posted on Sunday, August 19, 2007
STRICKLER - Eighteen miles south of Fayetteville, on the edge of the Ozark National Forest, sits a dilapidated monument to both the promise of nuclear energy and the problems it can create.
An egg-shaped dome rises six stories above the valley floor. A smokestack designed to disperse radioactive material in case of emergency reaches even higher. Creeping rust has gained more than a foothold.
More than 30 years ago, men inside the dome purposefully set off some daring chain reactions. They brought the core of a reactor to the brink of overheating and then cooled it down again, to test whether they could place a bridle on nuclear power when the plant was running full-tilt.
Satisfied with their tests, the consortium of power companies that built the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor, or SEFOR, vacated the plant in 1972, three years after it was built. The University of Arkansas took it over in 1975.
The reactor has been dormant ever since, a decaying remnant of the Nuclear Age.
While SEFOR rusted, the nuclear industry has primed for a rebirth. Once viewed as a solution for the nation's energy needs, a lack of support for nuclear power stopped it in its infancy.
High-profile accidents at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant in 1979 and at Ukraine's Chernobyl plant in 1986, concerns about the spread of nuclear weapons and the lack of a plan for disposal of nuclear waste combined to sour public enthusiasm for splitting the atom.
Utilities haven't completed a new nuclear plant since 1996, when the Tennessee Valley Authority switched on its Watts Bar 1 plant.
The 103 reactors in the United States that were built before nuclear power fell out of favor generate about 20 percent of the nation's electricity. That number hasn't really changed in 20 years. Since 2000, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has granted 44 reactors, including the two in Russellville run by Entergy Corp., 20-year extensions to their original 40-year licenses.
"In the late'90 s there was an expectation that a large number of plants would be closed at the end of their license,"said Alex Flint, vice president of governmental affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobbying group. "Now, we assume the majority of reactors will be relicensed."
Not only are existing reactors getting a second life, but utility companies are getting ready to break ground on new plants.
In the past two years, 17 utility companies have announced plans to build 33 reactors. Flint predicts five new announcements by the end of the year, and a "similar number"in 2008.
Why are nuclear plants back on the drawing board ?
For one thing, financial incentives offered by the federal government and rising naturalgas prices have made the huge expense of constructing a nuclear plant less daunting. So has a streamlined regulatory process for the licensing of new plants. And as Congress ponders carbon emissions and global warming, nuclear power grows more attractive.
Nuclear reactors generate far less carbon than coal-burning plants.
It is far from clear what, if anything, Congress will do on climate-change legislation. A tax on carbon emissions, which is a long shot, or a cap on emissions would make nuclear reactors a viable option for utilities trying to reduce pollution.
But Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear, a Takoma Park, Md., group that advocates a nuclear ban, argues that the nuclear industry would have to grow substantially throughout the world to have any impact on global warming. That, he says, is too great a risk.
"If we spread nuclear power abroad to boil water, the flip side of that coin is nuclear weapons,"he says. "We'd be exchanging global warming for nuclear winter."
Arkansas' Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said she doesn't understand proponents of energy independence and climate-change legislation who "in the same breath oppose nuclear power. You have to see it as part of the equation."
The Bush administration has aggressively promoted the expansion of nuclear energy. The Department of Energy has pushed for development of reactors that can use recycled nuclear fuel, encouraged the use of nuclear power abroad and tried to figure out how to dispose of nuclear waste. The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act directed the energy department to construct an underground repository for nuclear waste. It took 20 years to agree on a site, Yucca Mountain in Nevada. And the department has not yet demonstrated that the site would be safe.
ABSORBING RISK In the 2005 Energy Policy Act, Congress signaled its interest in nuclear power by including $ 13 billion in incentives for the industry. New spending in the act included risk insurance and loan guarantees for the construction of new plants. It included tax credits of 1. 8 cents for each kilowatt-hour of power generated in a plant's first eight years of operation. And the law lowered from 35 percent to 20 percent the tax rate on investment gains utilities make in funds they must set aside to decommission plants. Public Citizen, the Washington consumer-advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, estimates that last item will save the industry $ 1. 3 billion.
"These are cradle-to-grave subsidies,"says Michele Boyd, an energy specialist with the group.
Particularly galling, Boyd says, is the fact that taxpayers would pay for risk insurance covering construction stoppages due to regulatory hurdles or litigation, and for loan guarantees on what she considers a risky construction process.
"Taxpayers should not be paying the industry for this,"she says.
Randy Hutchinson, senior vice president for nuclear-business development at Entergy, contends risk insurance and a whittled-down licensing process are necessary, because nuclear opponents can stall construction for months, if not years. When that happens," everything stops, except the interest on your construction loan."
Before it adjourned for its August recess, Congress was poised to increase loan guarantees for the construction of "clean"energy plants, which would include nuclear sites. President Bush's budget proposal set aside $ 4 billion for the purpose. But the Senate version of the fiscal 2008 energy spending bill would not put a limit on loan guarantees. The nuclear industry wants $ 40 billion to $ 50 billion in guarantees over the next two years.
According to a 2003 report by the Congressional Budget Office, the risk of default on construction loans would exceed 50 percent because high construction costs would make it difficult to operate the plant and make a profit and because the technology planned in the new facilities is relatively untested.
Flint, of the Nuclear Energy Institute, says potential investors are skittish without guarantees that their money won't disappear. FAYETTEVILLE EXPERIMENT
Meanwhile, SEFOR sits, discarded by the nuclear industry and shunned by the government that ushered in its creation.
It has been part of Joann Pennington's life since her late husband worked as a guard there. She lives at the long-shuttered visitors center in exchange for mowing the grass and keeping watch against intruders.
The visitor center's back deck overlooks the reactor dome. Pennington has hung plastic snakes from the deck roof to ward off birds. Across the valley at the dome, real snakes are a problem when she cuts the grass, as are black wasps.
The snakes and the wasps, not to mention the double cordon of razor wire fence, would seem to tell interlopers: Stay away. But to Pennington, 66, the dome is just a benign constant in the landscape.
Rarely, a driver will take the curve in the road by the plant too fast and knock out part of the fence. Or a former worker will stop by to snap pictures.
"They don't hardly come by anymore,"she says.
One of those former workers, Louis Mansur, served as an intern with the U. S. Atomic Energy Com-
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