Nuclear Power: Time to Choose

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That endorsement marks one of the few recent positive developments for an industry that has been mired in misery for more than two decades. Faced with an endless round of challenges, U.S. utilities have walked away from 120 nuclear plants since 1974 -- more than all the plants now in operation. In New York State, the Long Island Lighting Co. gave up on its completed $5.5 billion Shoreham nuclear facility in 1989 after local authorities refused to approve the firm's plans for an evacuation route for nearby residents in the event of a serious accident. The state now plans to buy the plant for a token $1 -- and to spend about $186 million to dismantle it.

Such fiascoes have for years discouraged virtually every U.S. utility from even looking sideways at nuclear power. "We have no plans to build a nuclear plant," says Pam Chapman, a spokeswoman for Indiana's PSI Energy. The troubled company is still reeling from the financial crisis that sandbagged it in 1984, when it wrote off $2.7 billion in construction costs for a half-built reactor. Concurs Gary Neale, president of nearby Northern Indiana Public Service Co., which scrubbed a barely started nuclear plant in 1981: "We're not antinuclear, but given the size of our company, I just don't think it ever would be practical for us."

Nor is nuclear power currently practical for any other firms in America, Wall Street experts argue. "The first utility that announces plans to build a new nuclear reactor will see its stock dumped," warns Leonard Hyman, who watches electric companies for Merrill Lynch. Hyman estimates that abandoned U.S. nuclear projects have generated some $10 billion of losses for the utilities' stockholders. "Investors are not quite ready to warm up to nuclear power just yet," says Hyman. "They're still recovering from their first chilling experience -- and it was very chilling." He adds, "There is no demand for new plants, because no one wants to spend the next 10 years in court or being picketed."

All that resistance stems from fear, and the overriding fear these days is of nuclear waste. Says I.C. Bupp, managing director of the Massachusetts-based Cambridge Energy Research Associates and a longtime student of nuclear energy: "There will be no nuclear renaissance until a waste-disposal program exists that passes some common-sense test of public credibility and acceptability."

The public's dread centers on the radioactive elements that remain in spent fuel rods after atomic reactions. While such highly toxic fission products as strontium 90 and cesium 137 have half-lives of only about 30 years, other intensely radioactive substances like plutonium will endure for tens and even hundreds of millenniums, and are piling up fast. High-level waste -- that which is most radioactive -- from U.S. power plants is not voluminous. More than 30 years' worth totals 17,000 tons, a thimbleful compared with the slag that would result from generating equivalent power by burning coal. Yet this waste threatens to fill all available storage space at generating facilities, and the U.S. has made little headway in developing a safe final resting place for more of it.