WSJ: New Hurdle for Nuclear Plants

[bananas]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119240598741458693.html

New Hurdle for Nuclear Plants
Licensing System Seen By Utilities as Too Slow Amid Rush for Supply
By REBECCA SMITH
October 15, 2007; Page A8

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission spent the past decade simplifying the process of licensing the next generation of nuclear power plants, intending to avoid the delays and cost overruns of the past. But unexpected hitches are appearing as utilities and vendors skip voluntary steps of a process many companies already find too slow.

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Westinghouse got its reactor certified in December 2005, but it is back at the NRC asking for changes in its design. Some fix errors, some come in response to NRC requests -- for example, the post-Sept. 11 requirement to design plants to withstand airline crashes -- and some are sought by customers. The NRC review is expected to take a couple of years. In the meantime, several power companies are expected to submit their combined construction and operating-license applications.

Constellation, which is expected to submit an application soon, also decided to skip the early site review for its Maryland location. It has picked a reactor by French-based Areva that isn't certified for U.S. use. Areva intends to submit a reactor-certification request to the NRC by year end and hopes to have approval in 2010. Tom Christopher, chief executive of Areva's U.S. unit, said it will be challenging to have reactor certification and plant licensing occurring simultaneously.

Pursuing approvals on parallel tracks could be a problem for GE and its customers, too. GE got off to a rocky start in 2005 in efforts to get certification of its newest reactor, the "economic simplified boiling water reactor." The NRC's Mr. Klein said he told GE "to get their act together" and he has seen improvements. But certification isn't expected before three customers, led by Dominion Resources Inc., submit applications to build plants based on the design. Andy White, head of GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, GE's joint venture with Hitachi Ltd., said GE underestimated the volume of information the NRC would require. It has since beefed up its certification team.

[greenman3610]

1. and in case you think its just the damn NRC bureacracy, check out Europe..

Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Martin Landtman hunches forward in his shirtsleeves as a June storm on Finland's Baltic coast drenches the construction site of the world's most powerful nuclear reactor. As project manager for TVO, the joint venture buying the plant, Landtman has weathered far worse annoyances than rain.

Flawed welds for the reactor's steel liner, unusable water- coolant pipes and suspect concrete in the foundation already have pushed back the delivery date of the Olkiluoto-3 unit by at least two years.

``Substantial delays, I think you can use that word, yes,'' the 54-year-old Landtman says.

Olkiluoto-3, the first nuclear plant ordered in Western Europe since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, is also more than 25 percent over its 3 billion-euro ($4 billion) budget.

If Finland's experience is any guide, the ``nuclear renaissance'' touted by the global atomic power industry as an economically viable alternative to coal and natural gas may not offer much progress from a generation ago, when schedule and budgetary overruns for new reactors cost investors billions of dollars.

The U.K.'s Sizewell-B plant, which took nearly 15 years from the application to build it to completion, opened in 1995 and cost about 2.5 billion pounds ($5.1 billion), up from a 1987 estimate of 1.7 billion pounds.

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``The nuclear industry has put forward very optimistic construction cost estimates, but there is no experience that comes even close to backing them up,'' says Paul Joskow, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Some investors already are treading cautiously, even amid rising demand for electricity.

``You have to go in with your eyes wide open,'' says Robin Kendall, director of project finance at Societe Generale in Paris, which is among the banks that lent 1.95 billion euros to TVO for the Finland reactor. It's looking into providing loans for nuclear projects in Europe and Asia.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=exclusive&sid=aFh1ySJ.lYQc