- NEW YORK (Reuters) - A consortium
of seven companies, including the two largest U.S. operators of nuclear
plants, on Wednesday said it plans to apply for a license that would allow
it to build the first new U.S. nuclear power plant in 25 years.
-
- The consortium's immediate intent is to work with the
U.S. Department of Energy to test a new process from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission for obtaining a license for an advanced nuclear power reactor.
-
- In addition, "we want to demonstrate there's broad
interest in the industry for pursuing a combined operating license,"
said Craig Nesbit, a spokesman for Exelon Nuclear, a division of Exelon
Corp., the No. 1 U.S. operator of nuclear power plants and a member of
the consortium.
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- There is no plan at this time to build a new nuclear
reactor, the consortium emphasized in a statement. No company has followed
through with plans to build a new nuclear plant since the worst nuclear
disaster in the nation's history at the Three Mile Island plant 25 years
ago.
-
- The plan is to complete the application and submit it
in 2008. The NRC is expected to make a decision on the application by late
2010, after which any of the consortium's members could build a plant under
the license.
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- The energy companies in the consortium are Exelon; Entergy
Corp., the No. 2 U.S. operator of nuclear power plants; Constellation Energy
Group ; Southern Co. ; and France's state-owned electric company Electricite
de France .
-
- The consortium also includes two nuclear reactor vendors:
Westinghouse Electric Co., a unit of British state-owned nuclear company
BNFL, and General Electric Co. .
-
- The news first appeared in an article in the New York
Times.
-
- Each energy company is expected to contribute to the
consortium about $1 million a year in cash plus other services, totaling
about $7 million over seven years per company, according to a statement
from Entergy.
-
- The application is likely to cost "hundreds of millions
of dollars" because of the amount of engineering work required, Nesbit
said.
-
- As for the projected cost of a plant, he said, "Nobody
really knows. In fact, one of the outcomes of the application will be a
much better understanding of what one of these plants will actually cost."
-
- Soaring construction costs and safety concerns after
the partial reactor meltdown at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania
in 1979 scared U.S. utilities away from building new nuclear plants. Instead,
the industry has relied almost exclusively on building cheaper, cleaner
natural gas-burning plants to meet rising electricity demand.
-
- But due to a growing shortage of natural gas in the United
States and concerns over emissions from older coal-fired plants, utilities
are looking at the nuclear option again.
-
- The consortium's intended application comes at the behest
of the Department of Energy, which last November asked energy companies
to test the NRC's new licensing process. The process was established in
1992 in a bid to streamline the licensing process, but it has never been
tested.
-
- "The old system was very cumbersome. You had to
build the plant before you could get an operating license," said Nesbit.
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- "They changed that to make it much more streamlined
and compact to where you actually get the license and then build the plant."
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