We’ve got lite beer and lite frozen dinners. Now the nuclear power industry wants to give us lite nukes to chill and microwave it all.
Opponents say if you step in a ditch once, why step in it again. Robert Pollard, of the Union of Concerned Scientists and coauthor of the book Safety Second, says, “With the discussions of the new nuclear designs, we’re having almost an instant replay of the promises that were made by reactor manufacturers and the federal government in the late 60s and early 70s. Promises which not only never were kept, but had no chance of being kept. The talk of advanced reactors strikes me as more salesmanship than science.” He says a new nuclear age will happen only if government forces it down our throats.
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Commonwealth Edison, for instance, got permission in 1975 to build Braidwood I and II for a cost of around $1 billion. Both plants were to be finished by 1982, but Braidwood I wasn’t completed until 1987, Braidwood II not until 1988. The total bill was more than $5 billion–nearly five times the original estimate.
The Shoreham plant on Long Island took ten years to build at a cost of $5.3 billion–four times the original budget–but it appears the facility will never operate. Federal taxpayers, along with the investors and local customers, are paying for the losses. The construction of the New Hampshire Seabrook plant sent its investor, Public Service of New Hampshire, into bankruptcy because of cost overruns and the plant’s failure to go on-line–utilities can only pass along rate increases after a plant is on-line. Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Light estimated in the late 70s that the Perry plant in Ohio would cost $636 million to build. It was finally completed last year for $5.2 billion. To cover the cost of the Perry and Beaver Valley II plants, Duquesne Light was granted permission last year to raise its rates 28 percent over the next four years.
Given the industry’s track record, is a new wave of orders possible? Experts such as Pollard say no, and even Brian McIntyre of Westinghouse admits, “The next nuclear plant’s going to be a tough sell. I don’t care if it’s an AP600 or something that we’ve built three or four other times.”
The design of the AP600 is also simpler. It has an emergency cooling system that uses the force of gravity to move water through it–the source of its “passive” label; the plant would require less piping, 60 percent fewer valves, and 50 percent fewer pumps and heat exchangers. Most important, Westinghouse promises that the plant’s “passive” qualities would essentially eliminate the need for operator intervention in an accident. “There are still people who operate the plant,” Brian McIntyre says. “And they are still going to have to look at something and say, ‘That is not working quite the way we would like it to work.’ All the artificial intelligence in the world doesn’t replace something that complex.”
McIntyre says the design is everything the NRC and EPRI have ever wanted to see in a nuclear power plant. “We’re hearing from them what features they would like to see. We’ve said, scout’s honor, we will follow these features, as ludicrous as they may seem at times. They have this list. We’re building a plant that meets all those requirements. The NRC is reviewing it. They will probably say [they] want changes in it, realistically speaking, and we will complete all the design and analysis by the middle of 1992.”
