A ‘Nuclear Renaissance' Stumbles Forward

September 9, 2009, 8:40 am

By Matthew L. Wald

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/a-nuclear-renaissance-stumb...

A dispatch from the uneven march toward new nuclear reactor construction:designs awaiting federal approval.
General Electric on Wednesday claimed a significant step toward getting one of its advanced reactor designs, the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor, approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - although the model has recently lost most of its customers.
Westinghouse, in contrast, has customers lined up for its new reactor model, the AP1000, but it was recently told by the N.R.C. that certification would be delayed because the company has been slow in answering the regulators' questions.
When the last round of reactors was built, mostly built in the 70s and 80s, companies got a construction permit and then, after a plant was mostly finished, asked for an operating license, often creating delays.
A new licensing procedure was reformed in the 1990s to make the process faster and more predictable. Vendors like Westinghouse and General Electric submit a variety of designs for approval, and utilities then choose from a selection of these approved designs, pairing them with an approved site and generating a "combined license" to both build and operate the plant.
But with a recession that has both reduced demand for electricity and made it difficult for utilities to borrow money, considerable uncertainty surrounds planned reactor projects- despite the expedited process.
G.E., along with its nuclear reactor partner Hitachi, said on Wednesday that it is moving ahead. "Over last 5 years, we have answered well over 6,000 questions from the NRC,'' said Daniel L. Roderick, senior vice president of GE-Hitachi. "We have all of those answered; we have zero open right now,'' he said.
But while Exelon, the Chicago-based utility, had planned to build two of G.E.'s new reactors in Victoria County, Texas, the utility dropped the idea last November, at least partly because of delays in design certification. It switched to an older Hitachi design.

Dominion, another large energy provider, still has plans on file for an E.S.B.W.R. in Virginia, but it says it is exploring alternatives.
Detroit Edison is the only company still on record as wanting to build an E.S.B.W.R.
Mr. Roderick, interviewed by telephone from London, said he was negotiating for purchases by several European utilities, and that the reactor would be built there and in the United States.
Westinghouse, meanwhile, won approval for a smaller version of its reactor, the AP600, in 1997, and then for the AP1000 in 2006.
But then the company submitted an amended design to the N.R.C., and now it's waiting for approval.
On August 27, the N.R.C. told Westinghouse in a letter that "schedule revision was necessitated" by the company's slowness in providing design information. Westinghouse, the regulators said, had delivered some information later than promised.
(The N.R.C.'s engineers are mulling the AP1000's reactor sump - the area under the reactor where debris would accumulate in some kinds of accidents. The schedule for when the Commission would approve the design was left unclear.)
Still, Georgia Power and South Carolina Electric and Gas, both leading candidates to receive loan guarantees from the Energy Department for new reactors, both have plans on the table to build the AP1000, and four other customers have also chosen that design, for construction at some later point.