Fortunes rise for state's only nuclear plant as nuclear power gets a second look

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RICHLAND -- Chuffing away at a steady 1,200 megawatts, the Columbia Generating Station near the Hanford nuclear reservation produces enough power to light Seattle. Without air pollution and without killing salmon.

It is the nuke in Seattle's back yard, the only one of five nuclear plants planned for the region that is in operation. The other concrete hulks dotting Washington from Satsop to Hanford were never finished.

But Columbia, completed in 1984 at a cost of $3 billion, has become a reliable producer. It is a metaphor of the nuclear turnaround story. Both a nightmare and a laugh line of the '80s and '90s, nuclear power is serious business again.

Costs of nuclear power are now competitive with coal and gas, once the power plants are built, and cleaner in terms of air emissions than both. Nuclear energy also is getting the first political boost since President Nixon from the Bush administration.

And the nuclear-power debate has returned to the Northwest, a place that thought the issue was dead along with its bungled nuclear plants. As the region scrounges for kilowatts, the once unthinkable is under review: expanding the region's nuclear capacity.

Energy planners are studying the viability of finishing construction of the dead plant next door to Columbia Generating Station, WNP-1, and firing it up. The debate will kick off in earnest this summer when the study is completed and open to public consideration.

Back in 1992, the Columbia plant was a dog of the industry, down more often than it was up because of malfunctions and accidents. It was hastily built and sloppily run, and the cost to generate power at the plant was so high that regional power planners were ready to pull the plug.

But after a change in management and a major repair campaign, the plant has turned the corner.

Shut down for malfunctions five times in five days in times past, the plant now runs years without problems. While it used to work only 40 percent of the time, it now runs 80 percent of the time and is down only for planned outages, including one for refueling beginning next Friday.

Thanks to better management and repairs, the cost of generation at Columbia has dropped from 5.8 cents a kilowatt hour in 1994 to about 2.5 cents today. That's competitive with the cost of coal generation (between 1.5 to 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour) and power from natural-gas plants (4 cents per kilowatt hour). Electricity on the spot market costs from 25 to 57 cents per kilowatt hour.

Folks who work at Columbia have a new spring in their step; for the first time in years, they are proud to tell people where they work.

Pillboxes and Glock 9s

Cut over the Cascades, the Columbia River and then miles of open country in the state's sagebrush steppe, and the hulking concrete block that is the Columbia Generating Station appears. Amid the concrete cubes, domes and towers, it is heaped like a child's building blocks near the Hanford nuclear reservation.

Pass the sign reading "Should you hear a steady three-minute siren you must evacuate immediately."

Go past the triple row of razor wire; the bomb sniffer; the X-ray scanner; the radiation detectors; the concrete pillboxes for taking cover in enemy fire; the anti-terrorism nets; the steel riot shields on wheels in strategic hallway corners; through the steel doors with the sign: "Warning: Grave Danger"; past a 3-foot-thick concrete wall; a steel casing; and finally inside a 9-inch-thick steel-reactor vessel.

There, packed in 12-1/2-foot-long zirconium fuel rods, are ceramic pellets the size of pinky digits, pregnant with the most powerful and poisonous fuel known to humans - uranium. Each pellet contains as much energy as a ton of coal, 149 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas.

The radioactive material is so lethal anyone running toward a hunk of it in the middle of a football field would die before he or she reached it.

Fuel rods are stored in a shimmering pool of water 50 feet deep, along with every spent rod of fuel ever burned in the reactor. The water shields the surrounding environment from the fuel's neutron and gamma radiation.

When the pool fills, more spent fuel will be stored in steel casks parked on concrete pads outdoors.

A generator harnesses the enormous energy produced as atoms are split by subatomic particles in a continuous, controlled reaction deep within the reactor's core. The heat from the reaction boils water, which produces steam. The steam turns turbines that spin a generator the size of a locomotive.

Its pulsing energy vibrates every surface in the control room of the reactor, with its backup tanks of oxygen hung on a rack by the door in case the air is rendered unbreathable.

A half-dozen workers monitor the reactor's vital signs. A hexagon glows red on the control panel, showing the reactor is running pedal to the metal.

The control room is part Oz and part insurance office, with guys in Dockers toiling under fluorescent lights.

The security guard hidden in the back with a Glock 9 mm side arm, automatic rifle, gas mask and bank of surveillance monitors is a clue to the sensitive nature of their work.

Today the staff is so zipped up a visitor putting on lip balm is met with a stern, "Sorry, I'll have to take that." A worker is concerned about even the remote possibility the salve could transport radiation beyond the reactor's walls.

Electricity sizzles over high-voltage wires from the plant to the power grid, where it is purchased at cost by the Bonneville Power Administration for wholesale to utilities around the region.

BPA carefully planned for the plant's upcoming monthlong refueling by purchasing replacement power, a sign of the plant's importance. Every kilowatt is needed.

That's big news for a plant that during the 1990s was routinely fined for faulty operations by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which criticized the plant as one of the "worst under-performers" in the country.

Remembering WPPSS

Columbia Generating Station used to be known as WNP-2. It was just one more dark chapter in the region's gothic tale of nuclear woe, courtesy of the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS), a regional consortium of public utilities nicknamed "Whoops."

Formed by the Legislature in 1957, the consortium is funded by power revenues.

WPPSS, now known as Energy Northwest, backed a series of five nuclear plants in the 1970s that foundered in a sea of construction mismanagement; falling demand for electricity spawned by recession; and skyrocketing debt.

Two of the failed plants resulted in the largest municial-bond default in history when WPPSS could not repay the $2.2 billion debt owed investors who gobbled up WPPSS' tax-free municipal bonds.

BPA is still on the hook for the $6.4 billion in debt for the other three plants, including Columbia Generating Station.

BPA guaranteed the bonds floated by WPPSS to build three of the nuclear plants, promising to repay investors whether the plants ever produced a kilowatt of electricity. In return, BPA was to receive all of the power from the plants at cost for wholesale to its customers.

Added to that financial disaster is the concern nuclear power causes anywhere: fear of radiation release, such as in the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island at Harrisburg, Pa.

The country also has no permanent safe place for its nuclear waste. Even low-level radioactive waste is usually dangerous for up to 500 years. High-level waste remains lethal for millenniums.

But the volume of waste produced is small. According to Energy Northwest, the amount of spent fuel produced to power Seattle for 60 years would fit in a 7-Eleven.

And nearly all sources of energy have some environmental price: coal stokes global warming; natural gas heats the planet; hydropower has helped put the region's once legendary salmon runs on the endangered species list.

The plant near Hanford has enabled the region to avoid an estimated $1.5 billion in expensive power purchases so far this year.

An approximately $1 million study is under way by a consultant hired by Energy Northwest to scope the cost of completing WNP-1, the dead nuclear plant next door to Columbia Generating Station.

Nationwide, 103 nuclear plants crank out about 20 percent of the nation's power. Plants across the country are applying to extend their federal licenses for another 20 years.

The proposal in Washington is different: Energy Northwest is taking a look at reviving a plant - with a vintage 1960s design - that was never completed, let alone licensed for operation.

The age of the design is not unusual; no new plant has been ordered in the U.S. since 1973. Energy Northwest engineers say completing WNP-1 and making it run is technically a "no-brainer."

The plant was maintained in its mothballed state for 12 years, at a cost of about $5 million a year, until the Supply System decided to terminate it in 1994. It was to be cut up for scrap this year.

The big question isn't technical feasibility, according to managers at Energy Northwest, but whether the economics make sense and if the region has the political stomach for a nuclear expansion.

After so many years as the region's whipping boy, Energy Northwest officials show the relief of the pardoned convict to anyone open to nuclear power.

"A lot of people don't even know there's a nuke plant in Washington," said Vic Parrish, CEO of Energy Northwest since 1996. "And they thought these nuclear plants were pretty much gone."

"The faults of the past and the mistakes of the past are to be learned from. We are doing everything in our power to show we are different. It's `You are a convicted sinner.' Well, it's time to move on."

Lynda Mapes can be reached at 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com.