Energy Dependence

Wait, how do you build a nuclear-power plant? As the United States zeroes in on green energy, this is exactly the question new nuclear firms are scrambling to answer. It's a wonder, considering the U.S. invented nuclear power more than a half-century ago. But it died here in its adolescence as cost overruns marred the industry and opposition grew from anti-Cold War activists and local pols glad for the power but skittish about a meltdown in their backyard. The last successful order for a commercial nuclear plant was in 1973 (the most recently completed plant was in 1996), after which Americans ceded leadership to other nations. With the growing urgency over fossil fuels, nuke plants are back; thing is, savvier nations have done so much to advance the technology that we don't know how to make them anymore. In short, the U.S. has lost its nuclear edge.
 
The Department of Energy (DOE) developed the world's first electricity-producing reactor in 1951 in Idaho. (It initially lit four lightbulbs.) In 1960, Westinghouse put the first commercial pressurized-water reactor online at Yankee Rowe in Massachusetts. Then the construction boom began: over the next few decades, the country built more than 100 reactors, but in the 1980s, the boom fizzled in the wake of the Three Mile Island meltdown and a political backlash. "We Americans invented [nuclear] technology," Sen. Lamar Alexander said this week, calling for 100 new nuclear plants. "Isn't it time we got back into the game?" If so, policymakers must concede that, at least for a while, going nuclear means another kind of energy dependence. Alongside building new plants, there has to be a plan—until the country can wrangle the technology and know-how back for its own industry—to rely on allies to pave the new nuclear way.
 
At this point, 100 new plants is a pipe dream, but the U.S. is gearing up to build at least four by 2020. The DOE has committed $18.5 billion in loan guarantees to four different companies. But having never built the latest nuclear technology, they are at a loss as to what to build and how to build it on time. So they've called in help from places like France and Japan, which has kept building plants over the past three decades. With 59 reactors online, France supplies nearly 80 percent of its electrical grid with nuclear power and earns handsome profits from exporting not just electricity, but also nuclear technology. Japan has been making advances in closing the fuel cycle—that is, in reprocessing spent fuel rods and recycling nuclear waste.
 
Two companies receiving loan guarantees have already established partnerships overseas. UniStar Nuclear Energy, which is planning a new reactor at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, is a joint venture of U.S.-based Constellation Energy and Électricité de France, that country's chief power company. "It's a boomerang," UniStar chairman Michael Wallace said in an interview. "In effect, the U.S. technology went to France in the 1970s, and now what we're doing is bringing back a larger and improved version." UniStar plans to employ technology from Areva, France's nuclear behemoth, to build a European pressurized reactor, which has increased safety while producing more power, making it more profitable, once it's running. 
 
Similarly, to build two nuclear reactors about 90 miles outside of Houston, NRG Energy teamed up with Toshiba in Japan to create Nuclear Innovation North America, or NINA. The idea was to avoid the kind of budgetary disasters that helped to shutter the industry in the 1980s when some 40 projects were canceled after nearly $80 billion in cost overruns. Toshiba offered NRG a track record to avoid the same kind of mismanagement. "Toshiba has had a plant in construction every year since about 1968," Steve Winn, NINA's CEO, said in June. NINA will use Toshiba's advanced boiling water reactor design, two of which Toshiba has recently completed on time and—more important—on budget in Japan. 
 
Even utility companies that have avoided explicit joint ventures overseas find themselves tapping resources abroad. In recent years, major reactor manufacturers in the U.S. have formed foreign partnerships of their own. General Electric went into business with Japan's Hitachi to capitalize on expanding markets—especially in China and India—for nuclear reactors. Likewise, Westinghouse is now principally owned by Toshiba. As reactors come online in South Carolina (by SCANA Corp.) and Georgia (by the Nuclear Operating Co.), each of them will tap Westinghouse to build their reactors, which means, in effect, they are calling on competency from Japan.
 
Conceivably, all of this could happen without a hitch. After all, French and Japanese firms have proven track records of delivering. But considering the incendiary mix—fission, environmental concerns, and overseas companies taking hold in America's strategically crucial energy sector—Senator Alexander and his allies will have to guard against political spoilers. Gallup puts popular support for nuclear power at the highest point it has been in 15 years—nearly 60 percent of Americans favor it—so perhaps the tide is turning. But even so, Alexander will have to wait a while for his hundred nuclear plants, and, until then, Americans will need help learning how to split the atom again.

© 2009