GREENSBORO

The last U.S. nuclear reactor was approved when the Berlin Wall was firmly in place, abortion had just been legalized in the United States and women were still burning their bras.

But the power source that seems more Cold War than War on Terror is poised for a comeback -- and North Carolina, possibly even the Piedmont Triad, is at the forefront of the movement.

In the past 12 months, six utilities have told the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they might build nuclear power plants.

And two, Duke Power and Progress Energy, have said that theyre looking at sites in North Carolina. Progress doesnt operate in the Piedmont Triad.

Duke Power does, and it owns at least two properties -- in Davidson and Davie counties -- that fit the basic criteria the company has set for housing nuclear reactors. The two sites, which adjoin each other, are about 40 miles southwest of Greensboro.

Duke says it is considering about a dozen sites across its coverage area in North and South Carolina for a nuclear plant. The company isnt divulging which sites are being considered, only that it will announce its plans by Jan. 1.

And the Charlotte-based company is considering options other than building nuclear plants. It could expand its coal-fired plants or buy electricity from the wholesale market.

But coal-fired plants are a tricky option, especially in North Carolina, because of new limits on smog-forming emissions such as those produced by burning coal.

Duke already has begun preparing a construction and operating license for a nuclear plant, and many energy experts say its just a matter of time before one of the major U.S. utilities commits to new nuclear power.

My belief -- and the belief of a lot of people in the industry -- is that somebody is going to take that next step and commission a new reactor, Mitchell Singer, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, said. Its more than just a gut feeling. Theres definitely a consensus.

Nuclear industry officials say that the new reactors will be safer than the ones in operation today, and they point out that no one in the United States has died after any nuclear-reactor incident.

The United States did have a near-miss in 2002, when workers at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant outside Toledo, Ohio, discovered a football-sized hole in the reactor vessel. The problem had been missed by Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors.

Depending on who you ask, we were three months to a year and a half away from a Three Mile Island type event, at the least, said Edwin Lyman, a nuclear specialist and senior staff scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists. The Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania suffered a core meltdown in 1979.

And while new reactors may be safer, experts widely agree that the first companies to build those new reactors would be taking on a greater risk than those that follow.

If youre talking about a first-of-a-kind anything, even a car, these are very complex systems, and there are going to be things you didnt understand, Lyman said. You just hope they dont rise to the level of a real problem.

Still, utilities are poised to act. That consensus has grown over the past year as utilities searched for new ways to meet ballooning power demand.

Natural-gas power plants were the darlings of the 1990s, but as natural gas prices remain high, theyve lost their luster. Not to mention, natural-gas plants cant provide the kind of so-called baseload power needed to meet projected demand.

The U.S. population has grown by almost 20 percent in the past 15 years. Our houses are bigger -- averaging more than 2,300 square feet -- and fewer people are living in each one. We have more gadgets, more appliances and more big-screen televisions.

And those trends are expected to continue -- which add up to a big demand for electricity. In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy expects electricity sales to increase by about 50 percent between now and 2025.

That increase could be even more dramatic in high-growth states such as North Carolina. Duke Power and Progress Energy, formerly known as Carolina Power & Light, each add between 30,000 and 40,000 new customers each year in the Carolinas.

In the face of increasingly stringent regulations on plant emissions, like the N.C. Clean Smokestacks Act, utilities are looking to nuclear power to meet demand.

Nuclear plants, unlike coal-fired plants, do not produce greenhouse gases, which cause smog and contribute to global warming.

Nuclear has no impact other than waste, said Paul Turinsky, head of the nuclear engineering department at N.C. State.

But the issue of what to do with spent fuel, or nuclear waste as its commonly called, is unresolved. The government has planned for it to be stored in Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but the project has been repeatedly delayed, and most nuclear plants are storing spent fuel on-site.

Many think tanks, advocacy groups, and a growing number of businesses think conservation, not new nukes, should be the wave of the future. Wal-Mart, for instance, announced an initiative last month to dramatically decrease its energy consumption over the next 20 years.

Its really important over the next few months that we have some public debate on these issues, said Jim Warren, executive director of advocacy group N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network.

In many ways, the Triad is already at the center of that fledgling debate.

One statewide environmental groups annual meeting, held in Mocksville last month, focused almost entirely on the issue of a nuclear revival in North Carolina.

Mocksville is near the two Duke properties in the Piedmont Triad - - about 1,600 acres in Davidson County and 1,700 acres in Davie County, both on the Yadkin River. Both sites were purchased in the 1970s as potential sites for power plants.

In the late 1970s, the company considered building three nuclear reactors on the Davie County site, and did initial environmental studies, before scrapping its plans in the early 1980s.

Duke officials say they abandoned plans for the plant because electricity demand fell short of their estimates, but opposition groups say public outcry played a role.

As speculation mounts that the Davie site is being considered again, groups like Clean Water for North Carolina and Citizens Against Perkins (the Davie property is commonly referred to as the Perkins site) are publicly opposing a nuclear plant.

Clean Water members dont think the Yadkin River has enough water to safely meet the cooling needs of a nuclear plant, and its members also are concerned about the effect of low-level radiological releases -- not to mention the potential for a catastrophic event.

The group is pushing for alternatives like conservation and renewable energy. Conservation is the only truly clean way to improve energy effectively, said Hope Taylor Guevara, executive director of Clean Water.

Contact Elyse Ashburnat 373-7090 or eashburn@news-record.com