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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Constant Reader who wrote (121440)	6/22/2005 10:04:23 AM
From: MulhollandDrive	Respond to of 793739

does one exist? maybe in france...or coming soon in iran...<g> but i just found this googling the news...apparently there is hope when even the democratic leadership is taking a seriously hard look freep.com Remember nuclear power? It's getting popular again June 22, 2005 BY JAMES KUHNHENN and SETH BORENSTEIN FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF WASHINGTON -- Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Yucca Mountain. For the past 25 years, a nuclear industry already saddled with prohibitive costs and radioactive waste struggled in the face of fears about nuclear power. But the atom is rebounding. President George W. Bush plans to tout the benefits of nuclear power today when he visits a nuclear power plant at Calvert Cliffs, Md. He also will promote energy legislation that the Senate is debating this week. It includes tax incentives, loan guarantees and federal liability protection for new reactors. The Senate bill also would authorize $1.3 billion for cutting-edge nuclear-hydrogen projects. An industry burdened with high reactor-construction costs and expensive disposal of nuclear waste is inching toward competitiveness as a cleaner, though still distrusted, alternative to coal as the electric-power source of the future. No less a skeptic than Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., recently touted the pro-nuke provisions before Congress. "You're going to see a movement toward nuclear power," he said. "If it's done right, we believe it will protect the environment." Even a handful of environmentalists -- a group that long viewed fission with suspicion -- say they could tolerate new nuclear power because it doesn't cause global warming, the top environmental problem to many. "Climate change is such a serious issue . . . that we have to examine all low-carbon and especially zero-carbon solutions," said Judi Greenwald of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, an environmentalist think tank. 104 plants running No electrical utility has built a nuclear plant in the United States since the 1970s. Right now, 104 plants operate at near full capacity, including DTE Energy Co.'s Fermi 2 plant in Monroe. But after almost 30 years of cooling interest, nuclear is getting hot. Yet it may never reach critical mass. Wall Street, which has to finance new multibillion-dollar reactors, hasn't joined the nuclear chorus. Bankers and investors want to see something built first, creating a chicken-and-an-egg scenario, says one top economist who studies nuclear-power finance. "There's a lot of focus on Congress and what Congress wants to do and the subsidies," said Geoff Rothwell, an economist at Stanford University who has advised the Department of Energy on nuclear-power economics. "But it all depends on Wall Street and whether or not Wall Street wants to be involved in financing nuclear power. At this point they're not interested." Or, as Jason Grumet, the executive director of the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, said: "The interest in nuclear power is necessary, but not sufficient to rejuvenate the industry." Still, "the momentum gained in the past six or eight months is palpable," said Mike Wallace, the president of Constellation Generation, which has 34 power plants, including five nuclear ones. The industry's spending in new nuclear planning "is at a level we haven't seen in 25 years." Wallace acknowledged that Wall Street isn't willing to risk financing nuclear projects that could be caught up in regulatory delays. That's why federal aid is needed to build the first three or four plants to demonstrate nuclear's new feasibility. Partial meltdown The partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 resulted in tighter government regulations but transformed the public's abstract apprehension into real fear. The 1986 accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine, which killed 30 people, forced massive evacuations and left a legacy of thyroid cancer among its survivors, turned fear of nuclear-plant disasters into horror. Over the past two decades, however, reactor technology has improved, global warming has emerged as the most profound environmental worry and the energy industry has realized that coal, which accounts for 52 percent of electricity production in this country, would require expensive technology to reduce pollution.