Nuclear Summer

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Not surprisingly, the no-nukes crowd, once radiated, is more than twice shy. Nuclear power plants may not, as the Bush Administration has pointed out countless times, emit greenhouse gases, but they carry with them their own, very real environmental risks. Most important, there is the matter of where to put all that spent fuel--40,000 metric tons, at last count--that has to be stored for thousands of years. For the moment, most of it is being kept in on-site storage pools, a costly and--according to many observers--risky proposition.

"[Radioactive waste] is still the Achilles' heel of the industry," says Edward Smeloff, director of the Pace University Law School Energy Project. In California, for instance, a new nuclear plant can't even be licensed until the feds come up with a permanent solution. The Energy Department is scheduled to decide later this year whether to go ahead with the controversial proposal to bury the waste deep within Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But with the state's congressional delegation fiercely opposing the idea, the fight could easily drag on for years. If the site could be built, it would still be necessary to find a safe way to move all the fuel there without unduly imperiling the nation's crucial freight rails.

The Administration's proposal to reexamine nuclear recycling makes watchdogs even more nervous. Such reprocessing aims to reduce waste by separating plutonium from spent uranium fuel and reusing it as a power source. But this practice hasn't been done in the U.S. since the 1970s, and opponents say it could help put bomb-grade plutonium in the wrong hands.

Even the improvements that the industry never tires of trumpeting--more efficient, longer-running plants--do little to comfort antinuclear activists. "They're running these reactors hotter and longer," says Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. Last year the Indian Point 2 plant, part of a trio of upstate New York reactors Entergy recently bought for around $1 billion, was temporarily closed down after radioactive water leaked from a ruptured steam tube. Just as the plants are getting older and more prone to problems, critics assert, the nrc is letting operators police themselves.

Still, when it comes to safety, there's no denying that the industry has made great strides. The annual number of protective automatic shutdowns at each reactor, for instance, has fallen tenfold in the past 16 years, to 0.5. Exelon and Entergy have a lot more riding on their vast nuclear portfolios than an old-line utility with one measly reactor and a guaranteed rate of return. By pooling the expertise of a much larger, dedicated staff and spreading out the fixed costs, they've been able to reduce the length of refueling outages from 100 days to 40 and to keep plants running nearly 90% of the time, compared with an average of around 60% to 65% during the 1980s.

With the value of existing plants rising dramatically, companies like Exelon and Entergy can no longer snap them up on the cheap. That's a rationale for building new ones. If that were to happen, though, Wall Street could lose its radioactive crush. The past generation of nuclear plants ran way over budget, taking more than a decade to finish and ultimately costing around $5 billion each. Back then, utilities could tack that onto customers' bills. But today shareholders may not be happy to take that risk.