News

May 11, 2008

POWERING UP

Nuclear issues again coming to fore

SALEM TWP. – Valarie Anderson was a grade-schooler in Berwick in the 1970s when the Atomic Age came to town and, she says, changed everything.

The large industries that had supported the town during World War II were shuttered, but PPL Corp.’s nuclear power plant built nearby turned the town’s economy around.

“I just have very vivid memories of … a very strong workforce” pouring into town, Anderson said. “It was just very, very positive.”

Churches and schools grew, the downtown business strip expanded and housing construction took off to accommodate the influx of families. Anderson heard old-timers saying, “This is what Berwick used to be when we had the large industry here.”

A sense of culture and diversity flourished that she said had never really existed before.

Nuclear fission made it possible. Just decades earlier, scientists had figured out how to knock apart atoms and release energy. Now it was powering homes, creating jobs and promising a bright future.

But others were skeptical of the industry with its shiny, futuristic fa�ade. They saw as-yet unanswered dangers just beneath the surface.

Sam Troy, then a 20-something product of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, was working at his father’s automotive business in Wilkes-Barre when he read a newspaper article about the proposed plant. The Wilkes-Barre man immediately joined up with the Susquehanna Environmental Advocates and began attending meetings, staging protests and advocating energy conservation and conversion to renewable sources.

“The focus was a little more intense, especially on the nuke industry, because we all knew it was dangerous,” he said. “This was such an appalling prospect of having this nuclear facility down there.”

A stormy past

The Susquehanna plants were proposed during a turbulent time in America’s romance with atom-splitting.

Two massive destructive mushroom clouds over Japan in August 1945 marked the dawn of the Atomic Age, and within a decade the federal government had passed the Atomic Energy Act to encourage the commercialization of nuclear power. It also created a quandary by tasking the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission with regulating and promoting the industry. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the commission’s chairman, predicted the future would bring nuclear energy “too cheap to meter.”

However, concern swirled that avoiding catastrophic emergencies, such as a core breach, couldn’t be guaranteed. Regulators feared the “China syndrome,” in which molten, radioactive fuel from a reactor meltdown would eat through containment and bore through the earth, theoretically toward China.

The liability threat was so great that the industry refused to build reactors until Congress created indemnity legislation in 1957. The Price-Anderson Act afforded almost 10 times more insurance than the industry could secure otherwise.

The first large-scale commercial nuclear reactor, the 515-megawatt Oyster Creek Generating Station in New Jersey, went online in 1969.

The Susquehanna reactors were proposed the next year, eliciting fears of health and safety problems from critics and cheers from those anticipating the economic boon. Construction began in November 1973.

PPL owns 90 percent of the facility; Allegheny Electric Cooperative, Inc. owns 10 percent.

While the industry was taking off, the regulatory environment was falling apart. In 1971, federal appeals court dealt the commission a major blow, rebuking it for its weak enforcement of the new National Environmental Policy Act. Other controversies arose over the commission’s conflicting roles, and legislation in 1974 split it in two.

Today’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission was created, along with an industry-promoting agency that would help form the Department of Energy.

Fears persisted, though, and soon penetrated the national psyche. Hollywood latched on, and “The China Syndrome” was released in March 1979. Events would soon conspire to make it a blockbuster.

Within weeks, reality imitated art when Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, about 100 miles southwest of Luzerne County near Harrisburg, suffered a partial meltdown. Though there were no injuries and very little radiation was released, the incident badly damaged the industry’s image and still marks the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history.

Susquehanna’s Unit 1 went online in 1983, and Unit 2 followed in 1985.

A year later, the world witnessed the worst nuclear incident ever, when Unit 4 of the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl reactor exploded and released radioactive fallout that officials blame for at least 54 deaths.

Adjusted, with issues

Since then, there have been no major incidents with American plants, but also no new plants. There’s still no storage site for radioactive waste, the jury’s still out on radiation’s health effects, and, if producing nuclear energy is fairly environmentally benign, producing its fuel is anything but.

If the issues haven’t changed much, however, the industry, the economy and society have. The nation’s demand for electricity continues to rise, and three decades’ distance has dulled the public’s anxiety over nuclear catastrophe.

After about three decades, a handful of new reactor applications were filed last year, the closest in southern Maryland. Many companies are proposing additional reactors at existing sites to avoid major public protest, and many of those aging plants are applying for license extensions to lengthen their initial 40-year lifetimes.

The Susquehanna plants remain in the thick of change. Both have received output-increasing upgrades, and PPL is seeking license extensions for each. Additionally, the company has announced plans to apply for a new reactor on adjacent property.

For local supporters and detractors alike, three decades, two international-attention-grabbing incidents and the dual-reactor plant operating quietly in their backyard have done little to change opinions.

Anderson, now 38 and the executive director of the Berwick Area Chamber of Commerce, still praises the plant’s impact.

“A lot of those families that relocated … are still here today, and … are part of the community and have made a tremendous difference,” she said. “I remember a lot of the safety concerns, the water supply, the air quality. I remember those promises (the company made), and honestly they have kept those promises, more than I expected.”

Troy, now a 58-year-old yoga instructor and part-time college English professor, still distrusts the industry. “The writing was on the wall. We were moving in the wrong direction then, and we’re moving in the wrong direction now,” he said. “The issue, really, from the 70s till now, hasn’t changed all that much.”

Rory Sweeney, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 970-7418.

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