Won't get fooled again
I think there's a "Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football" feeling just below the surface optimism of the nuclear industry. The nukes are looking to kick that atomic field goal once and for all. Deep down inside, they fear that just as they swing a leg, somebody (Uncle Sam, Wall Street, the greens, the invisible hand of the market) will jerk the football out of the way and the industry will take another pratfall.
The residue of history plays directly into this. Remember that the first nuclear renaissance was quite brief. Few folks are still around who remember those halcyon days of atomic power.
The nuclear boom lasted just a decade, from 1969 and the opening of Oyster Creek to 1979 and the meltdown at Three Mile Island (TMI). Prior to Oyster Creek, nuclear power was essentially experimental. The power utilities were wary of this capital-intensive technology. The 610-MW Oyster Creek GE boiling water reactor started the boom days for nukes (although how much GE lost building Oyster Creek on a fixed-cost, turnkey basis is buried in the myths of nuclear history).
But the nuclear bubble started deflating well before TMI put the radioactive kiss of death on the U.S. industry. Plant orders had dried up by 1975. The last alleged order, by Commonwealth Edison (now an Exelon subsidiary) in 1978, was a sham. The utility never applied for an NRC construction license (back then, you needed one license to build and another to drive), and ComEd withdrew the order in the mid-1980s. Every plant ordered since 1974 eventually got cancelled, as delays, cost-overruns, inflation, and skyrocketing interest rates clobbered the economics of nuclear power.
So the underlying caution of the industry as it looks at today's positive signs makes sense. Although the speakers at the nuclear conference in Washington began by exuding optimism, they usually ended by noting how much can go wrong. There are so many moving parts that all must mesh before juice reaches the grid from a start-from-scratch nuclear plant that building one is a daunting proposition. Following are the issues fraught with the most risk.
Technology
The next new nuclear plants are not your father's reactors. We're talking new technology for the most part, but not exclusively (see box). None of the advanced reactors that the NRC has certified (by reviewing engineering documents) has a performance record. Anyone building a Westinghouse AP1000 or a GE Advanced Boiling Water Reactor will be betting big money—perhaps even betting the company—on a first-of-its-kind technology.
The reactor vendors have put a lot of thought, money, and intellectual and engineering elbow grease into the new plant designs. The new plants have a real elegance about them and clearly reflect the lessons learned in the 1970s. There's a lot less brute-force engineering in the new designs and a lot more reliance on passive safety.
But, as the euphemism goes, in the real world, "Stuff happens." So there is a fundamental reluctance on the part of some potential nuclear builders to be the first to build. The line to be second is far longer than the line to be first.
The only new reactor design that has any track record is AREVA's EPR (evolutionary power reactor), a French pressurized-water design with a unit under construction in Finland. Constellation is committed to the AREVA EPR, if it decides to go ahead with new nuclear units at its Calvert Cliffs site or elsewhere. But the EPR is not yet certified by the NRC, meaning it also has technological risks.
There was considerable salesmanship among the reactor vendors at the Platts conference as they tried to convince potential buyers of the superiority of their technology. But at the end of the day, each technology has some advantages and some disadvantages, and each has technical risks as well. Choosing the technology is a high-stakes gamble, because the potential rewards are equally high
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