INL could lead nuclear comeback in the U.S.

U.S. nuclear power could be emerging from a long sleep sparked by the Three Mile Island reactor accident in 1979, widespread environmental concerns and soaring capital costs.

Today, nuclear experts like the Idaho National Laboratory's Dave Hill are confident as many as 10 reactors will be built in the next two decades.

"I think it's pretty clear there will be a nuclear renaissance," said Hill, the deputy INL director.

Right now it looks like none of the new reactors will go up at the lab or even in Idaho. Idaho Power Co. just backed out of a nuclear reactor study, Warren Buffett quickly killed consideration of an Idaho nuclear reactor, and a proposal that has moved from Owyhee County to Elmore and now to Payette has a long way to go financially and politically.

But the future of the facility eastern Idahoans refer to simply as "The Site" isn't about the next few years.

It's about the bonanza it can expect in coming decades, given its 60-year role as the leader in nuclear research and the growing interest in nuclear energy as an alternative to generating electricity without producing greenhouse gases.

The lab is uniquely poised for the role.

Half of the Department of Energy's $800 million nuclear energy research now goes through the INL (which spends half of its own budget on nuclear research).

The French firm Areva plans to build a $2 billion uranium enrichment plant near Idaho Falls by 2012.

And the Idaho lab is high on the radar screen for Congress.

The government just added $33 million to INL's nuclear facilities budget for 2010. And the lab received half of all of Idaho's federal stimulus money - the $468 million for nuclear cleanup made Idaho the fifth-highest state in per capita stimulus spending.

As climate change has challenged many long-held environmental tenets, it has placed a renewed call on something most environmentalists have stood against for years: nuclear power, which is relatively carbon-free.

The debate is at the heart of climate-change legislation that has passed the House and is now in the Senate. If Congress pushes nuclear power in the bill, it could more than double the number of reactors built by 2030.

A LONG HISTORY - AND POTENTIAL FUTURE

INL was the birthplace of the commercial nuclear power industry in the 1950s. Its leadership in nuclear safety research and reactor development continued even after the 1979 Three Mile Island incident.

Eastern Idaho long seemed immune to the nuclear fears that followed the industry from its atom bomb roots through the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union. Even as evidence that radiation from bomb testing and nuclear sites spread throughout the West, Idaho Falls has remained a bastion of support for nuclear power.

Still, Chernobyl killed the last attempt of the nuclear industry to rise, and in the early 1990s, Congress killed the INL's last new advanced-reactor design reactor program, the Integral Fast Reactor.

It wasn't until 2002 that DOE restored the INL as its leading laboratory for nuclear energy research. Since then, much of the lab's focus has been on the Next Generation Nuclear Plant Project, which would be designed to produce not only electricity but heat and hydrogen that could be used in a wide variety of industrial applications.

Today, DOE is looking for major companies to share the costs and help steer the final designs.

"If the industrial partners come in with enough money, they will decide where you build it," Hill said.

Idaho Power Co. had been planning to buy power from the INL reactor, which was scheduled to be built by 2025. When that was no longer likely, the utility joined with Energy Northwest, a consortium of utilities studying the feasibility of building smaller, modular reactors near Richland, Wash.

But Idaho Power decided not to spend its $25,000 share of the study because of budget pressures, said Mark Stokes, Idaho Power manager of power supply planning.

"It doesn't change our potential interest in nuclear at all," Stokes said. "We are still looking at all resource types as we always do."

The biggest hurdle for nuclear power is the capital costs of building a new plant. But as long as Congress is looking at regulating carbon dioxide to reduce climate change, nuclear will remain one of Idaho Power's options, Stokes said.

THE SAME OLD PROBLEM OR A NEW SOLUTION?

The debate over nuclear's role in the fight against climate change turns on two visions - both inside Idaho and out.

On one side are supporters of relatively carbon-free nuclear reactors, which already produce 20 percent of the nation's power and could create much more in a few centralized power plants. On the other are people devoted to wind, solar, geothermal and other alternative energy generators already spreading out across the American landscape.

Energy efficiency will lead all efforts to replace fossil fuels as energy sources, said the INL's Hill. But, he said, it will take all kinds of energy sources to meet the nation's and the world's needs and to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to reverse global warming.

"Because of global climate change, we need a level of nuclear power," Hill said.

But Andrea Shipley, executive director of the anti-nuclear Snake River Alliance, disagrees.

"We're relying on federal subsidies to prop up a white-knuckle industry," Shipley said.

Nuclear industry writer Dan Yurman disputes the notion that loan guarantees, which the nuclear industry says it needs to kick-start financing for future plants, are subsidies. "A loan guarantee is no different than crop insurance," he said.

The case for nuclear power to combat climate change was made earlier this month by Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

Wind, solar and other alternative energy options take up large tracts of land, including important wildlife habitat, Alexander argued in a speech Oct. 6. Nuclear power is concentrated and offers an alternative energy vision.

"My fellow Tennessean Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for arguing that global warming is the inconvenient problem," Alexander told the environmental audience. "If you believe he is right, and if you are also concerned about energy sprawl, then I would suggest that nuclear power is the inconvenient solution."

But where Alexander sees "energy sprawl," Shipley sees rural development. "When we talk about localizing energy we're talking about strengthening rural communities," she said.

Activist Kiern Suckling has fought solar and wind plants across the West that threatened habitat of endangered species like the desert tortoise. But he thinks federal agencies could reduce the sprawl problems through good management. "With some strong federal leadership you can get non-controversial solar and wind facilities built on degraded lands very quickly," he said.

Idaho would benefit from either Alexander's vision or Shipley's, said John Freemuth, a political science professor at Boise State University.

Freemuth is not yet convinced climate legislation is necessary, but if it is, vetoing either route wouldn't make sense, he said.

"If it's serious business, we have to have everything on the table."

THE PROBLEM OF WASTE MAY BE A BOON TO INL

One stumbling block for the whole industry is the decision by the Obama administration to shut down the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site in Nevada. A group of 19 national and regional pro-nuclear groups wrote Energy Secretary Steven Chu this week protesting the decision.

"Cancelling this program without providing a bona fide alternative path forward is troubling, particularly to future generations, who bear the full burden of this action," said Lane Allgood, the executive director of Partnership for Science and Technology and one of five Idaho groups that signed the letter.

The new administration has convened a blue-ribbon commission to study those options, which include reprocessing and continuing to store waste in dry casks at nuclear plants. The INL already has gotten money to study lengthening the life of existing reactors and storage facilities.

"I do not see spent fuel management being a barrier to new reactors," said Dan Yurman, a nuclear industry writer retired from the INL.

The Yucca decision may even bring more money to the INL. But nuclear power's future and the future of the INL may be tied to how fast the U.S. is forced to replace coal plants to reduce carbon emissions.

Some supporters are talking about building dozens of plants in the next two decades. If that happens, the competition for research dollars will become fierce, Freemuth predicts.

"If we do decide to go nuclear in a big way, INL is going to have to fight for its primacy," he said.

Rocky Barker: 377-6484