As we find when waiting for buses here in the UK, nothing happens for ages and then suddenly a whole load of them turn up at once. Something similar seems to be happening in the USA when it comes to applications for licences to build and operate new nuclear power stations. After a gap of 29 years, with no applications at all, new reactor permitting – using the USA’s streamlined but as yet untested licensing process – has now become something of a growth business. Let’s hope the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the resources to cope.
In July, UniStar (a joint venture of Constellation and EDF in partnership with Areva and Bechtel) submitted the first part (the environmental section) of an application for a 1500 MWe Areva EPR – formerly European Pressurised water Reactor, but now apparently standing for Evolutionary Power Reactor – to be sited at the Calvert Cliffs site.
But NRG Energy really got the ball rolling in September when it submitted (along with the South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company, in which NRG holds a 44% stake) a full application for a combined construction and operating licence (COL) for two 1350 MWe ABWRs at the South Texas site (see pp 30-32). (It has, incidentally, been a busy couple of months for NRG, which has gone from bankruptcy a few years back, in the wake of Enron, to becoming something of a pioneer in the field of decarbonised baseload generation, with the signing of an MoU in November that paves the way for demonstrating Powerspan’s ECO2 post combustion capture on a commercial scale at its Parish coal fired plant.)
A second full COL application was placed before the NRC in October. This was submitted by the NuStart Energy consortium, along with TVA, and is for two 1100 MWe Westinghouse (now Toshiba) AP1000 reactors at the Bellefonte site in Alabama.
A third full COL application was due to be submitted on 27 November, by Dominion, for a GE Nuclear Energy, now GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, 1520 MWe ESBWR at its North Anna site.
As the table left shows two more COL applications were expected before the end of this year, while 14, covering 20 units, are currently expected in 2008, and a couple more in 2009.
Three “early site permits” (ESPs) have also been awarded this year, for Clinton (Exelon), Grand Gulf (System Energy Resources, an affiliate of Entergy) and North Anna (Dominion), while an ESP for Vogtle (Southern Nuclear Operating Co) is under consideration. ESPs are essentially partial construction permits, allowing the would-be developer to establish that a site is suitable for future nuclear plant build before large amounts of money are spent.
In addition utilities have been reserving and even placing contracts for long lead items such as superheavy forgings and other vessel components, generators and steam turbines. For example in mid November a letter of intent was signed by UniStar and Alstom for the supply of “a minimum of four” Arabelle steam turbine generators for its planned fleet of EPRs, providing “certainty in the global supply chain,” as UniStar put it.
This flurry of activity has been prompted by a growing realisation that nuclear power is worthy of serious reconsideration in a carbon constrained world and also by two US government initiatives: the Nuclear Power 2010 programme, which provides support for the licensing of lead (or “reference”) reactor projects using new technologies (eg ESBWR and AP1000); and provisions in the 2005 Energy Policy Act (EPACT 2005) designed to incentivise “first movers.” These provisions include loan guarantees, risk insurance and production tax credits designed to reduce the burden of first of a kind costs, indemnify the first six plants against delays due to regulation and litigation, and improve the economics of the first 6 GWe of new nuclear capacity once it is operating.
But none of this of course guarantees that any of the growing number of planned new nuclear projects will get as far as the construction and operation stage.
EPACT 2005 also contained provisions designed to encourage IGCC, but a number of planned IGCC, and for that matter pulverised coal, projects in the USA now seem to be unravelling – and as the case of the Stanton IGCC plant shows, even getting as far as ground breaking does not necessarily mean that a project will get completed. Uncertainties about the future of carbon regulation and general cost inflation are proving particularly damaging to the IGCC case. Nuclear power benefits from carbon worries, but is very prone to cost hyperinflation – and some of the numbers we have been seeing recently in the USA, eg $13 billion for a couple of reactors (as reported in NEI, November 2007), may raise eyebrows in utility board rooms.
The NRG approach is to try to control uncertainties by going for what is basically 20 year old technology, but as we have seen in Finland at OL3 that doesn’t always prevent delays. A basic problem there seems to have been going to site with too little of the detailed design complete (a failing we were particularly good at in the UK when we used to build reactors). This must be avoided if there is to be any hope of a nuclear revival in the USA: the industry must not underestimate construction times and costs as it has done too often in the past.