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News June 26, 2008, 5:00PM EST

Nuclear's Tangled Economics

(page 2 of 2)

Even $18.5 billion won't guarantee the debt needed to build dozens of reactors, though. And the current limit on the loan guarantee is just one bottleneck. Only two companies, Japan Steel Works and France's Creusot Forge, a unit of Areva, are capable of forging key reactor parts such as massive pressure vessels. There are also shortages of contractors with nuclear certification and of skilled workers—even a lack of potential sites for new reactors. The proposed plants are all next to existing reactors. Builders of the power plants, utility executives say, are unwilling to commit to fixed prices and fixed schedules. Most companies want to be paid their actual costs, including overruns, plus a reasonable return, says one CEO.

That's why experts say the much-heralded nuclear "renaissance" will be slow to flower. "I'm not quite sure the number McCain put out is obtainable," says Adrian Heymer, senior director for new plant deployment at the Nuclear Energy Institute. "If there are any hiccups in coming in on time or on budget, it will be a struggle to go much beyond the first eight or 10 plants." Exelon's Rowe adds that the industry can't grow until the government solves the waste problem, either by opening a proposed storage site in Nevada, or by setting up surface storage facilities around the country. And in the long run, to cut the amount of waste, he says, "it's very clear that we've got to have a fuel-recycling technology."

The trouble is, separating out plutonium in the spent fuel for reuse is costly and dangerous, argue critics like Princeton University physicist Frank N. von Hippel. And in any case, worries over separated plutonium being diverted to make bombs led the U.S. to ban reprocessing 31 years ago.

The upcoming election will pull many of these issues into the limelight. The nuclear industry's call for still more government support will find a more sympathetic ear in McCain than in Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.). The presumptive Democratic nominee agrees nuclear energy could help combat global warming, but he says there are better alternatives. Indeed, many Democrats and renewable power advocates are upset that the playing field is tilted so far in favor of nukes. Robert Fishman, a veteran utility executive who is now CEO of solar startup Ausra, says the investment tax credit sought by the solar industry would cost less than 1% of the dollars going to nukes and fossil fuels. "I don't think we've done a good job laying out to Senator McCain what the renewable industry can do for the country," Fishman says. So it looks like a few nuclear plants may come online in the U.S.—some as early as 2016—but not as many as McCain wants.

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"Strategy for Disaster"

In the May issue of Scientific American, Princeton University physicist Frank N. von Hippel attacks the idea of reusing spent nuclear fuel as a way to solve the waste issue. "Reprocessing spent fuel and then storing the separated plutonium and radioactive waste indefinitely at the reprocessing plant is not a disposal strategy," he concludes. "Rather it is a strategy for disaster, because it makes the separated plutonium much more vulnerable to theft." Common sense, he says, "dictates that [plutonium] should not be separated at all."

With Carol Matlack in Paris, Michael Arndt in Chicago, and Kenji Hall in Tokyo

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