The convergence was too obvious to ignore. February 5, 2008, political Super Tuesday, saw voters in 24 states make their choices for Republican and Democratic nominees for president. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, given up for politically dead three months earlier, was triumphant on the Republican side. On the Democratic side, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama found themselves virtually tied for the lead and headed for a long slog to a nomination.
Two days earlier, an astonishing upset saw the New York Giants, a wild-card playoff qualifier, beat the overwhelming favorite New England Patriots in pro football’s Super Bowl XLII.
Also on Tuesday, Feb. 5, some 500 folks assembled in a fancy hotel conference room a scant block from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in Rockville, Md., at the 4th annual Platts Nuclear Energy conference to discuss the future of nuclear power in the U.S. What’s the connection to the Super Bowl? Was the meeting’s kickoff on Super Tuesday a reminder that politics, probably more than engineering, will determine the fate of the alleged nuclear renaissance?
Gaming the system
The Giants’ victory was a lesson that nothing in football, politics, or business—no matter how clear and obvious it appears—is certain. Entering the game, the Pats were masters of the universe, undefeated in 18 consecutive games, winner of three Super Bowls in the past seven years. The point spread favored the New Englanders by a dozen.
The smart money said, “Take the points.” The speculators said, “Take the Giants.” The prevailing wisdom said, “Take the Pats.” Vegas bookies took a $2.6 million bath as the smart money and the speculators won the day.
The prevailing wisdom in the nuclear industry is that its revival is already under way, with concerns about greenhouse gas emissions crippling coal, price volatility clobbering natural gas, and inherent problems (dispatchability) limiting renewables. James Miller, PPL Corp.’s CEO, described the industry’s perspective succinctly. Nuclear, he said, “is the last man standing.”
Several applications for the new, untested combined construction and operating licenses (COLs) are now docketed at the NRC, triggering a 42-month (that’s right, more than three years) review process. This is what passes for expedient regulatory action in our federal government. Bob Borchardt, who runs the NRC’s office for new reactors, told attendees at the Platts meeting that the agency has received five COL requests (not all of them complete), covering eight nuclear units.
Questions of economics, finance, and political feasibility dominated the conference. Players in the nuke arena converged in Maryland to discuss worthy issues such as how to maximize the opportunities of the NRC’s COL approach, how to manage new plant construction at existing operating plants, how to deal with the cost problems imposed by a global supply chain for commodities and services, and how to find and successfully exploit a new, inexperienced workforce.
But the main theme of the meeting was inevitably political, in this most political of years. On the minds of many utility resource planners at the conference: how to get a nuclear generation project financed and concrete poured, given the ticking policy time bomb of the November 2008 election and the installation of a new president of whatever political persuasion. Even a president friendly to nuclear power will have to learn the issues, appoint new people, and endure a transition of several months. All of that will mean delay—and time, it is said, is money.
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