US gets application for 1st nuke reactor in 30 yrs

Los Angeles, Aug 2: The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received its first application since the 1970s to build a new nuclear power plant, a spokesman for the NRC said.

The proposed plant in Maryland won't come online until at least mid-2014 and is among a new wave of about 19 reactors that will be considered by the NRC in the next year or so, said Scott Burnell, NRC spokesman.

''It is entirely accurate to say this is the first application for a new reactor in the United States in about 30 years,'' Burnell said yesterday.

Burnell said the NRC is expecting, including this application, 19 filings from the start of the new fiscal year on October 1, 2007 through 2009.

If all of the new reactors that the NRC has been told are likely to be applied for in the next two years come online near proposed schedules, about 32,000 to 33,000 megawatts of power production will be added.

The US has 104 active nuclear reactors that can produce just over 100,000 megawatts of power, which is about 20 per cent of total generation capacity in the United States.

Industry analysts said the July 16 earthquake in Japan that shut the world's largest nuclear power plant will not deter the expected revival of nuclear power in the United States.

Dimitri Nikas, director of utilities and project finance at Standard and Poor's, was among the analysts who said the Japanese incident will create an atmosphere where safety is closely monitored by the public and politicians, but is not big enough of an event to stop the new wave of reactors.

No applications for a new nuclear power plant have been filed since 1976 or 1977, and those were for plants that were never built, said Burnell.

After those applications were filed, the biggest nuclear accident in US history at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania occurred in 1979.

The proposed 1,600-megawatt reactor will take its owner, Unistar Nuclear, an estimated 4 billion to 5 billion dollar to construct, but that price tag may increase depending largely on construction material cost, the company has said.

Unistar, based in Annapolis, Maryland is a joint venture of Constellation Energy Group Inc. and French-owned Areva .

Like most of the wave of new nuclear reactors expected to file for licensing by the NRC, the Unistar plant is to be put on the site of an existing plant. This one would be the third reactor at the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Lusby, Maryland, about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Washington, D.C.

The new reactor would almost double the size of Calvert Cliffs' power output, which is now about 1,735 megawatts.

A megawatt can serve about 750 to 800 homes, so if the third unit is built, Calvert Cliffs would be able to serve about 2.6 million homes. The current two reactors at Calvert Cliffs, located on the Chesapeake Bay, went into operation in 1975 and 1977.

Constellation Senior Vice President George Vanderheyden told the Washington Post that Constellation has not yet decided to build a new reactor but is ''moving as aggressively as we can down the first phase, which is the licensing phase.'' The Calvert Cliffs application is actually a partial one, and includes the environmental portion of what the NRC calls its combined operating license. The remainder of that combination, regarding safety must be filed in the next six months. Burnell said Unistar has told the NRC to expect the safety portion of the application in early 2008.

NRC staff is expected to take about two-and-a-half years for a technical review of the full license, with an expected additional year if the new the plant is contested.

No NRC decision on the full license, which would allow construction is expected until at least mid-2011, said Burnell.

Reuters >