Energy Industry Eyes Nuclear Power

N E W   Y O R K, May 17 -- Nuclear power could be making a comeback — but not before the end of the decade.

That's one of the implications of the Bush administration's energy plan — to be released today under the direction of Vice President Dick Cheney — which seeks to make it easier for companies to construct new nuclear power plants.

The proposal advocates nuclear power as a cheap way of increasing the country's electricity supply, encouraging an industry that has not filed a new application for a nuclear plant since 1978, the year before the notorious Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.

Nuclear Power Timeline

"A new dawn is here for the nuclear power industry," says Melanie White, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry-wide lobbying group in Washington.

But Bush's proposals also raise plenty of unresolved questions. Do energy companies think there are financial benefits to building multibillion-dollar nuclear plants, some of which effectively bankrupted power companies in the 1970s? If so, when would new nuclear plants be constructed? And would consumers benefit?

A Decade in the Making

Even for heavyweight energy companies, nuclear power is the ultimate long-term investment — and gamble, given the high cost and many years needed to build government-approved plants.

For instance, New York's Shoreham plant, on Long Island, was scheduled to open in 1978 at a cost of $77 million; a decade later, costs had multiplied tenfold, but the plant never opened and its owner, the Long Island Lighting Co., went out of business in 1998.

Federal regulators say that even if energy companies were to begin applying for permission to build new plants immediately, it could be nearly 10 years before any of them saw use.

"There's a lot of uncertainty," says Victor Dricks, a spokesman at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must approve all plans for the construction of nuclear power plants. "The bottom line is, because nobody has built one here for 20 years, our expectation is it would take them five or six years."