Apr 14 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Dave Flessner Chattanooga Times Free Press, Tenn.


For America's power industry and its regulators, the long nuclear winter appears to be over.

With proposals for 26 new reactors from TVA and 16 other utilities, the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday the agency is gearing up for its biggest workload in a generation.

The NRC has added nearly 1,000 more employees in the past six years to review plans for the next generation of nuclear reactors and the fuel enrichment plants that will supply the additional units.

"This is a very busy time for us," NRC Chairman Dale Klein said Monday after touring the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar Nuclear Plant. "It's a challenge, but we believe we are ready and are committed to continuing to protect the public health and safety."

NRC and TVA officials said Monday they do not anticipate the kind of problems with the new reactors that led to costly delays at TVA plants built in the 1980s and 1990s.

TVA was within days of loading nuclear fuel at its Watts Bar Unit 1 in 1985 when safety problems were discovered that led to an 11-year delay and a doubling of the cost to finish the unit.

"We know a lot more today than we did in 1985 and we have resident inspectors that have been closely watching what has been going on," Klein said.

No new nuclear reactor construction projects have been started in the United States since the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.

TVA spent more than $6 billion on Watts Bar Unit 1 and now expects to finish Unit 2 at Watts Bar for another $2.5 billion. The plant is located near Spring City, Tenn.

Klein and NRC Commissioner Kristine Svinicki are touring TVA facilities this week in preparation for the agency's decisions on licenses for the plants over the next decade. The federal utility is building what may be the last of the previous generation of nuclear plants at its Watts Bar plant and what may be one of the first of the next generation of reactors at its Bellefonte site in Northeast Alabama.

TVA and the Southern Co. in Georgia also are proposing to build more reactors using a new AP-1000 design by Westinghouse Corp. Utility officials say the new reactors can supply additional power in the next decade without the greenhouse emissions caused by coal-fired power plants.

Critics of nuclear power fear that regulators are not being tough enough on the utility industry. They claim the NRC shouldn't approve older designs like the ice condenser containment system at Watts Bar, which is smaller and less secure than other types of containment.

Anti-nuclear critics also want the NRC to do more to review new plant designs.

"The NRC has been very reluctant to make changes that impose more burdens on the industry, yet they are vigorously pursuing risk-informed changes to reduce regulations," said Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Klein insisted that the ice condenser containment used at Watts Bar and eight other reactors, including TVA's Sequoyah plant near Soddy-Daisy, "certainly meet the objectives that they need to in the unlikely event of an accident."

But the NRC chairman said he doesn't anticipate such containment to be used in the future because of the challenges of maintaining the ice in the walls of the containment building.

At the urging of Congress, the NRC streamlined its licensing process for new plants. Manufacturers have designed what they claim will be simpler and safer nuclear plants built in a more standardized fashion than the previous generation.

Louise Gorenflo, a member of the Bellefonte Efficiency and Sustainability Team, which is fighting the proposed Bellefonte reactors by TVA, questions the safety of the new design.

"These are untested reactors whose cost seems to continually go up," she said.

After touring Watts Bar, Klein said he was "very impressed" at the amount of construction already done and praised TVA's well-planned approach to the project.

"It was much farther along than I had expected," he said.

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