Seeking nuclear revival in Idaho

ARCO, Idaho – Surrounded by dog-eared newsclippings, Charles Pieper sits in his living room and remembers the night a half-century ago Sunday when he helped usher in the age of nuclear power.

It was July 17, 1955, nearly midnight in the desert 20 miles south of this central Idaho town. The 33-year-old electrician’s flip of a circuit breaker sent 2,000 kilowatts from the National Reactor Testing Station’s boiling water reactor – Borax III – to Arco, making the city the world’s first to be electrified by nuclear power.

“I don’t think I grasped the significance of it all,” recalls Pieper, now 83, of an event that lasted about an hour before the reactor was disconnected. “We were so tired, I didn’t hardly notice anything.”

As Pieper and the rest of Arco’s 1,000 residents look back a half century during this weekend’s “Atomic Days,” scientists at what’s become the Idaho National Laboratory are looking to the future. They’re planning a new high-temperature, gas-cooled nuclear reactor they hope will produce both electricity and hydrogen for a new generation of clean-running cars.

INL officials also are part of a push to license a new nuclear power plant by 2010 under streamlined regulatory guidelines. Companies including General Electric and French state utility Electricite de France are in on the Department of Energy-backed bid.

“Nuclear is the only large-scale, non-greenhouse-gas-emitting energy source we have,” said Kathryn McCarthy, INL’s director of advanced nuclear energy systems integration. “It’s an energy-security issue: We need to decrease our dependence on foreign sources.”

It all began in 1949 when the site was known as Argonne-West, the government’s first nuclear reactor proving ground. Deep in the sage-and-basalt desert, Cold War-era scientists could work far from prying eyes, and civilization was far away in case of an accident.

It was here where the first experimental breeder reactor was built. That reactor is now a museum and the only place on the site visitors can see without a background check. Some 8,000 tourists come annually.

Fifty-two reactors were built on territory almost as big as Delaware, including prototypes of reactors that fire the Navy’s nuclear submarines.

Today, the INL’s centerpiece is the Advanced Test Reactor, where scientists eventually hope to test fuels and metals slated for use in the planned new reactor. The facility currently performs tests for the Navy and the nuclear industry, including scrutinizing how different alloys withstand neutron bombardment.

“Our part is providing a place to do the research,” said John Dwight, who oversees the 38-year-old Advanced Test Reactor.

There are now slightly more than 100 nuclear power plants in the United States, a quarter of the world’s total. But a license hasn’t been issued for a U.S. plant since 1973, and skeptics want it to stay that way. America, they say, should focus on renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, because a new generation of reactors would prove too costly for real-world use.

The industry also lives in the shadow of terrifying and dangerous accidents including Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and Chernobyl, the 1986 Ukrainian disaster. The INL site has its own tragic history: In 1961, three workers died when a power surge in a test reactor caused water surrounding its core to explode.

In recent years, much of the work at INL has been court-ordered cleanup of tons of radioactive and hazardous waste. New reactors will mean new waste, some worry.

“Why should we set ourselves up with thousands of reactors that we’ll have to deal with 100 years from now?” asks Jeremy Maxand, executive director of the Snake River Alliance, an Idaho nuclear watchdog.

Still, nuclear power has won surprising allies.

Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace in 1971, now believes nuclear plants, along with wind and geothermal power, would safely help the U.S. reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and keep pace with rising energy demand.

“There’s no getting away from the fact that 6 billion people wake up every morning with a need for food, material and energy,” Moore said. “If we don’t move forward on this, we’re going to end up buying nuclear technology from the Chinese.”