Amid all the talk of new and more environmentally safe ways to produce electricity, several public utilities and the federal government have been quietly working together behind the scenes to hammer out a new kind of nuclear power plant that will be easier for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to monitor and cheaper for utilities to build and operate. Now, according to a recent report from the New York Times, the two have reached an agreement which has resulted in the approval of not just a new design, but of three new facilities that are scheduled to break ground almost immediately.
As most people recall, the building of new nuclear plants came to a virtual standstill in the United States after a minor accident at the Three Mile Island facility and then a major accident at Chernobyl in the Ukraine (a part of the Soviet Union at the time). Since that time, utility companies finished projects they were working on but put a stop to all new construction, yielding to the public’s fear.
The news that the United States is forging ahead with plans to build new nuclear plants is likely to come as a surprise to many as other countries, most notably in Europe, as reported in the Guardian, have shuttled such plans and Germany has stated that it plans to get rid of all its current plants.
The Times suggests that the U.S. government has become convinced that nuclear power plants can be made safer (despite the recent major accident at the Fukushima plant in Japan) by using a standard blueprint, and a design that uses far less mechanical parts, which means less chance of problems that could lead to a meltdown.
The newly approved design, called the Westinghouse AP1000 is a 1,154 megawatt facility that boasts what industry insiders call, a passive design, which means it uses gravity to move water around rather than pumps, which theoretically makes a plant safer because it won’t be at the mercy of power outages that can lead to meltdowns.
In approving the design, the NRC also gave the go-ahead for construction to begin on one new plant in Georgia and two new ones in South Carolina, paving the way for a whole new wave of nuclear plant construction in the United States.
As an interesting side, note, China has already been busy building plants using the AP1000 design and the first is expected to go online in just two years. The new plants approved here in the U.S. are expected to take at least five years to build and go online.