Oregon State University's nuclear engineering department sits in a one-floor, square brick building that dates to the 1960s. Walking through chrome-plated doorways and down several hallways of ceramic tiles bathed in fluorescent light you come to a door marked "No Routine Access."

Inside, Jose Reyes, John Groome and Brian Woods, all nuclear scientists, huddle around the control panel of a simulator of the AP 1000 nuclear reactor.

The simulator is a tangle of pipes and metal cauldrons housed behind Plexiglass and, for now, heated with an electric element. Groome has warmed the water in the center of the reactor up to 398 degrees Fahrenheit and submitted it to 25 times the normal atmospheric pressure. Now, the three scientists are watching how a small section of the simulator behaves when the liquid water turns to steam, as it might during an accident.

If Groome were watching over a real AP 1000 and the superheated water turned to steam, dangerously drying out the nuclear fuel rods, the system would virtually tie his hands behind his back. Without any operator intervention, a gravity-fed system would send water in to prevent the fuel rods from melting down while natural air circulation — encouraged by the plant's design — would cool it down.

The AP 1000 and its novel safety system are part of nuclear energy's comeback. In working for most of a decade with British-owned Westinghouse Nuclear to test the reactor's safety and advance its design, OSU's engineers operated under the strong conviction that well-conceived plants could usher nuclear back into a turbulent energy landscape as a cheap, clean and safe power alternative.

Zero tolerance for safety glitches is one of the guiding principles of the comeback. Huge cost overruns, regulatory tangles and cheap natural gas may have banished nuclear power into the background of the energy market by the mid-1990s. But the public remembers being sold on supposedly foolproof designs and then seeing a meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, followed by the disastrous explosion at Chernobyl in 1986. The seriousness of those accidents has been attributed to plant operators. Now, OSU scientists say Westinghouse has a design that's beyond safe — and ready to carry the industry beyond its tarnished past.

"It's walk-away safe," Groome says of the reactor. "You can leave it alone in an accident."

Oregon may have all but outlawed nuclear energy generation when its last reactor closed in 1993. But in the world at large, and in a brick building in Corvallis, the conversation about nuclear power is changing. The question is not if new reactors will be built in this country but where and when. The AP 1000 design is expected to be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this month, and North Carolina-based Duke Power is looking for sites to place an AP 1000 and make it the first of a new generation of plants to be built. Another smaller reactor, designed in part by OSU staff, promises a cheap, simplified module that can easily be plugged into the grid, which has piqued the interest of countries without much nuclear experience.

Some environmentalists such as Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, whose organization earned a name fighting nukes, are embracing new power plants on principle. They say shifting from carbon-intensive coal and natural gas to carbon-free nuclear power may be the best way to slow global warming. In the United States, the nuclear industry received at least $12 billion of subsidies in this summer's federal energy bill, while legacy nuclear reactors continue to provide 20% of the nation's power.

Oregon's electricity needs are growing at 1.5% per year. And with natural gas costs rising, coal linked to global warming, new dams off limits and renewables such as wind still far from shouldering a large regional burden, some in Oregon's business and policy community want the state to join the new dialogue about nuclear power.

"Nuclear deserves an honest look," says Mike Early, executive director of the Industrial Customers of Northwest Utilities, a regional advocacy group. Other countries have done it, Early adds. France, for example, gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear power.

But before the state even looks at linking into the island of nuclear activity in Corvallis, there is Oregonians' decades-old distaste for atomic energy to face down.

THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, the state kissed nuclear power generation goodbye. Facing a $200 million repair of its two steam generators, Portland General Electric closed Oregon's only nuke plant, Trojan Nuclear Facility near Rainier. But the handwriting was already on the wall for nuclear power in Oregon: In 1980, voters passed a ballot measure requiring a federally licensed nuclear waste repository to be up and running before any future nuke plants can be sited within the state. (The U.S. Department of Energy still hasn't opened a facility — Yucca Mountain in Nevada is the designated spot.)

While the majority of our power now comes from coal plants, hydroelectric dams and a few natural gas turbines, Oregon still gets about 3% of its electricity from the nuclear-powered Columbia Generating Station in Richland, Wash. But lingering concerns about accidents, nuclear waste and, more recently, weapons proliferation have translated into continued skepticism in Oregon about nuclear power.

"Any new ballot measure could undo the current ban but I doubt it would pass," says Phil Carver, a senior policy analyst with the Oregon Department of Energy. Carver, who authored a state report agreeing that PGE's closure of Trojan made financial sense, says fears about storing old nuclear fuel can be allayed by an adequate new federal storage site. The more dangerous concern, for Carver, is about used fuel rods — plutonium — that get diverted to clandestine weapons operations. "People lose track of plutonium because it's uninteresting," he says. "But a terrorist incident would obviously be far worse than Three Mile Island for the industry, and that's the concern going forward."

In light of the anti-nuclear atmosphere here, utilities, including PGE, see little hope in bringing nuclear power back to Oregon. "If the generation resource was out there and it was deemed cost effective we would certainly look at it," PGE spokesman Scott Sims says. "But just as important as the availability of the technology is the consumer acceptance of the fuel type."

Nuclear power has made some surprising converts in the last 10 years, however. One is Oregon State's Brian Woods. "I'm an environmentalist," he says. In the early 1990s, Woods, a mechanical engineer, considered getting his doctorate studying solar energy. He eventually chose the nuclear field instead. "I came to the conclusion that solar wasn't going to be economically viable in the short term," says Woods, who worked for Dominion-Virginia Power before coming to Jose Reyes' team at OSU. "If we're going to get out of the quandary of producing more energy for more people without emissions, the only way out is nuclear energy.

"People wonder how I sleep at night, given the waste nuclear energy produces," Woods continues. "You look at this high-level waste we've produced in the last 40 years from nuclear power — you could put it on a football field. It's much easier to solve than waste from a coal-fired power plant that you're putting into the atmosphere."

Woods is satisfied that spent nuclear fuel can be safely stored underground in concrete and steel casks. But many anti-nuclear activists disagree, especially given the country's designated storage site. "I've been to Yucca Mountain. It's not safe," says Paige Knight of Hanford Watch, an anti-nukes group based in Portland.

"I can't guarantee the safety for 10,000 years but I don't really care," Woods says. "Instead, I ask myself a couple of things: Will we know if there's a problem with it? Yes, we can monitor it. Two, can we fix a problem through resealing it if we have to? Yes, we can. So I sleep better at night."

WHILE OREGON ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS CELEBRATED the closure of the Trojan plant as a signal of nuclear's end, it marked the start of a decade of innovation for Jose Reyes and his team at Oregon State. Soon after, he joined forces with Westinghouse. And in helping the company win design approval for the AP 1000 model and an earlier predecessor, Reyes proved himself as a worthy consultant on the safety of systems that move water throughout a nuclear reactor. Before coming to OSU to head the nuclear engineering and radiation physics department, Reyes spent 10 years in the research division at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where he was recognized for advancing safety codes. "I tend to look at what can go wrong," says Reyes, whose quiet, assured manner has the effect of defusing one's anxiety about nuclear reactions.

At the heart of reactors are uranium fuel rods, which create heat through nuclear fission: The atomic structure of the uranium is bombarded with neutrons, which causes electrons and massive amounts of energy to escape. It's a dynamic, unseen process and often feared for its connection to more intense bomb fission.

But in reality, it's the reactors' water systems — its hydraulics — where many dangerous malfunctions originate. Problems there can quickly affect the nuclear core.

In the AP 1000 design, the heat energy from nuclear reactions is transferred to water, which then is pumped through a series of pipes to a separate chamber, the steam generator. There, the hot water from the reactor transfers its heat to colder water returning from electric turbines, and that colder water turns to steam — ready for another run to the turbines to create electricity.

Westinghouse reduced the risk of accident in the AP 1000's water systems by cutting down the amount of piping in the reactor.

In the late 1990s, Reyes and his in-house construction specialist, the stout Navy veteran Groome, built on their experience with the Westinghouse reactor in another project. Teaming with scientists from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and Nexant, a Bechtel subsidiary then based in San Francisco, they explored eliminating the machinery in the first half of the water heating system altogether. The group also bucked the prevailing wisdom of reactor design that bigger was always more economical. "We thought, 'Are there some advantages of going small?'" Reyes says.

Using a Department of Energy grant, the team developed a 60-foot modular plant (see diagram, below) that relies on the changing density of water in the reactor to circulate it, rather than pumps and pipes. As nuclear fission heats the water in a large chamber, it rises and passes off its heat energy to cool water circulated in from the electricity process. Losing its heat, the column of water in the chamber grows more dense and naturally sinks back to the reactor core to be warmed.

At 35 megawatts, the plant is minuscule compared to traditional reactors or even the AP 1000, which would produce 1,100 MW (1 MW provides enough power for about 600 homes). But the scale tackles some of the huge cost burdens that big nuclear plants bear during long construction periods: The cheaper, smaller reactor could be up and running more quickly, generating revenue through power sales. The designers also envision up to 30 reactors built on one site on a staggered schedule, eventually integrating to provide power comparable to one large 1,000-MW plant.

The design heads off safety concerns as well. It would sit in a pool of water below ground, making it less of a terrorist target. And it could be stocked with fuel rods, sealed, shipped on a single rail car and run for five years without refueling. "It's a lot simpler than a full-size plant," says Groome. "You just plug it in — we call it the battery option."

Reyes is now trying to attract more private or public capital to ready the reactor for the market and allow it to compete with other small plants being developed around the world.

"We feel like it has commercial value and think it responds to the needs that are out there," Reyes says. "It's a near-term deployment option."

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE FOR ENERGY DEVELOPERS to site a modular reactor, or more feasibly an AP 1000, say, in North Portland or Pendleton? For one thing, it would have to make economic sense. Theoretically, nuclear could be one of the cheapest options for generating new electricity within 10 years. Analysis by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council (NPCC), a federally appointed regional planning organization, found that a new AP 1000 reactor could be the least expensive source of new power in the region by 2015, costing an average of $35 per MW/hour over the life of the reactor (see chart, above). Reyes' group projects that a cluster of 30 modular reactors could produce electricity for $34 per MW/hour.

But neither of the reactors has ever been built. And Jeff King, an analyst for the NPCC, notes that the nuclear industry has a long history of cost overruns and regulatory tangles, which drive the numbers up. The cost of an AP 1000 starts at around $1.4 billion, but actual costs have exceeded developmental estimates for nuclear plants in almost every case, says King.

This summer's federal energy bill provides loan guarantees for new construction, subsidies in the event of regulatory holdups and production tax credits that might help avoid future financial pitfalls. Still, it's been 10 years and many technology generations since the last plant was built in the United States and, at the soonest, it will be another 10 years before the first new plant is completed.

"From a business perspective nobody wants to be the first to build," says Dale Atkinson, vice president for nuclear generation at Energy Northwest, which runs the Columbia Generating Plant in Richland, Wash. "That first plant is liable to be expensive."

Phil Carver, the state energy analyst, says it will take at least one successful plant elsewhere in the country to get Northwest power interests' attention.

Mike Early, with Industrial Customers of Northwest Utilities, supports more conversation about nuclear power. But he agrees with Carver that it will take something dramatic to get the frozen nukes discussion going in Oregon, not to mention getting small, cash-strapped Northwest utilities to pursue a capital-intensive nuclear venture. "Something would have to change for utilities to step up and take that risk," Early says.

That means that out-of-state energy interests might be the key to any nuclear comeback in Oregon.

Siting a nuke plant, of course, remains the biggest challenge. Developers could put a plant in a neighboring state and pump the juice into Oregon. But Washington, scarred by the Hanford waste dump, is an unlikely candidate. Energy Northwest has shown no interest in new nukes: It is pursuing a new coal-fired plant. Idaho has no existing plants and citizens have been chilly to the idea of a new one. "I'm not holding my breath," Mike Early says of prospects for a new plant in the region.

In the meantime, OSU scientists are joining an Idaho National Labs group researching a high-temperature reactor, which has the potential to create hydrogen fuel for cars. "We're eager to get into it," Reyes says.

And in a back hallway of OSU's nuclear lab, Reyes' colleague Brian Woods has a nascent local pro-nukes movement going. On the door of his office he has affixed a simple, green bumper sticker: "Another Environmentalist for Nuclear Power." Stepping out into the hall, he points to other office doors, each one bearing the same sticker.

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Copyright 2005 Oregon Business magazine