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The climate for building new nuclear power plants in the United States hasn't been this good for decades. The Bush administration is solidly behind them. Some prominent foes have changed sides, embracing uranium-derived electricity as the best available answer to global warming. Boosters are wearing told-you-so smiles.
And Congress is doing its best to help. After establishing liability limits and start-up assistance for new plants, it voted last year to offer utilities a variety of direct incentives and structured them to favor the first half-dozen plants to leave the drawing boards. Companies that design and build reactors are also said to be trying to jump-start new business by offering limited-time discounts.
The results, so far? Exactly one utility, Constellation Energy in Maryland, has contracted to buy parts for a new reactor, the first such order since 1973. While the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been saying for months that perhaps two dozen new plants are getting active consideration, polls of utility executives find that most think any notion of a nuclear renaissance is fanciful _ that nuclear power will, at best, maintain its 20 percent share of U.S. power generation, with a dozen new reactors at the most. And the reasons have less to do with Three Mile Island or Yucca Mountain than with Wall Street.
When utilities began canceling orders for new reactors in 1973, everyone still assumed the problem of storing spent fuel would be solved. The crisis at Three Mile Island was six years away; the first true nuke-plant catastrophe, at Chernobyl, wouldn't happen for seven years after that.
Safety and environmental concerns have shaped public opinion, but the core reasons for America's 30-year hiatus in building new nuclear plants lie in unfavorable balance sheets. Industry analysts say the outlook is no brighter today despite the many factors _ tougher pollution caps for coal plants, higher natural-gas prices, pending controls on greenhouse gas emissions _ that theoretically should favor more cheap, clean nukes.
But to consider nuclear power "clean," you have to ignore the pesky problem of permanent waste disposal, and to consider it "cheap" you have to focus only on the ultimate cost to make a kilowatt-hour of juice over a span of decades. Nuclear plants are more expensive than fossil-fueled counterparts to site, license, build, operate and secure; and they are slower to pay off on investment, for which the front-end needs are larger.
These factors, plus additional uncertainties of regulation, make them harder to finance. For any kind of power plant, a utility typically tries to pre-sell the power before it breaks ground, and customers just aren't as quick to sign long-term contracts for their power supplies when the electricity will be coming from uranium.
So for every utility like Constellation that opts for a new nuke, there will be multiple others that invest elsewhere _ like Constellation's competitor, PPL, which decided to invest $1.5 billion in cleaning up emissions from its coal burners. Besides environmental benefits, PPL expects further payoffs as pollution limits get tighter and, perhaps, as emissions reductions become tradeable assets.
On a smaller scale, but at an accelerating pace, private investment is moving toward alternative technologies of sustainable power generation, conservation and efficiency. The nuclear era that began with promises of electricity "too cheap to meter" has given way to a time when a dollar invested in conserving electricity returns six or seven times value of a dollar invested in making more of it.
So today the consensus seems to be that nukes have served their purpose, and will continue for a while to do so, but the future lies somewhere else.
