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Backers of project say ‘green plant’ part of nuclear renaissance

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This June 22, 2000 file photo shows the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon, Ohio. Plans are in the works to turn this contaminated Cold War-era atomic plant into America’s first “clean energy park” and Ohio’s first nuclear reactor in two decades.

AP photo by David Kohl This June 22, 2000 file photo shows the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon, Ohio. Plans are in the works to turn this contaminated Cold War-era atomic plant into America’s first “clean energy park” and Ohio’s first nuclear reactor in two decades.

Opponents say it’s a bad idea, with no way to clean up waste.

By Tom Beyerlein, Staff Writer Updated 7:22 AM Friday, June 19, 2009

PIKETON — Thirty years after the nation’s worst nuclear accident, the partial reactor core meltdown at Three Mile Island, nuclear power is being reinvented as clean, green and safe — a talisman against global warming.

Government and industry officials say a reactor proposed for Piketon would be part of a nuclear renaissance that would be environmentally friendly — nuclear doesn’t produce greenhouse gases — and spur job creation in impoverished Appalachian Ohio.

“This is the day everybody’s been waiting for for a long time,” said John K. Welch, chief executive of USEC Inc., which enriches uranium for reactor fuel and leases the Energy Department’s Piketon atomic plant site. “This is a big deal.”

Duke Energy, one of the partners in the reactor project, has no cost estimate or timetable, said spokeswoman Rita Sipe. The cost estimate for two reactors Duke plans to build in South Carolina is $11 billion. Duke currently has seven reactors, all in the Carolinas. Piketon could get more than one reactor, Sipe said.

She said the Piketon site, once home of a Cold War atomic weapons plant, “looked like a good fit” as the Energy Department works to convert such facilities for new uses.

Piketon would use the Evolutionary Power Reactor, which can provide electricity to 1.5 million customers and “features enhanced safety and simplified operations and maintenance,” according to its French designer, Areva. Areva is building four of the reactors, one in Finland and France and two in China. One is planned for Maryland.

“EPR is a fortress,” Areva CEO Anne Lauvergeon said in Piketon on Thursday, June 18. “Nothing can get out, nothing can get in.”

Not everybody was excited about the announcement.

“It’s a horrible idea,” said Diane D’Arrigo, radioactive waste project director for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service of Takoma Park, Md. “There’s no place for the waste to go. We already have lots of radioactive messes in Ohio that there’s no money to clean up. It’s one of the more nuclear-contaminated states.”

The Piketon announcement comes as the government works toward cleaning up radioactive and chemical contamination from the uranium enrichment plant that operated on the site from 1954 to 2001.

A government program has paid $367 million in compensation and medical benefits to 3,773 Piketon atomic workers and their survivors for illnesses and deaths caused by working at the old plant.

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