Oct 11 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Jack King Albuquerque Journal, N.M.

Nuclear power is not the solution to global warming, any more than any other currently available technology, says Jim Ferland, Public Service Company of New Mexico's vice president for energy resources.

But, nuclear fuel releases no carbon dioxide and its reputation has improved in the last decade, as concerns about global warming have grown, he said.

"Climate change is changing environmentalists' attitudes, not across the board, of course, but you can see a fundamental shift as the environmentalists weigh global warming and weigh the overall impact of nuclear versus the alternatives. Ten years ago, if you had told me that I would have told you 'No way,' '' Ferland said.

Speaking at a luncheon of the New Mexico Utility Shareholders' Alliance last week on the topic of sustainability in a carbon-constrained world, Ferland emphasized that nuclear energy is only one of several approaches that must be used to address global warming and rising energy costs.

He also said PNM is not currently planning to build a new nuclear facility, preferring to focus on building natural gas-firedand renewable energy-fueled plants. The company has said it is considering additional nuclear power in its future generation mix.

In a side-by-side comparison with other options, some of the benefits of nuclear are apparent, Ferland said.

Wind and solar power are clean, but intermittent, sources of energy, and some of the technological elements of solar energy still need to be worked out, he said.

Unlike natural gas, nuclear fuel is relatively cheap and, while coal is cheap, it releases lots of carbon dioxide and it may get more expensive if governmental caps on carbon releases are ever approved, he said.

Carbon sequestration -- the idea of storing carbon dioxide underground or even underwater -- is much discussed, but no one has really contemplated the problem of what to do with all that stored carbon dioxide, he added.

Ferland said disposing of nuclear waste remains a huge political issue, but ranked it only at the "medium" level on his list of challenges facing the industry. Besides the Yucca Mountain, Nev., storage site, dry storage in barrels and, eventually, recycling the spent fuel for further use can provide safe storage alternatives until a final solution is reached in 30 to 40 years, he said.

Of greater concern is the challenge of avoiding cost overruns and meeting schedules when building new nuclear plants, a problem for the industry when it was building in the 1960s and 1970s, he said.

There is also the problem that "big iron," the huge, high-pressure vessels required in nuclear power plants, are no longer built in the United States. There are only two places in the world where they are still built, one in Japan and the other in France, he added.

Finally, licensing a new plant through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can take up to 10 years and costs between $50 million and $100 million, he said.

Despite the cost, NRG Energy Co. submitted the first application to the NRC in 29 years to build a new 2,700-megawatt nuclear plant in south Texas, and approximately 10 other utilities are developing license applications, Ferland said.

The federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 contained production tax credits and government loan guarantees for the first few new clean coal and nuclear power plants, he said.

Before joining PNM, Ferland was vice president of global nuclear field services for Westinghouse Electric Co. Prior to Westinghouse, he was president and chief executive officer of Louisiana Energy Services, which is building a uranium enrichment plant near Hobbs. The plant was the first successful licensing of a major nuclear project in the United States in 20 years.