Fueling a Fight?

Winston-Salem Journal
Sunday, May 15, 2005

Nuclear plant at old Yadkin River site could fit Duke's plans for expansion

By Jim Sparks and Brian Louis

JOURNAL REPORTERS

As Duke Power Co. explores ways to generate more electricity, including possibly building a new nuclear-power plant, company officials are taking a fresh look at a site they proposed for a nuclear plant more than 30 years ago in southeastern Davie County.

Dense forest, with pockets of pastureland, dominates the old Perkins site along the Yadkin River, about eight miles southeast of Mocksville. Duke Power owns 1,836 acres in the area, most of that now used as gameland.

Company officials say they need to expand capacity because they are adding as many as 60,000 customers a year in their service area in North and South Carolina.

"We're looking at every site in our territory," said Tom Williams, a Duke Power spokesman. "Sites we own and sites we don't own.

"Nuclear power is just one of the options that company officials are exploring. But its consideration highlights the change in the U.S. electricity industry, which for years has relied on natural gas to fuel new power plants. Declining domestic supplies and sharply rising costs of natural gas, however, have led utilities to take a new look at coal and other fuels.

In March, Duke Power officials met with staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to discuss the issues involved in applying for a federal license to build and run a nuclear-power plant.

Building a new nuclear plant would take about nine or 10 years. The company expects to decide by the end of the year whether it will proceed, and if so, where.Williams stressed that the company has not made a decision.

"Not by any means. This is far from being a given," Williams said.

"We don't want to get people there spun up," he said. "But clearly, it's property we own and could be a potential site.

"Duke Power, environmentalists and the state and federal governments began wrangling over the Perkins site in 1973, when the utility announced plans to build three nuclear reactors there along the Yadkin River. The plant would have produced about 3,840 megawatts of electricity.

Opponents, armed with questions about radiation, water use and the plant's effect on aquatic life, staged a 10-year fight to stop the plant. They argued that the amount of water allowed for use in the plant's massive cooling towers, as much as 25 percent of the river's flow, would draw the Yadkin down to dangerous levels and cause problems at High Rock and other lakes downstream.

Despite having the needed permits, the company backed off the plan in the early 1980s in the wake of the near-disaster at Three Mile Island, dropping energy demand and state concerns over the amount of water the plant would take from the river. There have been no nuclear plants built in the United States for 30 years,

Terry Bralley, Davie County's manager, has met annually with company officials for the past few years to talk about the Perkins site. The last meeting took place about a year ago.

He said he hasn't given the property much thought even after hearing about Duke's prospective expansion.

"It's probably too early to speculate," Bralley said. "Right now, we're just going to wait and see what, if anything, they propose. I feel sure that if the site is getting serious consideration, we'll be contacted."

Other community leaders also said they haven't heard any concerns circulating in the community.

David Springer, one of the most vocal opponents of the proposed Perkins plant 30 years ago, isn't surprised that the company is revisiting the nuclear issue.

"I knew they would be one day," said Springer, who lives in Mocksville but owns a farm along the river in Cooleemee.

Now 93, Springer said he wouldn't be leading any new battles, but he's still keeping a wary eye on the company. "I'll try to keep up with it, but I can't fight anymore," he said.

He says he still thinks that the site is a bad choice for a nuclear plant because of its proximity to the river.

"There is no way a nuclear plant should go there," Springer said. "How would a nuclear plant have gotten along during the bad drought we had a couple of years ago? How much water would have been left for Salisbury and South Carolina all the way down?"

Duke Power is also planning to expand capacity at plants using conventional fuels.

On Wednesday, the company announced filing a $2.35 billion proposal with the N.C. Utilities Commission to build new power generators at plants near Salisbury and Shelby.

The utility proposes adding a new 800-megawatt coal-fueled unit at its Cliffside Steam Station on the Broad River on the Cleveland-Rutherford County border in 2010. A second unit of the same size could also be added later. However, the company would not go ahead with this option if it makes good progress toward a new nuclear plant by 2014, officials said. The total cost could be $2 billion.

At Buck Steam Station in Rowan County, Duke proposes spending $350 million to add a 600-megawatt natural gas and oil-fueled, combined-cycle unit. However, it won't move ahead with the project if it can buy power more cheaply on the open market.

Certain factors, though, are making conventional power less attractive to Duke.

Duke's coal plants are aging. The newest was built 30 years ago and the oldest more than 60. State and federal limits on the amount of pollution the plants can emit are expected to keep getting tougher.

Natural gas is a very clean fuel, but natural-gas plants are expensive to operate, experts said.

Nuclear-power plants use heat from the decay of radioactive fuel to generate electricity. Unlike burning gas or coal, the process produces no carbon dioxide, the compound blamed for global warming.

Nuclear plants are expensive to build, costing as much as $2 billion each. Operating expenses, however, are considered low.

"Once a plant is built, moving forward, it is relatively inexpensive to operate," said Mitch Singer, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group for the nuclear-energy and-technologies industry, based in Washington.

Rita Sipe, a spokeswoman for Duke, said that the company is studying how much it would cost to build a plant and reactor technology. The analysis will be used to make a decision on whether to apply with regulators to build a plant.

General Electric Co. and British Nuclear Fuels PLC's Westinghouse unit are designing two new nuclear reactors. NuStart Energy Development LLC, a consortium of utilities formed in 2004, commissioned the work. Duke Energy Corp., the parent company of Duke Power, is part of the NuStart consortium.

New technology notwithstanding, nuclear power remains a controversial subject.

"Nuclear energy has a number of positives about it," said Mike Mayfield, a professor of geography at Appalachian State University. But the issue of waste disposal remains a significant challenge.

Mayfield said that currently "most of it is stored on-site" at nuclear-power plants and that there are also a number of places where it is shipped. Federal plans to create a permanent underground-storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have long been stalled.

Dan Besse, a public-policy lawyer who focuses on environmental issues, remains strongly opposed to nuclear power.

He called nuclear fission an outdated technology surrounded by too many unresolved issues including construction costs and health and environmental concerns.

"There is no economical or practical way to detoxify the waste. That means you've got to store the most toxic material for a length of time that far exceeds the duration of any government in history."

Because Duke Power's projections on energy demand were way out of line when the company proposed the Perkins plant 30 years ago, Besse said that it would be prudent to scrutinize them closely now. "The history of their projects tells us that their numbers need to be independently studied," he said. "They appear significant and meaningful. But the first thing the utility commission needs to do is carefully examine their demand projections."

Besse argues that because nuclear plants are so expensive to build, the possibility of government subsidies for new nuclear construction -an idea that has been floated by the Bush Administration - is the only thing holding power companies' interest in the plants.

Construction costs and the impact on Duke Energy's 500,000 shareholders are clearly on the minds of Duke officials as they ponder a new nuclear plant.

"Investors have a reasonable expectation of ongoing, predictable earnings from their investment," Brew Barron, the chief nuclear officer for Duke, said at a conference in February "Shareholders should not be unfairly penalized for a project that is clearly good for both the customers and the environment."

For this reason, he said, some government involvement could be helpful in building nuclear plants.

"Whether it is at the federal or state level, innovative solutions need to be created which alleviate these valid shareholder concerns," Barron said.

• Jim Sparks can be reached at 727-7301 or at jsparks@wsjournal.com
• Brian Louis can be reached at 727-7378 or at blouis@wsjournal.com

• Information from Bloomberg News and The Associated Press was used in this report.

 

Information from: Winston-Salem Journal, http://www.journalnow.com

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