The eyes of Texas—and the rest of the world—are upon NRG Energy after its September application for licenses for two new reactors at South Texas Project (
see Global Monitor). The filing was the first of its kind in nearly three decades and the first of up to 30 like it expected over the next few years. However, most industry observers—including yours truly—expected a nuclear utility to be first out of the gate, not a company that emerged from bankruptcy less than four years ago.
How will NRG stand up under the heightened scrutiny? It depends on how well it solves a certain equation.
Perception is reality
Peter Sandman (www.psandman.com) was a professor of journalism specializing in media coverage of environmental issues in March 1979, when Three Mile Island Unit 2 suffered a partial meltdown, ending orders for new reactors in the U.S. The Columbia Journalism Review asked him to go to the site and "cover the coverage" of the TMI disaster. Years later, Sandman wrote a series of articles based on his findings there and elsewhere, recommending ways for nuclear utilities to improve their public communications during crises. It's my observation that his advice applies equally well to utilities looking to invest billions in advanced nuclear units.
In the late 1980s, Sandman coined the formula Risk = Hazard + Outrage in an effort to quantify the public fear caused by a nuclear power mishap. For example, although there was no chance that the molten core of TMI Unit 2 would breach the containment below and create a real public hazard, the public's outrage—fanned by poor communications and exacerbated by release of the movie The China Syndrome just 12 days earlier—heightened the perceived risk of such an event. Conversely, the full meltdown of Chernobyl Unit 4 in Ukraine seven years later was extremely hazardous, yet the outrage it generated in the U.S. paled in comparison.
Sandman's formula can be likened to the International Nuclear Event Scale developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1990 to standardize reporting of nuclear events to the public. The scale runs from zero (an event with no safety significance) to a Chernobyl-like seven. On this scale, TMI was a five. A 1980 level-four accident in France passed without notice in the U.S., while the corrosion discovered at the Davis-Besse nuclear station in 2002 rated a three—though its outrage factor was much higher.
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