NEW NUCLEAR: The U.S. may build as many as 26 new nuclear reactors in coming years and construction is booming globally, as at Lungmen Nuclear Power Plant in Taiwan pictured here, which is scheduled to be completed this year.
Courtesy of GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy

[This is Part 2 of an In-Depth Report on The Future of Nuclear Power.]

Brown's Ferry is the name of an unprepossessing boat crossing on the Tennessee River in Alabama. It is also the birthplace of a revival for nuclear power in the U.S. In May 2007 the one gigawatt-electric nuclear reactor known prosaically as Unit 1 restarted boiling water—after a 22-year shutdown and a refurbishment that cost $1.8 billion.

Brown's Ferry is just the first. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), owner of the three nuclear reactors at Brown's Ferry, also has plans to complete a stalled reactor at Watts Bar in Tennessee and two new reactors at Bellefonte in Alabama; Princeton, N.J.–based NRG Energy wants to build two new reactors at its South Texas nuclear power facility.

And North Carolina–based Progress Energy hopes to replace two old coal-fired power plants with two new nukes near Florida's Tampa Bay by 2017 at a cost of roughly $7 billion apiece—a price tag already incorporated into the company's bills to local ratepayers. If built, the two units would be the first brand-new nuclear power plant ordered and constructed since the Palo Verde plant in Wintersberg, Ariz., in 1973—a full 25-year moratorium on new construction could be drawing to a close.

"There continues to be a demand for power and a certain percentage of that power needs to be baseload" (an industry term for electricity that is always available), says Adrian Heymer, senior director for new plant deployment at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a Washington, D.C.–based industry group. "What is it going to be? Coal is not favorable at the moment and natural gas is volatile [in price]. So people are looking at nuclear."

The federal government echoes those sentiments. The Bush administration pushed though loan guarantees, whereby the costs of delays in construction would be paid for by U.S. taxpayers, and the Obama administration has indicated its support for new nuclear power plants. "Nuclear power, as I said before, is going to be an important part of our energy mix," said physicist Steven Chu, Obama's secretary of energy during his confirmation hearing on January 14. "It's 20 percent of our electricity generation today, but it is 70 percent of the carbon-free portion of electricity today. And it is baseload. So I think it is very important that we push ahead." He added: "There is certainly a changing mood in the country because nuclear is carbon-free, that we should look at it with new eyes."

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agrees, noting that nuclear could make "an increasing contribution to carbon-free electricity and heat in the future" provided that fuel constraints, costs, waste management, safety and "adverse public opinion" could be overcome.

Already, utilities have filed 17 applications for 26 new reactors and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency charged with overseeing the nuclear power industry, expects three more applications for five more reactors this year.

But like fingerprints, no two nuclear reactors in the U.S. are exactly the same for the most part—even those that sit right next to each other in the same facility. In large part, this is because all nuclear reactors were designed while they were being built, leading to a host of changes—and a host of delays. "We have 104 custom-built plants" in the U.S.," says Craig Nesbit, vice president of communications for Illinois-based utility Exelon, the owner and operator of 17 reactors, the largest fleet in this country.