Nuclear plant remains a distant goal

Nuclear plant remains a distant goal

by Ron Georg
contributing writer

Moab Independent Times Review

According to Transition Power Development chief executive officer Aaron Tilton, his company isn’t working on a nuclear power plant, which may or may not be located near Green River – they are working on a nuclear power plant site, which may or may not be located near Green River.

“There are two major decisions to make. The first is, do we license the site?” Tilton said. “The second is do we build the units that are now licensed? The way that we’re running our process, the decision has only been made to license. As to whether to build or not, that can come anywhere in a 20-year period. It may not make economic sense early on, depending on what is the capacity on the grid for the current consumers and utilities.”

For now, what they’re building is value, he said. “The sites will have value in and of themselves with the license associated with them,” Tilton said. “And it’s a separate decision, a value decision, for building the plant. It’s not as straightforward a question as ‘are we going to have a plant?’”

While the only site Transition Power has identified for a potential nuclear power plant is the new industrial park Emery County is developing on state School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration property, Tilton emphasizes that it is only one of a number of options. “We have other sites that we’re looking at as well. Whichever site comes up with the best environmental characteristics, that’s certainly our primary concern, and that’s where we’ll go.”

With Colorado River water rights from Kane and San Juan Counties, Transition Power can operate anywhere from Flaming Gorge reservoir to Lake Powell. Tilton said the company has identified an unspecified number of private parcels where a plant could operate. The Green River site has gotten publicity because it’s necessarily part of a public process.

That process has attracted the attention of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah. John Urgo, outreach director for HEAL Utah, visited Emery County to address the county commission and to hold a public information meeting.

“We wanted to raise some concerns about the project, but mainly to tell the county that they’re one of the only state agencies which will have any say over this project, then it goes to the feds,” Urgo said. “We just wanted to tell people that, if you do have concerns, now is the time to raise them.”

Emery County economic development director Mike McCandless suggested that HEAL Utah’s concerns are misplaced, and that there is plenty of time to address the issues. “Frankly, we’re an energy producing county, so it doesn’t intimidate Emery County to have [a nuclear plant] as something being considered for the site. But there are so many obstacles, issues, public meetings, processes before we get to that point, it strikes me as funny that we’re having so much feedback at this point,” McCandless said.

Tilton also said it’s still early in the planning process. “Now it’s viable. But these are the very first stages. Licensing is five years, construction is five years. If everything goes without a hitch, you’re still talking 10 years.” And, as he noted, construction will be based on market forces.

However, despite the long process ahead, much of that will be at the federal level. Transition Power has already submitted a letter of intent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and they’ll begin the licensing process in 2010 – a process that Tilton said will cost $20 million to $30 million.

With those upfront costs, followed by billions of dollars in construction, nuclear power plants have never lived up to the promise of “energy too cheap to meter,” but Tilton says they can be competitive. “If you take the cost for kilowatt for plants using nuclear as the heat source to generate energy, it’s lower than the average cost for a coal-fired plant,” he said. “The difficulty in the ‘60s and ‘70s was every single plant was a one-off custom plant. Every plant they built was different than everything that had been built. That’s where the cost overruns came.”

Today, with standardized plant designs, Tilton said costs are more predictable. Once the plant is licensed, Transition will be able to use solid numbers to determine its economic viability.

Urgo wonders why Emery County would want to wait through that process. “The county has said they’re doing this because they want economic development and job creation, and Emery County is in dire need of that,” he said. “If this is really about economic development, why wouldn’t the county want a more assured bet?”

According to McCandless, the county didn’t pursue nuclear power, it just “dropped into our lap.” He’s been targeting other industries with his marketing for the industrial park – including alternative energy.

“I have talked to photovoltaic companies, I have talked to wind companies, and not just companies to deliver that power, but actually construction, like construct wind towers or photovoltaic cells,” McCandless said. “You know what, every other state in the county is targeting those same people. We want to have those kind of alternative companies come here, but, guess what, so does everybody else.”

In recent years nuclear power has enjoyed a shift in public perception as climate change has become perceived as a more immediate threat than the radiation danger presented by nuclear waste. Prominent environmentalists such as James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, have come out to insist that deploying nuclear power immediately could stop the rise of carbon levels in the atmosphere.

Urgo said the pace of nuclear development, especially in this country, precludes that goal. “You have climate change scientists saying, ‘We need to do things now, right away, this problem’s getting out of hand,’” he said. “Sure, we need to take immediate action to reduce our carbon emissions – and a nuclear reactor is going to take 10 to 15 years to come on line, whereas the development of wind takes much less. In 2006 the equivalent of two nuclear reactors worth of wind power came online in the U.S., within a year. So that’s much more rapidly deployable.”

Still, Urgo acknowledged that his public meeting at the John Wesley Powell Museum in Green River attracted more nuclear power supporters than detractors. He said they see the alternative as becoming more like Moab. “When I was in Green River I found the last thing they want to be is the next Moab. They don’t want to be tourist-driven economy, but at the same time they want to keep their small town.”

Tilton agrees that Emery County has been gracious. “The local support has been tremendous,” he said. “I think people still have a few questions and it takes a little bit of education for people to understand what nuclear power is, and what it is not. Sometimes people think of mushroom clouds, and that’s not nuclear power.”

Urgo will continue his outreach efforts with Emery County residents, but he points out that nuclear issues are larger than the footprint of a nuclear power plant. “It’s not just an Emery County thing, it will affect people in Grand County as well,” he said. “But, unfortunately, Emery County calls the shots.”

© moabtimes.com 2008