During the last several decades, the U.S. nuclear energy industry has endured a prolonged slump. The last permit for a new nuclear power plant was issued in 1979; the last new plant to be built, the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City, Tennessee, finally went online in 1996 after being commissioned in 1970. Because of attrition, 10% of the nation's aging reactors have been removed from service in the last 10 years. But nuclear energy still supplies 20% of the nation's electricity, and the tide appears to be turning back in its favor.

The Washington, DC-based Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the industry's leading trade group, recently unveiled a plan to add 50,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity to the electrical grid by 2020. The plan is supported at least in principle by the Bush administration, which has made increased use of nuclear power a high priority in its energy policies.

According to Mitchell Singer, a spokesperson for the NEI, the additional wattage could be supplied by 50 new reactors, most of which could be installed in existing plants where the requisite infrastructure and public support are already in place. Additional wattage can also be supplied by "uprating" a plant's power-generating capacity by making certain structural changes. According to the NEI, uprates completed since the 1970s have allowed nuclear energy's contribution to the power grid to rise, even as the number of active reactors has declined.

And what of the health and environmental concerns that once made nuclear power such a hot issue? Stakeholders acknowledge that the industry's safety record has been very good since 1979, when a reactor meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was narrowly averted. Also to their environmental credit, nuclear power plants don't release greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

But the key problems--and the resulting criticisms--haven't gone away, says David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC. "The risk of a catastrophic accident has always been a low-probability, high-consequence event, and it's still in the same category," he says. Terrorist attacks on nuclear infrastracture--an acute concern in the wake of September 11--have raised the stakes even higher. Nuclear reactors are potential targets, as is what the NEI estimates to be 44,000 tons of radioactive waste spread throughout the country (the total produced by all nuclear industry activities in the United States to date), much of it under water in so called spent fuel pools. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a nonprofit group located in Takoma Park, Maryland [see EHPnet, p. A19], says some pools "contain even more radioactivity than the reactors," adding that a deliberate attack on these temporary repositories could be "comparable to a reactor accident."

A suitable option for permanently storing radioactive waste remains elusive and highly controversial. Only Yucca Mountain, located in a remote rocky region in Nevada, is currently under federal review. Singer says that if approved by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), 77,000 tons of nuclear waste could be stored deep in the mountain's core. But any decision to go ahead with the project risks a huge public backlash. Critics charge that Yucca Mountain is vulnerable to earthquakes, and according to Makhijani, the site has poor natural containment for radionucleides. [See EHP 107:A68-A73 (1999) for more information on Yucca Mountain.] Lochbaum insists, however, that DOE studies on these issues show that earthquake effects are most profound on the surface and would have little impact on the 1,000-foot-deep repository, which could be designed to reduce risk from fault displacement. Also, he adds that DOE assessments show that any radionucleides would represent a very small portion of the overall background exposure levels for radiation. Still, problems with the site remain contentious and unresolved, as illustrated by the DOE's long-inconclusive studies and review, which have been ongoing since 1982.

Lochbaum acknowledges that nuclear power may be a suitable alternative for the short term and agrees that even the expansion called for by the NEI may be appropriate. But he adds that alternative energy sources must be developed to handle the nation's long-term energy needs. "There are more attractive options," he says. "Conservation and renewable fuels could provide the same environmental benefits and then some, without the risk of a catastrophic accident."

Charles W. Schmidt

Last Updated: December 26, 2001