Duke Power is considering whether to build a new nuclear power
plant in the Carolinas, its chief nuclear officer said in a speech
this week.
While the Carolinas' largest utility stresses it has not
committed to building anything, the company says it needs to add new
plants over the next decade to serve the region's growing population
and industry.
That will likely come through a combination of coal, natural gas
and potentially nuclear plants, Duke Power's Brew Barron said at a
nuclear energy conference in Washington on Wednesday.
"It is not a commitment to build," Barron said. "It is a
commitment to maintain new nuclear capacity as a meaningful option
for our customers."
If Duke decides to build a nuclear plant, it would likely be at
least a decade before one would go online in the Carolinas. The
application process is lengthy, involving years of scrutiny from
nuclear regulators on the engineering, safety and environmental
plans of a proposed plant.
The utility hasn't applied for such a license. It is "in the
initial stages of planning the preparation" of a license
application, looking at its cost, Barron said.
Duke Power has three nuclear plants across the Carolinas, on
lakes Norman and Wylie and in Seneca, S.C.
Nuclear power may be coming back into vogue in the United States
as the stigma of the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accidents has
faded. Besides being cheaper than natural gas, nuclear power also
doesn't belch greenhouse emissions.
But environmentalists still point to greenhouse gases produced by
the mining of uranium, the potential danger of nuclear plants' fuel,
as well as concerns about where plants dispose of their waste.
Three nuclear-plant projects, in Virginia, Louisiana and
Illinois, are in the very early stages of applying for licenses.
The last U.S. nuclear plant to come online was in Tennessee in
1996.
