The nation's growing electricity supply problem could be helped by the building of new nuclear-powered generating plants, the chief executive of one of the world's largest energy providers said in a lecture at Cornell April 23 in Thurston Hall.
No new nuclear plants have been ordered in the United States for about 20 years. Yet, E. Linn Draper, president and chairman of American Electric Power Co., of Columbus, Ohio, noted, other countries have continued to build nuclear plants to U.S. designs, "not demonstrably less safe than ours, and they can build them in a predictable period of time at a predictable cost."
He said, "I think that if we had the political will in the United States, we could do that, too. Will we have that will? I don't know. It depends on what the price of electricity is and how excited people are about clean air."
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), he said, would like to be able to support a new order for nuclear plants. "I suspect that the next order for a nuclear plant, if there is one, will be unusual, in the sense that it will be done with government guarantees or participation or by a nontraditional entity, like the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority]."
Draper was talking about power deregulation and the California electricity crisis as part of the Energy Engineering Seminar Series sponsored by the Ward Center for Nuclear Sciences.
Draper noted that the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in March 1979 caused people to reconsider how nuclear plants are licensed and regulated. Before the accident, the cost of a nuclear plant was similar to that of a coal- or gas-fired plant. After the accident, new regulations resulted in several incomplete nuclear plants costing four to five times the original estimate.
This was one of the factors, Draper said, that resulted in the debate about the price of electricity in the 1980s, which in turn led to calls in the 1990s for deregulation. In California in particular, new generators came into the market, allowing customers to shop for better rates, and utilities were forced to sell generating plants to their competitors. "For two to three years, the system worked," Draper said.
"Then, last spring, things began to come apart. The problems of supply and price in California came about for a variety of reasons, some of which were due to dumb market design and some of which were just plain bad luck.
"The fact that California's demand for electricity was steadily growing had not been noticed by anyone outside of the electricity business, and the fact that people had not been building new generating plants in California also had not been noticed. So you had a situation that for a decade or so there was steady demand growth and essentially no new construction of generating capacity or transmission. California was muddling through by importing power from the rest of western United States."
At same time, the California utilities had not been allowed to enter into long-term contracts to supply wholesale power to customers because of the desire by regulators for competition. "California is afflicted by inadequate capacity, inadequate fuel, fixed prices for retail and floating prices for wholesale," Draper said.
"It is all going to end with a very tough summer in California."
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