THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604270475
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 154 lines
Relax, assures Virginia Power.
Its two nuclear plants in Virginia are water cooled, unlike the Chernobyl reactor in the Ukraine, which blew up 10 years ago Friday in the world's worst nuclear disaster. The doomed reactor was insulated with graphite, a flammable material.
``Totally different system,'' said Jim Norvelle, spokesman for Virginia Power's nuclear plants at Surry, about 40 miles west of Norfolk on the James River, and at North Anna in central Virginia. ``We're different from Chernobyl in almost every way you can imagine.''
His anxiety over a reporter drawing comparisons is understandable. No one in the nuclear power business wants to be mentioned in the same breath with what happened April 26, 1986, at Chernobyl Unit 4.
Yet, the 10th anniversary of the explosion and subsequent government cover-up of poisonous fallout offers an obvious pause for reflection on the state of nuclear power in general and nuclear safety in particular.
Norvelle said Virginia Power learned very little from Chernobyl since the plant's operation was so contradictory. But the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, still considered America's biggest reactor accident, certainly offered lessons.
At the time, Virginia Power was primed to open its second reactor at North Anna. But after Three Mile Island, the utility had to wait a year and implement a host of safety and emergency protocol. North Anna 2 finally cranked up in June 1980. Plans to build two other reactors at the station were put on hold, and have never come off the shelf.
If the timing was bad then, Virginia Power suffered its worst accident just months after Chernobyl exploded. In December 1986, a feed pipe at the Surry plant inexplicably ruptured, raining 600-degree water on eight workers. Four died later from burns.
The incident led to a soul-searching investigation that ultimately uncovered a problem unique to the industry: thinning pipes.
``Flow-assisted corrosion,'' as the trouble was termed, spurred an extensive replacement program and new maintenance tests that have since become standard at plants nationwide, Norvelle says.
``We found something no one had ever seen before,'' he said.
It's this unknown factor, the surprise, the unforeseen, that frightens nuclear opponents most.
While they acknowledge that utilities have come a long way in running nuclear plants, especially since Three Mile Island, critics note the symbolism of how the best minds a generation ago thought nuclear power plants would last an average of 40 years. Government statistics now show that of the 84 reactors that have been shut down worldwide, the average life span was 17 years.
As the many plants operating in the United States and Western Europe reach this age, environmentalists, scientists and engineers are asking whether such facilities are strong enough to last.
``The consequences for miscalculating with nuclear energy can be of global proportion,'' said Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Watchdog Project at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington. ``But the thing is, we know miscalculations are going to be made. We're only human.''
A stark reminder is the unwitting assurance given by Vitali Skylarov, Minister of Power and Electrification for the Ukraine, two months before the Chernobyl accident: ``The odds of a meltdown are one in 10,000 years.''
As of Jan. 1, the world could count 434 commercial nuclear reactors creating energy from the delicate technology of splitting atoms. Roughly a fourth of those reactors, or 109, were in the United States, nuclear power's biggest customer. France is second, Japan third.
The tiny island of Taiwan has six nuclear reactors, and Iran still is building its first atomic facility. The Islamic Republic was not an Islamic Republic when construction started, in 1975.
Chernobyl, on the broad plains of the former Soviet Union, consisted of four reactors before the accident. One exploded and burned, another caught fire.
Two others, however, remain active. Western countries are bartering with the Ukraine to close them. The government says it needs $4.4 billion to do so, but is balking for lack of money and for the loss of jobs and electricity.
Nuclear power advocates boast that environmental protests have faded over the past 20 years - an indication, they say, of a recognition that operations are much safer.
Not so, says Scott Denman, executive director of Safe Energy Communication Council in Washington, an interest group that touts renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, instead of nuclear power.
``The reason you don't see the protests anymore is not because we think nuclear power is clean and wonderful,'' Denman said. ``It's because there hasn't been a new nuclear plant ordered in this country since 1978. There's no plans for plants that we can protest.''
Denman quoted another statistic: No nuclear plant ordered after 1973 has been completed. He said this illustrates two points - the incredible amount of time it takes to open a nuclear plant, and how the nuclear power industry has stalled.
``Nuclear power will fail not because of its enemies, but because of itself,'' Denman said, adding that billion-dollar start-up costs, construction delays and a maze of safety and environmental regulations are making nuclear power increasingly less attractive to American utilities.
Consider the case of the Watts Bar nuclear plant in Tennessee. Ordered in 1972, the facility was thought done more than 10 years ago. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government's chief watchdog agency, would not release a license until several safety and liability concerns were corrected, explained Roger Hannah, an NRC spokesman in Atlanta.
The utility in question, Tennessee Valley Authority, ran into money problems and legal questions, and the plant languished. Finally in February, 24 years after its beginning, Watts Bar received an operating license.
Still, the plant only generates energy at about 12 percent of its capacity, and more hurdles must be jumped before full power is allowed, Hannah said.
``They've had a rough go,'' he said. ``But you can see the time and effort these utilities face.''
The Shoreham plant, in Long Island, N.Y., never fully came on line despite years of negotiation and construction. It eventually was shut down and left for decommissioning, which promises more expenses and more trouble.
Of the 20 U.S. plants that have closed in nuclear power's history, six have shut down since 1989. Most were older plants that faced huge upgrade costs and ``an uncertain economic future,'' said Sue Gagner, an NRC spokeswoman in Washington.
Environmental protests have not completely evaporated. They just center on different issues now. Most notable is nuclear waste.
As of 1992, the latest year statistics were available, 30,000 metric tons of highly radioactive wastes and spent fuel rods sat idle at the country's nuclear plants.
They're not supposed to be there. They're supposed to be buried at a protected, permanent storage site that the U.S. Department of Energy was charged to build.
Under a law passed by Congress in 1982, the federal government was to accept all commercial wastes in 1998. Utilities contributed millions of dollars for a storage site, but politics, environmental concerns and bureaucracy have stalled the project.
Yucca Mountain, a former bombing range in the Nevada desert, was tentatively selected as the storage site. But even under best-case scenerios, the facility won't be ready for at least 12 years. So now Congress is discussing the construction of a temporary storage yard in Nevada that environmental activists have labeled the ``Mobile Chernobyl'' alternative.
``Why are we going to transport thousands of shipments of nuclear waste out to the desert, risk an accident, then face the very real possibility we'd have to move the whole lot again?'' asked Denman. ``Tell me this makes sense.''
With time and space running out, however, frustrated utilities and government officials may not have another choice. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
VP Chart
Diminishing expectations
[...estimates at various times for the world's capacity for
generating nuclear power in the year 2000.]
[In billions of Watts]
Waste in their backyard
[on-site accumulation of high-level radioactive waste....]
[In thousands of metric tons stored]
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KEYWORDS: NUCLEAR POWER NUCLEAR POWER PLANT ATOMIC ENERGY by CNB