America's nuclear industry is about to embark on its biggest expansion in more than a generation. This will influence energy policy in the rest of the world

Atomic renaissance

Nuclear power - Atomic renaissance | Briefing | The Economist

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OVER the next few months America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) expects to receive 12 applications to build new nuclear-power reactors at seven different sites. It is preparing to see plans for another 15 at 11 more locations next year. These will be the first full applications to build new nuclear plants in America for 30 years. If they are all successful, the number of reactors in the country will increase by roughly a third. The output of nuclear electricity would grow even more sharply—the new reactors would be more powerful than older ones. The new enthusiasm for building reactors means America's long-awaited “nuclear renaissance” is about to become reality.

Whether it is a leap forwards or a step backwards remains to be seen. Since the 1970s, far from being “too cheap to meter”—as it proponents once blithely claimed—nuclear power has proved too expensive to matter. The problem is finance: nuclear plants cost a lot to build but are relatively cheap to run, unlike gas-fired ones, for which the reverse is true. So to be profitable they must be built quickly, to minimise the period when no revenue is coming in and interest payments are piling up on construction loans. Yet America's previous generation of nuclear plants was plagued by safety scares, design revisions and time-consuming regulatory procedures, which resulted in ruinously protracted construction.

America's most recent nuclear plant, at Watts Bar in Tennessee, started operations in 1996. But it took 23 years to complete at a cost of $6.9 billion; a second reactor at the site has been under construction, on and off, since 1973. Another plant, at Shoreham in New York, was completed and tested, but never allowed to start commercial operations because of local opposition. By the time it was decommissioned, in 1994—21 years after construction had begun—the costs had exploded from $70m to $6 billion. The local utility was able to pass most of this bill on to its customers. Not all energy firms have been so lucky: in 1988 Public Service Company of New Hampshire became the first American utility to go bust since the Depression, thanks largely to the fallout from a much-delayed nuclear project. 

Even when they were switched on, nuclear-power stations did not fulfil their promise. They were supposed to run almost constantly, but proved much less reliable. In the early 1970s, for example, the average nuclear plant produced power for under half the time. Since most utilities had planned to run them flat out to generate enough revenue to repay their debts, this poor performance led to further financial troubles. And, as anti-nuclear activists complain, all this happened despite the government's generous subsidies to help cover the costs of developing new designs and building prototypes.

What is worse, nuclear power has a spotty safety record. There have never been any catastrophic releases of radiation in Western countries. But one did occur in 1986 at Chernobyl, in what was then the Soviet Union and is now Ukraine. America came perilously close to such a disaster in 1979, when a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania overheated and began to melt down. There have been lesser safety scares and scandals in many countries, including Britain, Germany and Sweden. In August an earthquake resulted in several small leaks of radioactive material from a nuclear reactor in Japan.

The next generation of nuclear plants is said to be very different. Firms which make them, such as America's General Electric and Westinghouse, and foreign manufacturers like France's AREVA, insist that such episodes will soon be a thing of the past. Their latest designs, they maintain, are simpler and safer than existing nuclear plants. That should make it easier to obtain operating permits, allow them to be built faster and be cheaper to run—and so much less risky financially. Meanwhile, contractors are said to be getting better at building them, the NRC better at regulating them and utilities better at running them. Although nuclear power's boosters welcome a smorgasbord of new subsidies that Congress has approved to nourish the industry, they say that in the long run even this will not be necessary because the industry will be able to move forward under its own nuclear-generated steam.

America's utilities have certainly warmed to their existing nuclear-power plants now that they are running them more efficiently. In the 1970s, says Colette Lewiner, of Capgemini, a consultancy, even small municipally owned firms ordered nuclear reactors, imagining they would be no more complicated to operate than their existing power stations, except in so far as workers would need uranium to shovel into the furnace instead of coal. But they found that they had neither the expertise to maintain their new investments, nor the scale to absorb all the extra regulatory costs, nor the clout to secure fuel and parts at competitive prices. Many ended up putting their nuclear plants up for sale.

That allowed bigger firms to acquire reactors on the cheap, and thus to achieve economies of scale and to capitalise on their experience. These nuclear specialists have been able to speed up the refuelling process, keep shutdowns for maintenance to a minimum and so keep the reactors going more of the time. Last year the average nuclear reactor in America was in use 90% of the time. Better still, utilities have found ways to improve the non-nuclear parts of the power station, such as the steam turbines. These so-called “uprates” have increased America's nuclear capacity by almost 5,000MW since 1977, the equivalent of about five new nuclear reactors, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. At the same time, the NRC has agreed to extend the working life of about half of America's nuclear plants for an extra 20 years.

All this has turned nuclear-power plants into virtual mints—as long as the bill for construction has been paid down or written off. In most of America, the wholesale power price is closely linked to the price of natural gas, since gas-fired plants tend to provide the extra power required at times of peak demand. So the price of power has risen along with that of gas over the past few years, whereas the operating costs of nuclear plants have remained relatively stable. According to the Energy Information Administration, a government agency, the average wholesale power price in 2005 was 5 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh); the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, reckons that the average operating cost of America's nuclear plants was 1.7 cents per kWh that year. So their margins were almost 200%.

No wonder that utilities are rushing to the NRC with their plans for new reactors. But to get any of them off the ground they must not only persuade the NRC of the safety of their designs, but also convince potential creditors that there will be no repeat of the financial meltdowns of the 1970s and 1980s. They point to three reasons for optimism: changing conditions in the energy business, a streamlining of the NRC's process for obtaining permits and an overhaul of construction techniques.

Until recently coal-fired plants seemed to be safer investments. But nowadays most utilities expect—and in some cases are calling for—Congress to limit emissions of greenhouse gases in the near future to temper climate change. Coal-fired plants, which have a working life of 40 years or more, spew out globe-warming pollution, whereas nuclear ones produce almost no greenhouse gases at all. So coal is now subject to a massive “regulatory risk” of its own. Utilities are piling into green-generation technologies, such as wind turbines and solar panels. But for a constant source of clean power, they have few choices other than nuclear.

Meanwhile, to avoid the fiascos of the past the NRC has simplified its procedures. It used to require utilities to obtain two different licences, the first to build a nuclear plant and after that a second licence to start it up. Both applications involved lengthy reviews, which culminated in interminable public hearings. New reactors, like the one at Shoreham, could be finished at great expense and yet never secure an operating licence. So the NRC is combining the two stages: utilities can now apply for a single “combined construction and operating licence”. Construction need not start—and for most bits of the plant is not allowed to—until the licence is issued.

To speed things up even more, the NRC is allowing firms selling nuclear reactors to get designs cleared in advance. That way, when a utility applies to build a reactor of an approved design, the NRC will only need to review the modifications that are unique to its site. Westinghouse has already got its AP-1000 model cleared; the NRC is in the process of certifying GE's latest design, called the ESBWR, and AREVA is about to submit an application for its new offering, the EPR.

By the same token, utilities can now ask the NRC to approve a location as suitable for a nuclear-power station before they go to the trouble and expense of applying for a combined licence. Four firms have asked for these “early site permits” and two have already received them. Another short cut involves submitting the environmental part of a combined licence before the part that deals with the design. UniStar, a joint venture between America's Constellation and Électricité de France (EDF), filed that sort of paperwork in July for a new reactor in Maryland.

The NRC has also made a point of asking utilities about their nuclear plans before any applications arrive. This is so it can be sure it will have enough staff to handle them—which is how it knows how many new plants are in the works. It is hiring about 200 new staff every year, and since most of the utilities contemplating nuclear plants are in the South, has set up a field office in Georgia to co-ordinate with them directly. It is even planning to suggest to Congress possible amendments to the relevant laws to reduce the hassle and uncertainty of licensing even more.

The process will still be time-consuming: the NRC reckons it will need two and a half years to review each application and a further year to conduct hearings on its conclusions. Certification of new reactor designs might take as long as four years: AREVA says its application for the EPR runs to 17,000 pages and fills a small bookcase. Nonetheless, the NRC aims to issue its first new licences at some point in 2011.

Obstreperous local authorities could still put a spanner in the works. It was opposition from county and state officials, for example, that finally did in the Shoreham plant. Although they have no explicit authority to block a new reactor, local officials can withhold permits to use the water from a river for cooling, for example, or refuse to co-operate on emergency planning. But utilities are hoping to avoid such pitfalls by locating their new reactors only in welcoming jurisdictions—preferably next door to existing ones. Locals in such places know that expanding existing nuclear facilities will bring more jobs and produce more tax revenue. Moreover, they have grown accustomed to having nuclear reactors nearby and do not find the idea particularly frightening. As Dale Klein, chairman of the NRC, puts it, the staff and management of nuclear plants, and local residents, all go to church together.

Utilities are also confident that they can build new reactors more quickly than before. Many have already placed orders for the parts that take a long time to build. They have also brought in partners that have completed nuclear projects on time and on budget in other countries. Westinghouse, for example, points to the exemplary record of its parent company, Toshiba, in Japan. Similarly, GE has teamed up with Hitachi, another respected Japanese nuclear contractor. AREVA, meanwhile, looks to the series of successful plants it has built in conjunction with EDF in France. All three vendors say they plan to save time and money by using as many identical parts as possible for the different nuclear plants they build in America—unlike the bespoke designs of the past. All this should reduce the time required for construction to four years, they say, which would allow the first new reactors to enter service in 2015 or 2016.

But bankers are still sceptical. They are worried that when the new designs and the NRC's new procedures are put to the test, hidden flaws will emerge. After all, the first of AREVA's EPR designs is under construction in Finland and is two years behind schedule and dramatically over budget. To avoid such nasty surprises, NRG Energy, a power-generation company that is applying to build two new reactors in Texas, has opted for one of GE's older and already-proven designs, even though GE insists that its ESBWR will be cheaper to build and to run. Other utilities are planning to build nuclear plants in the regulated markets of the South, in the hope that the regulators will allow them to pass any cost over-runs on to their customers.

Even so, says David Crane, NRG's boss, banks are simply not prepared to lend money to build nuclear plants in America without some extra surety. The Energy Policy Act, which Congress approved in 2005, is supposed to provide that. It offers four different types of subsidies for new reactors. First, it grants up to $2 billion in insurance against regulatory delays and lawsuits to the first six reactors to receive licences and start construction. Second, it extends an older law limiting a utility's liability to $10 billion in the event of a nuclear accident. Third, it provides a tax credit of 1.8 cents per kWh for the first 6,000MW generated by new plants. Fourth, and most importantly, it offers guarantees for an indeterminate amount of loans to fund new nuclear reactors and other types of power plant using “innovative” technology.

The scope of these loan guarantees is the subject of great controversy. Some politicians fear that the costs of the programme might balloon; others complain that the Department of Energy, which will administer it, is too stingy. Meanwhile, some financial experts argue that the rules, as drafted, would not allow issuing banks to repackage and sell on the loans in question, making them less attractive. There is also some debate about what proportion of a nuclear plant's debt should be covered: the act says up to 80% of the costs of construction, but that might be sufficient to cover the full amount borrowed, leaving banks with no risk at all. Until all this is settled, utility bosses insist, new nuclear plants will not get built.

The fate of America's nuclear waste, which the government has vowed to sequester for a million years, is another unresolved issue. In theory, the Department of Energy is in charge of looking after it all. It requires utilities to set aside a tenth of a cent for each kilowatt-hour of nuclear power they generate to help defray the costs of transporting nuclear waste to a safe repository and storing it there permanently. The only hitch is that no such repository yet exists.

Most countries with nuclear power have determined that the safest way to store their waste is underground, deep in the bedrock in air- and watertight containers. But no one has actually built such a facility. America has got as far as selecting a site for one, at Yucca Mountain, a ridge in the middle of a former nuclear-testing ground in Nevada. The Department of Energy is planning to submit an application to the NRC next year to build a repository there. The NRC, in turn, thinks the application will take about three years to review. Officials say the facility will be open for business in 2017.

But Harry Reid, a senator from Nevada, has vowed to derail the scheme. As it is, Congress has been cutting funding for the Yucca Mountain project, which was first proposed in 1978 and has since been the subject of several lawsuits. Now that Mr Reid has become Senate majority leader the odds of the repository ever getting built have diminished.

Meanwhile, nuclear waste continues to pile up in ponds and containers at nuclear plants around the country. The NRC monitors these and claims that they are safe for the foreseeable future. But Mr Klein, its chairman, tactfully hints that it would be prudent for the government to find a more permanent solution, especially since it is encouraging a dramatic expansion of nuclear power.

Nonetheless, Mr Klein believes that the expansion of nuclear energy is now in motion and is unlikely to be slowed down by concerns about what to do with the waste. The only thing that could stop a nuclear renaissance now, he suggests, is a serious accident at an existing plant. Unfortunately, it would not be the first.

Nuclear power

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Atomic renaissance

America's nuclear industry is about to embark on its biggest expansion in more than a generation. This will influence energy policy in the rest of the world

Briefing September 8th 2007

From the September 8th 2007 edition

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