Can nuclear plants get 2nd chance here after WPPSS?

E-mail this article Print this article Other links Sunday: Fortunes rise for state's only nuclear plant as nuclear power gets a second look

RICHLAND - With pressure on throughout the region for more kilowatts and a pro-nuclear president in office for the first time in a while, nuclear power is getting a second look, in both Washingtons.

But nuclear power will face a tough sell in the Northwest, where in addition to concerns about nuclear-waste disposal and plant safety, ratepayers still are paying off billions in debt for a string of partially completed nuclear plants in Washington.

Vice President Dick Cheney is expected to embrace nuclear power as part of the solution to the nation's energy needs when he unveils his energy strategy this week.

"It's amazing," Mitch Singer of the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C., a nuclear-energy trade group, said of nuclear power's PR turnaround. "It's been quite incredible, to tell you the truth." Singer sees a convergence of factors:

• The rising cost of other fuel alternatives, including natural gas, has made the operating cost of nuclear generation competitive.

• Nuclear plants are far more reliable than they used to be. While plants used to run only about 65 percent of the time, plants routinely run at 90 percent capacity today as the industry has matured and plants have worked out the bugs.

• Smaller-scale, modular-plant designs using new technology are being developed and could be cheaper to build and safer to run.

• Concerns about air pollution and global warming make nuclear power's on-site air emissions - just water vapor and heat - attractive.

• And while air emissions from coal and gas are diffused around the planet, nuclear waste can be contained. However, that doesn't make nuclear power clean: "Nuclear plants may not emit greenhouse gases, but they generate long-lived nuclear waste (that) till this day we still don't know what to do with," said David Lochbaum, nuclear-safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear-industry watchdog.

"To say something is clean that puts 500 future generations at risk is worse than what they used to accuse Bill Clinton of."

Energy Northwest, a regional consortium of public utilities, is conducting an approximately $1 million study of completing WNP-1, a nuclear plant next door to the state's only operating nuclear-power plant, the Columbia Generating Station near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

The study - funded from the $44 million in unspent construction funds for the 70 percent-complete plant - is due for release this summer. Energy Northwest says it would consider resurrecting the plant only if it got a big yes from the region.

Abundance by 2004?

Some obstacles to that resurrection are unique to the Northwest. In a region blessed with abundant, cheap hydropower, there is a question about whether the plant is needed.

The Northwest Power Planning Council has determined the region needs 3,000 megawatts of new capacity by 2003 to maintain reliable, year-round supplies of electric power. The current drought has exposed the fact that the region's need for electricity exceeds its supply in a dry year.

The need also could be bigger in the next few years because the council's calculation assumed as much as 2,500 megawatts of electricity imported from California and the desert Southwest. But California's energy woes will reduce its ability to send power to the Northwest.

Still, a lot of new generation is already proposed or under construction throughout the region.

"I think we are going to be completely awash in generating capacity in two to four years, and that doesn't even count conservation," said Jeff King, senior resource analyst at the Northwest Power Planning Council.

The council is an interstate agency created by Congress in 1981, to encourage conservation in the Northwest, ensure adequate power supply and develop plans to protect regional fish and wildlife.

"By 2003, 2004 we will have an abundance of capacity, and gas prices will be considerably below where they are right now. That's not the time to be completing a nuclear plant." Both the supply and transport capacity of natural gas are expected to be improved by then.

In 1990, the power-planning council took a look at finishing off WNP-1 and determined it would take five years.

The council estimated conservation alone could produce more power for the region than firing up WNP-1, which is designed to produce 1,300 megawatts of power. Conservation could generate at least 1,500 to 1,600 megawatts.

"Nuclear has to be viewed in the context that we have other options," King said. "Conservation, gas, wind and solar will be an option. It would be an option now if we were willing to spend the money."

The Bush administration has brushed aside the advice of U.S. Department of Energy scientists who contend half the nation's energy needs could be met with conservation and energy efficiency. Instead, the administration has embraced an aggressive campaign of power-plant construction.

Only one Northwest plant

While nuclear plants are common on the East Coast, they are an anomaly in the Northwest.

Portland General Electric unplugged its Trojan nuclear plant in 1993 after 17 years of operation because the cost of generating power was too expensive. Its reactor is entombed at Hanford.

While still paying off $6.4 billion in debt, the region has only one operating nuclear plant to show for it. Debt service paid by Bonneville Power Administration ratepayers on three of the five nuclear plants built in this region in the 1970s costs more than half a billion dollars a year.

After the cost overruns, Washington voters overwhelmingly passed Initiative 394 in 1981. It requires any public agency to put a bond issue for major plant construction to a popular vote.

WPPSS not forgotten

That could leave any future financing for WNP-1 to a private investor. Winning over Washington's voters for another round of nuclear-plant construction could be tough.

Energy Northwest formerly was the Washington Public Power Supply System, or WPPSS - pronounced "Whoops" in a not-at-all fond reference. Construction of WPPSS' five plants was bedeviled by a lack of consistent safety standards from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The plants were continually redesigned at enormous cost as the commission imposed new rules.

Some predict today's energy shortage will pass long before the political half-life of the WPPSS debacle dissipates.

"Maybe they will find an Eskimo that hasn't heard of WPPSS," predicted Tom Carpenter, director of nuclear programs at the Government Accountability Project in Seattle. "But I doubt it."

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