Nuclear power still has big problems, too
June 23, 2009
Back to the future.
Duke Energy announced this week that it wants to build a nuclear power plant in Piketon, about 100 miles east of Cincinnati, due south of Columbus.
Duke provides electricity to most of Warren and Butler counties, as well as the Cincinnati area.
The company is confronting the fact that its Ohio business is now coal-based. And coal is a problem.
Washington seems to be moving toward some sort of limit on the carbon emissions that are associated with coal. (Some legislative proposals would hit Ohio particularly hard.)
Whether the much-talked-about "cap and trade" legislation passes or not, the coal industry seems likely to be on the defensive for a while, given the ties that science sees between carbon dioxide and global warming.
The utility apparently doesn't see the new-fangled likes of solar, wind or geothermal energy as quite ready to meet its needs. So it's returning to a technology that it sees as relatively tried and true. It operates other nuclear reactors out of state.
The last time Ohio turned to the nuclear option, things didn't work out. Three utilities, including Dayton Power & Light, started work on a nuclear plant known as the Zimmer project - also east of Cincinnati - in the early 1970s.
After much went wrong, and after $1.7 billion was spent, they gave up, turning the plant into a coal-fired one, and spending another $2 billion to do it.
So the fact that Duke says it wants a plant now doesn't mean a plant will happen, notwithstanding the enthusiastic support of the likes of Gov. Ted Strickland and Sen. George Voinovich. This is the beginning of a long, long effort.
The people around Piketon are more familiar than most with the dangers of a badly run nuclear operation. The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War project, resulted in several thousand workers and their survivors collecting hundreds of millions of federal dollars in this decade for resulting medical problems. The contamination is still being cleaned up, with stimulus money.
Even today, nuclear reactors come with a lot of problems. They are enormously expensive. They take forever to come on line, in part because every plant is different; there's no kit. Also, the country is still fighting about what to do with waste that nuclear reactors generate. And what to do with nuclear plants when their lives are over is still an issue.
Still, the fact is that nuclear energy has undergone a sort of rebirth in popularity since its earlier problems, including the famous Three Mile Island incident. A partial core meltdown at that nuclear plant in Pennsylvania scared the nation. That happened as the Zimmer plant was being built.
Nuclear technology - and the attendant safety precautions - have come a long way. And nuclear plants have operated a long time without any huge human catastrophe, at least in the West. France has 59 nuclear plants providing most of its electrical power, with excess to export.
Meanwhile, every other kind of power generation turns out to have its problems. These days, any kind of mass energy source that doesn't necessarily hurt the environment and doesn't come from the Mideast has a lot of attraction.
Ohio - especially Appalachian southern Ohio - has to be somewhat happy about any major corporation wanting to build just about any major project these days. Officials are saying that construction alone could provide 4,000 jobs.
But any nuclear project does still have to be kept under a powerful microscope. Nuclear is very far from problem-free. It just poses a different set of problems.
- Cox News Service
Back to the future.
Duke Energy announced this week that it wants to build a nuclear power plant in Piketon, about 100 miles east of Cincinnati, due south of Columbus.
Duke provides electricity to most of Warren and Butler counties, as well as the Cincinnati area.
The company is confronting the fact that its Ohio business is now coal-based. And coal is a problem.
Washington seems to be moving toward some sort of limit on the carbon emissions that are associated with coal. (Some legislative proposals would hit Ohio particularly hard.)
Whether the much-talked-about "cap and trade" legislation passes or not, the coal industry seems likely to be on the defensive for a while, given the ties that science sees between carbon dioxide and global warming.
The utility apparently doesn't see the new-fangled likes of solar, wind or geothermal energy as quite ready to meet its needs. So it's returning to a technology that it sees as relatively tried and true. It operates other nuclear reactors out of state.
The last time Ohio turned to the nuclear option, things didn't work out. Three utilities, including Dayton Power & Light, started work on a nuclear plant known as the Zimmer project - also east of Cincinnati - in the early 1970s.
After much went wrong, and after $1.7 billion was spent, they gave up, turning the plant into a coal-fired one, and spending another $2 billion to do it.
So the fact that Duke says it wants a plant now doesn't mean a plant will happen, notwithstanding the enthusiastic support of the likes of Gov. Ted Strickland and Sen. George Voinovich. This is the beginning of a long, long effort.
The people around Piketon are more familiar than most with the dangers of a badly run nuclear operation. The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a Cold War project, resulted in several thousand workers and their survivors collecting hundreds of millions of federal dollars in this decade for resulting medical problems. The contamination is still being cleaned up, with stimulus money.
Even today, nuclear reactors come with a lot of problems. They are enormously expensive. They take forever to come on line, in part because every plant is different; there's no kit. Also, the country is still fighting about what to do with waste that nuclear reactors generate. And what to do with nuclear plants when their lives are over is still an issue.
Still, the fact is that nuclear energy has undergone a sort of rebirth in popularity since its earlier problems, including the famous Three Mile Island incident. A partial core meltdown at that nuclear plant in Pennsylvania scared the nation. That happened as the Zimmer plant was being built.
Nuclear technology - and the attendant safety precautions - have come a long way. And nuclear plants have operated a long time without any huge human catastrophe, at least in the West. France has 59 nuclear plants providing most of its electrical power, with excess to export.
Meanwhile, every other kind of power generation turns out to have its problems. These days, any kind of mass energy source that doesn't necessarily hurt the environment and doesn't come from the Mideast has a lot of attraction.
Ohio - especially Appalachian southern Ohio - has to be somewhat happy about any major corporation wanting to build just about any major project these days. Officials are saying that construction alone could provide 4,000 jobs.
But any nuclear project does still have to be kept under a powerful microscope. Nuclear is very far from problem-free. It just poses a different set of problems.
- Cox News Service