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NEW NUKES: NRG Energy hopes to build two new advanced boiling water reactors at its South Texas nuclear power plant site.
COURTESY OF NRG

The two reactors at the South Texas nuclear power plant, an hour southwest of Houston, last year churned out 21.37 billion kilowatt-hours. By 2015, its majority owner, New Jersey-based NRG Energy, hopes to at least double that capacity if it gets permission to build two more reactors on the site. The company filed the first application on Monday for a new nuclear power plant—two advanced boiling-water reactors—in more than 30 years.

"It is a new day for energy in America," David Crane, NRG president and chief executive officer, said after making the application. "Advanced nuclear technology is the only currently viable large-scale alternative to traditional coal-fueled generation to produce none of the traditional air emissions," including the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.

Armed with the backing of the White House and congressional leaders—and subsidies, such as $500 million in risk insurance from the U.S. Department of Energy— the nuclear industry is experiencing a revival in the U.S. As many as 29 new reactors may be added to the current U.S. fleet of 104, according to Bill Borchardt, director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) office of new reactors. "It is going to be significantly different than it was in the 1970s," he says.

The South Texas project is the first entirely new reactor out of the gate, though it simply fulfills the original planning for four reactors at the site. The NRC says such upgrades of existing facilities are likely to comprise the majority of new nuclear power plants, all but one—a plant near Syracuse in central New York State— are in the Southeast or Texas. "At the majority of these sites, there's strong support for nuclear power," says Loren Plisco, NRC's deputy regional administrator for construction in the southeastern region.

The inactive reactor at Browns Ferry in northern Alabama was restarted in May after being shuttered for 22 years due to maintenance issues its owner, the Tennessee Valley Authority, decided would be too costly to fix. Completion of construction of a second reactor at TVA's Watts Bar power plant near Chattanooga in Tennessee has begun as well. The TVA expects to finish construction in 2013 at a cost of $2.49 billion. Its older twin at Watts Bar required 23 years to build at a total cost of nearly $7 billion, according to the TVA.

Such long delays and ballooning costs—paired with improvements in U.S. energy efficiency and reactor accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986—helped kill the first wave of nuclear power plant construction in the U.S. And the rebirth is not without controversy: Some environmentalists oppose the new construction, noting that all of the potential risks linked to nuclear power remain. "The flaws of nuclear power—excessive cost, security threats and long-lived radioactive waste—have not been solved," says Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's energy program. "More nuclear reactors will only exacerbate these problems."

In fact, the only shift in the debate is the growing acceptance of nuclear power as an alternative energy source to coal-fired generation, which spews globe-warming greenhouse gas emissions. "If we're not serious about building more nuclear energy [power plants] around the world, then we are not serious about addressing climate change," James Rogers, chief executive of North Carolina based–Duke Energy, said during remarks at the recent U.N. climate summit.