Government Technology - September 2007 - (Page 24)

One Space to Organize All Your Web Resources My Briefcase ing that without 100 percent coverage, no new nuclear plants would be built. Taylor questioned newly proposed plants’ economic viability if private lenders demand that the federal government pay 100 percent of any potential losses. “If nuclear power were economically attractive and made sense, you wouldn’t need to guarantee that loan. People like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank would be happy to loan you the money,” he said. “The argument was that there is so much risk in the market — and so much uncertainty going forward with this technology — that the first five or six plants have an unusually high hurdle.” The loan guarantees were more critical for utilities in unregulated energy states, Kray said, like Maryland and Texas, than for The UCS points to a dangerously close call at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant, owned by Ohio utility FirstEnergy, in 2002. According to the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), following the plant’s February shutdown for refueling and inspection, operators discovered a cavity had eaten through 6 inches of carbon steel on the top of the 6.5-inch thick reactor pressure vessel. It was the apparent result of corrosive coolant leakage from the reactor core. Less than a half inch of the reactor vessel’s stainless steel liner remained in the bottom of the 4-inch by 5-inch by 6-inch cavity separating the reactor’s highly radioactive and pressurized internal environment from blasting into the reactor containment build- “If your metric is how many people die from nuclear power, the answer is none in the United States. It’s a lot safer than the alternatives, like digging up coal.” Jerry Taylor, senior fellow, Cato Institute Track News & Hot Topics Store Videos & Resources Bookmark Whitepapers & Articles Save External URLs/RSS Feeds Southern states, many of which regulate their power industries, mandating when utilities must grow capacity. Regulated utilities can get affordable interest rates, due to those growth requirements, and guaranteed ratepayers to support them. Deregulated utilities don’t have either of those, and without government underwriting, get astronomical interest rates. The Safety Debate Interest in nuclear power may be growing, but debate continues over its safety. Nuclear proponents say, overall, nuclear power boasts a relatively high safety record in the United States, given that the two accidents happened during the 1970s. But the UCS, which was influential in safety upgrades mandated during the 1970s, paints a grimmer picture. The NRC shut down 38 plants for a year or longer to raise safety standards, which occurred after the Three Mile Island accident. And the UCS contends that these 38 instances cannot be considered a good record of the NRC’s effectiveness. Taylor disputes that argument. “The fact that plants shut down here or there is not particularly remarkable — so do coal mines; so do gas-fired power plants. All plants shut down — need maintenance — have things go wrong,” he said. “They take care of them. We don’t really care about that. What we care about are China Syndrome-type incidences, and things like that.” Take Our Tutorial Today! /briefcase/tour SEPT_07 Sponsored by: Confidence in a connected world. ing. This could have damaged safety equipment, and possibly set into motion a core meltdown accident, according to the NIRS. Initial company inspections also found cracks in the welds on five of the 69 nickel alloy sleeves that penetrate the reactor pressure vessel head to allow for control rod insertion to safely shut down the reactor. “FirstEnergy pushed this reactor beyond all reasonable safety margins, and the NRC basically allowed it,” said Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for the NIRS, in a statement. “This was a dangerous nuclear experiment on public safety that came damn close to exceeding the strength of a fundamental piece of reactor safety equipment, the reactor pressure vessel.” According to the NIRS, the NRC had earlier granted operators at Davis-Besse a delay from a Dec. 31, 2001 inspection report deadline on the same vessel head area of the reactor pressure vessel. Repairs on the Davis-Besse plant took two years. The plant went back online in 2004. NRC spokesman Scott Burnell defended the NRC’s handling of that incident. “The fact remains that it was detected before an accident occurred,” he said. “We have taken steps since that point to enhance the inspections that will prevent a recurrence of that event.” The NRC implemented better-defined procedures for inspectors to share information about what they found at particular plants. “For example, if an inspector at ‘plant A’ sees 52 C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 24 http://www.govtech.com/briefcase/tour http://symantec.com/publicsector http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - September 2007

Contents Point of View Big Picture ESRI Insert The Last Mile GT Spectrum Profile Nuclear Revival Way Back Machine Intel Insert Tale of TIERS Joining Forces Saving Seniors Site Seeing Quarter Miles Two Cents Products Signal: Noise Digital Communities Contents Our Road Ahead Course of Action Shared Interests Special Report: Foundation for the Future Using Wireless to Save Lives Smart Grids for Energy Conservation Community Governing and Wizards

Government Technology - September 2007

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