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FYI
Deja vu?
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2000 1:37 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Crowell says future demand may depend on nuclear
power
Not bad for a journalist, eh? Crowell I
mean.
Denis
At 05:15 PM 11/1/00 -0700, you wrote:
ASSOCIATED PRESS NEWSWIRES
By Duncan
Mansfield
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KNOXVILLE,
Tenn. (AP) - Nuclear power will get more valuable
as the pressure grows
to reduce air pollution from coal-fired power plants,
Tennessee Valley
Authority Chairman Craven Crowell said Tuesday.
"I think it has to
end up being nuclear in the long term because it is very
friendly to air
quality," Crowell said during a civic club appearance.
Crowell
conceded that no permanent disposal method has been
developed for
radioactive waste from the nation's more than 100
nuclear reactors,
including the five operated by TVA.
"But I think air quality issues
are going to become more and more
significant for us," said Crowell,
whose agency is battling federal
regulators and environmentalists over
pollutants from its 11 coal-fired
plants that cause smog and acid
rain.
Weighing those concerns against forecasts of a growing
population
and subsequent increased demand for electricity, Crowell
predicted,
"We are going to have to go forward with nuclear
power."
He said TVA, the country's largest public power producer,
isn't yet
ready to order another nuclear plant. But Crowell, who chairs
the
industry's Electric Power Research Institute, said it is both a
national
and international issue.
While "green" technologies -
from solar power to fuel cells - are
promising and deserve more research,
he said, they aren't capable
of meeting power demands
immediately.
"I think it is a simplistic approach to a complex
problem," responded
Stephen Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for
Clean Energy.
"To fix the air pollution and environmental problems
associated with
coal-fired power plants by going to nuclear power is sort
of like giving
up smoking and taking up crack," he said.
Smith
said environmentalists worry that TVA may respond to clean
air
enforcement actions by closing some fossil plants and resurrecting
the
mothballed $4 billion Bellefonte nuclear station in Alabama.
"Our
opinion is that TVA needs to be more engaged with independent
power
producers (particularly those using cleaner natural gas) and to
be
more aggressive about conservation and efficiency," Smith said.
He
said relying on nuclear power "shows they may not have learned
their
lessons."
However, Crowell said TVA has learned from its mistakes
with
nuclear power. An aggressive plan adopted in the 1970s for
a
17-reactor system is now mostly scrapped, leaving TVA billions
of
dollars in debt.
Only six reactors were completed. The five now
operating are rated
among the best in the industry, and TVA has trimmed
$2 billion off
the debt.
"We got into nuclear too big," Crowell
said. "We didn't create the
right kind of culture at TVA to manage the
nuclear program
correctly ... (and) through our own sense of importance
we didn't
get out of it soon enough.
"But," he said, "we are
coming out of that now."
=========================================
Dr. Denis E. Beller
Systems Engineering and Integration Group
Technology and Safety Assessment Division
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e-mail: beller@lanl.gov
phone: (505) 667-1357
fax: (505) 665-5283
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Mailing Address:
TSA-3, MS
F607
Los Alamos
National
Laboratory Los
Alamos, NM 87545
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