In Search of Energy, A Virginia Town Ponders a Third Nuclear Plant
MINERAL, VA.—The area around Lake Anna is pastoral, but it has never been a typical resort community. After all, the lake was built to help cool two commercial nuclear reactors. Residents who live along the lake blithely talk about its "hot side" and "cold side," depending on proximity to the power plant, while nearby, the owners of the award-winning Lake Anna Winery joke affectionately about their wine "glowing after dark."
For a community that's lived for the past 30 years with reactors in its midst, getting a third one might not seem like a big deal. That's what Dominion, the utility company that operates the existing two units, is hoping as it lays plans to build another one here. At the moment, Dominion is one of the leading applicants in a growing wave of companies hoping to revive America's long-stalled nuclear industry.
Comeback. If Dominion's proposed Virginia plant clears the remaining state and federal regulatory hurdles, it could become the first nuclear plant approved for construction in three decades in the United States. Dominion has even picked out the spot—a large plot situated between the two reactors on one side and transmission lines on the other.
The only thing that's gone in the ground so far, however, is a set of sticks: wooden stakes marking an intention. With today's high energy prices—and mounting concern about climate change—there are plenty of reasons why nuclear power seems poised for a comeback. And yet, as Eugene Grechek, Dominion's vice president of nuclear development, said on a recent afternoon as he stood looking across the site, "There's no guarantee that this reactor will get built." The earliest that official approval could come is 2011, which means the plant couldn't start operating until 2016 at the earliest.
Nuclear veterans like Grechek tend to speak cautiously when they talk about a nuclear revival, and it's not hard to see why. They all remember what happened after the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pa., when a reactor suffered a partial meltdown. In the years that followed, dozens of nuclear projects were abandoned, bogged down by costly safety requirements, as well as lawsuits that delayed regulatory approval and drove costs even higher. In the meantime, the reactors still operating in this country (104 at last count) have continued to chug along, producing nearly 20 percent of the nation's electricity. Yet given the dramatic rise in electricity use that's projected over the next 20 years, experts say it will take at least 35 to 40 new reactors just to keep that figure from dropping.
Getting one reactor approved and built will be challenge enough—even with recent federal efforts to streamline regulatory approval and the support that exists in this small pocket of central northern Virginia. If most people see nuclear power as a prominent national issue, it remains, at its core, an intensely local one. Aside from the area right around the lake, Louisa County is relatively poor and rural. Rush-hour traffic is six or seven cars at a stop sign. Tractors putter down the road regularly, and agriculture—corn and hay farming, mainly—is still the main occupation.
Officials here are well aware of the money that the two existing reactors, built in the late 1970s, have pumped into the region. Last year, they generated roughly $11 million in local tax revenues, which goes toward schools and road maintenance. More than 900 people are employed in high-paying jobs at the plant. A third reactor would create about 3,000 temporary jobs during the five years it would take to build it and some 750 permanent jobs to operate it. It should come as no surprise, then, that officials here enthusiastically support the project.
Most Louisa County residents, however, profess not to care much one way or the other if the third reactor gets built. Safety concerns barely rate a mention. As Patty Chandler, a cashier at Dickinson's convenience store a few miles down the road from the power plant, says: "We already have two reactors. If one of them goes, we're in bad shape anyway. So what's the big deal about a third one?"
Hot water. Some lake residents, though, are understandably more worried. Lake Anna is unusually small as a source of water to cool a single nuclear reactor, let alone three. Most nuclear plants are built along rivers or oceans where the water is constantly flowing, pushing the discharge from the plant downstream. Lakes, however, are more slow moving, so, in Lake Anna's case, the hot water that comes out of the plant ends up staying around for a while.
This has created two problems. On the lake's warm side, which receives the plant's discharge, the summer water temperature already can reach above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Even in the cooler months, in February and March, the water stays warm. Boaters bundled up in heavy jackets and caps often see people playing in the water in swimsuits. The second problem is the water level. Between the region's ongoing drought and the reactors' thirst for water, lake levels in some recent summers have fallen several feet, in some places exposing stumps or rocks that endanger boats.
A third reactor would strain the lake further, which has become a sore point between Dominion and lake residents. A 2003 Dominion report suggested that water temperatures near the reactor might rise as high as 113 degrees in the summer with three reactors operating. "That shocked a lot of people," says Doug Smith, a retired government worker who owns a farm in Louisa County and a boathouse on Lake Anna. In response, Dominion spent several months designing an alternative system to release water into the air rather than back into the lake. It's still working to address water-level issues.
Such delays are costly, and cost is one of the main reasons the nuclear industry has struggled—and continues to struggle—in the United States. Industry insiders estimate that it will cost $6 billion to build the third reactor, assuming everything goes according to plan. Work on the project began in 2000, and Dominion has spent the past five years doing safety and environmental reviews. Construction will take at least five years, and each year of delay could add at least $1 billion, maybe more, to the final bill. It's that estimated price tag, above all, that will determine whether Dominion's board of directors ultimately decides to give the reactor the go-ahead.
Some of the other major flash points about nuclear energy that tend to dominate the political debate—where to store nuclear waste, how to safeguard power plants from terrorist attacks—have figured less prominently here, although they're not entirely absent. Like most companies, Dominion stores its spent nuclear fuel on-site, in off-white-colored casks in a secured area. The casks don't take up much space, but they do cause consternation, especially among environmentalists. "Dominion has gotten its way here for more than five decades now," says Lou Zeller, president of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense league, a regional antinuclear organization.
Zeller's group is currently involved in a separate legal dispute with Dominion over the company's plans for disposing of "low-level waste" like workers' clothing that contains smaller amounts of radiation. Dominion used to send that material to a storage location in South Carolina, but that site, as of this past summer, no longer accepts it. So Dominion will most likely have to store that on-site, too.
Though concerns about nuclear waste were raised last spring at a public hearing at Louisa County High School, many residents who attended say such objections came primarily from outsiders—"people from Washington and Charlottesville with agendas to push," says Bill Murphey, a lakeside resident. They do, however, expect their community to experience other impacts. They say they'll need more schools, roads, and homes to accommodate workers and their families during the lengthy construction process.
Some locals, noting that the schools here are already overcrowded, fear the county hasn't done enough to prepare should the reactor get built on schedule. On the other hand, given that a new reactor hasn't been approved since 1978, it could still be many years, if ever, before construction begins. l
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