Nuclear Energy is Showing Signs of Life in the U.S.

MAUREEN CAVANAUGH (Host): I’m Maureen Cavanaugh. You’re listening to These Days on KPBS. People who love planet Earth hate nuclear power plants. Well, that at least has been the popular notion for many years except it’s not necessarily true. Scientist James Havlock (sic), the man who first proposed the gaya theory of the earth’s ecology and who is revered by environmentalists, has in recent years thrown his support behind the production of more nuclear energy and he’s not alone. There is even an advocacy group called Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy. These supporters argue it’s time to rethink our negative view of nuclear power because of the threat of global warming. So while the images of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island still taint our collective memory about nuclear energy, a lot of people now say our views are informed more by mythology than by facts. Last September, Tom Fudge spoke about the new push for nuclear power with Bill Halsey, group leader for Nuclear and Risk Sciences at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Ken Schultz, Operations Director for the Energy Group at General Atomics here in San Diego. He began by asking Bill Halsey when was the last time a nuclear power plant was built in America?

BILL HALSEY (Group Leader, Nuclear and Risk Sciences, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory): Well, there haven’t been new orders since back around the time of the Three Mile Island. In the late 1970s some of the plants that were under construction then did eventually get built and they came online in the 1980s and up into the 1990s.

TOM FUDGE (Host): And I guess Diablo Canyon, on – in – on the central coast of – of California, is one example of that, right?

HALSEY: Yes, those two plants came online in 1985 and 1986 and your two plants down there at San Onofre came online in 1983 and 1984.

FUDGE: All right, but the question is why have we not completed or – or – or built any nuclear plants since then?

HALSEY: Well, there’s several reasons. One is the – of course, the accidents created a whole new safety environment that was required.

FUDGE: Umm-hmm.

HALSEY: And, also, there was public acceptance plummeted but also the demand for electricity had been on a steep increase and it went to a slower rate of increase, so demand reduced but perhaps the biggest reason has been financial risk. It’s not – you – you certainly have to have a plant which is cost effective and affordable in producing electricity over its power – over its lifetime but nuclear plants are very capital intensive so you have to pay the big chunk of money up front to build them and then they operate fairly inexpensively. And after the accident at Three Mile Island and the later one at Chernobyl, the regulatory and safety environment changed constantly and those plants got delayed. And when you’ve paid a great deal of money and in – to build a plant, and you’re continuously changing it, the carrying costs, the interest on the – that construction got to be extremely high and some of the plants were cancelled with multi-billion dollar writeoffs.

FUDGE: And…

HALSEY: The financial industry then got afraid of nuclear power and that’s really been the risk factor that’s been a barrier to building new ones.

FUDGE: Well, Ken Schultz, what would you like to add to what we’ve heard from Bill Halsey, I mean, in terms of the state of the industry right now and – and what we’ve seen over the past couple of decades.

KEN SCHULTZ (Operations Director, Energy Group, General Atomics, San Diego): I’d like to pick up a bit, if I may, on your theme of – of there being some myths about nuclear power. One of the myths is associated with the safety issues. We talk about the Three Mile Island accident which was, indeed, a – a serious accident, a total meltdown of the core of the Three Mile Island – of one of the Three Mile Island reactors. I want to point out that that terrible accident with a total meltdown with Jane Fonda screaming in the – in the – the side wings, resulted in absolutely nobody getting hurt. So that is…

FUDGE: So you think that’s something that is probably a lot of people don’t even realize.

SCHULTZ: That’s reality, the fact that a terrible accident, the total meltdown and not a soul got hurt, is something that we need to bring out of the – the myth phase into the – the recognition of reality phase. It really does demonstrate that the safety in depth process of redundant backup features and safety features and what have you for nuclear power do work.

FUDGE: What about Chernobyl?

SCHULTZ: Chernobyl was, indeed, a very – a much different accident than Three Mile Island. In the Three Mile Island – In the Chernobyl accident, it was a total core meltdown of the Russian reactor in Chernobyl in – and, in fact, it – there were virtually no safety features with that reactor—couldn’t be built here in the U.S. As a result, radiation and radioactive materials were released. Some 53 of the firefighters and emergency response people died as a result of that accident.

FUDGE: Umm.

SCHULTZ: In the area surrounding Chernobyl, there are expected to be something like 3000 additional cases of cancer, thyroid cancer, primarily, caused by that accident. But in that pool of people that will experience these 3000 accidents – 3000 cancers, additional cancers, there are expected to be 300,000 normal cases of cancer, if cancer can be ever called normal. So the statistical impact was only a one percent impact on the – the region. So, again, a myth. Three Mile – Chernobyl was a terrible disaster, absolutely, but keep it in perspective. Some…

FUDGE: Well…

SCHULTZ: …something like 50 people died.

FUDGE: 50 people? Is that…

SCHULTZ: That – that is certainly not to be sneezed at.

FUDGE: Now – Now, Bill, is that your understanding? I mean, if we talk about deaths that are directly related to the Chernobyl accident, 50?

HALSEY: It was in that range and Ken is – is correct that the – the direct deaths were – were a terrible event and that the longterm event – effects, spread throughout a broad prop – population, are real but they’re small compared to – to natural cancers and – and other effects.

FUDGE: I – I read an article that suggested that – that exposure to the radiation may have spread as far as Sweden, for instance.

HALSEY: Yes.

FUDGE: And – and that is a fact?

HALSEY: Yes.

FUDGE: Okay. So – so I guess when we talk about the mythology of – of – of nuclear power and – and mythology of the dangers, that that Chernobyl accident does seem to be the one thing that – that environmentalists can point to and say, well, look at what happened in Chernobyl. And so I guess you guys – Bill, that’s something you have to be able to answer and – and talk about.

HALSEY: Well, of course. And, as Ken pointed out, the Russian reactor design did not have the safety features that the reactors in the United States and most of the rest of the world have. The Russians don’t build reactors that way anymore. They don’t operate them the way that they were operating that reactor. In fact, it was operating outside its design parameter space when the accident occurred, which should not have been done. And it’s a completely different type of reactor than we use in the rest of the world. So, we – we believe that the new generation of reactors reflect a much greater level of safety and defense in depth, and a much simpler operation and safety mode.

FUDGE: So if a utility company started construction on a nuclear plant today, first of all, that would be referred to as a Phase 4, is that the – the term of art that you use, Bill?

HALSEY: We would…

FUDGE: Phase 4?

HALSEY: We would – Plants that are currently look – being looked at for construction—and there’s quite a few of them—are called Generation 3 plants.

FUDGE: Generation 3. Phase 4, Generation 3…

HALSEY: Right.

FUDGE: …I was a little bit off on that.

HALSEY: The plants that we have operating, such as Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, are Generation 2 plants.

FUDGE: Umm-hmm.

HALSEY: The Generation 2 plants were the early ones and they’re pretty much all shut down and gone.

FUDGE: Now, Generation 3, Bill – Bill Halsey and Ken Schultz, tell our listeners why you consider those to be much safer and why you consider them to be – to be perfectly safe, if you consider them to be perfectly safe.

HALSEY: Well, I’ll take a start at that.

FUDGE: Sure.

HALSEY: I – I believe the Generation 2 plants are safe and, as was pointed out, the defense in depth at Diablo – at Three Mile Island really proved that those – those safety features function. What’s happened in the Generation 3 plants is all of those safety features that were being developed and added on to the Generation 2 plants have been designed in as intrinsic part of the plant design and the operating system so that the interface between safety and the rest of the plant is just naturally designed in and the complexity of the safety systems has been reduced, which enhances reliability and there’s even additional safety factors have been built in beyond the Gen 2 plants.

FUDGE: Ken, anything to add?

SCHULTZ: The integration – the better integration results in simpler plants which will aid in reliability and it also helps reduce cost.

FUDGE: Ken Schultz is Operations Director for the Energy Group at General Atomics, based in San Diego. Bill Halsey joins us by phone. He’s group leader for Nuclear and Risk Sciences at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I’m Tom Fudge. You’re listening to These Days and we’re talking about nuclear power, which is being viewed more and more these days as an alternative to fossil fuel plants for producing electricity in – in this country. Fossil fuel plants, of course, contribute to global warming. And Jim is in Bay Park. Let’s go to Jim.

JIM (Caller, Bay Park): Good morning.

FUDGE: Go ahead, you’re our first caller.

JIM: Oh, good morning. Thank you for taking my call. My – my concerns are more around what we do with potentially contaminated waste and – and how we’re dealing with longterm decay or – or long decay products like cesium and – and cobalt-60 and stuff like that. Has the technology changed in the last 24 years significantly as far as how we handle that?

FUDGE: All right, thank you very much. And how do we handle nuclear waste?

HALSEY: Well, let me – let me address that since I did work on the – the United States Spent Nuclear Fuel and Radioactive Waste Program for many years. The preferred method for – for managing the longterm waste from the nuclear power fuel cycle is deep geologic disposal. You put it into a deep-mined geologic facility, which you can eventually seal and leave it well underground. This is in the United States and in most – most other countries around the world. In the United States, our primary repository program is at the Yucca Mountain site in – in Nevada, and that program has had a long history of delays and development but this is an interesting week because the license application for the Yucca Mountain Repository was docketed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission earlier this week.

FUDGE: Okay, so that may actually, after decades of – of questioning, that may actually be settled sometime soon? Is that what you’re telling us?

HALSEY: Well, it won’t be real soon. They have three years to review the license application with a one-year extension. The – Then, if they get a favorable result from the NRC, it will take a number of years to finish building the repository and operation can start in, perhaps, ten years or so.

FUDGE: And as far as you can tell, that’s okay with the people of Nevada? That’s – this is the decision? This is what’s going to happen?

Yucca Mountain is actually going to become a repository.

HALSEY: Well, let me – I – I guess I can comment on that because I worked on the program for thirteen years. Technically, the program is okay. Politically, it has a great deal of problems. It was imposed upon the citizens of the state of Nevada without their – without their consent. It was basically done by congress and they said, put the waste there, and the – the politicians of the state of Nevada have made their careers opposing it. And, actually, the politicians in Nevada are more opposed than the citizens but no state likes to have something imposed on them without – without their consent. So it’s a political problem, not a technical problem.

FUDGE: And let’s take another call. We’ve got Dan in Oceanside. Dan, you’re on with – I should tell you who we’re – who’s talking on the show, I guess, one more time. Bill Halsey is group leader for Nuclear and Risk Sciences at Lawrence Livermore. Ken Schultz, in studio, is Operations Director for the Energy Group at General Atomics in San Diego. And, once again, Dan is in Oceanside. Go ahead.

DAN (Caller, Oceanside): Good morning, Tom.

FUDGE: Good morning.

DAN: I have sort of a follow-up question to the one that Jim just asked and it does – it does relate to the Yucca Mountain storage facility there. My understanding was that there had been some geological fault lines located directly under that facility that would put in real question the safety of that idea. And, second of all, the nuclear industry has made a big point of talking about nuclear power as being cheap, and I’m just trying to imagine how it is that they’re projecting the cost of maintaining that waste for tens of thousands of years. I can’t imagine they’ve even able to come up with a good ballpark cost estimate for the next hundred years. How is it that that seems to – that part of the equation seems to always be left out when they talk about how inexpensive it is? And I’ll take my answer off the air. Thank you.

FUDGE: Thank you very much for calling, Dan. So, I guess we need to go back to you, Bill Halsey, on this one since you were the one who worked on Yucca Mountain. Cheap? Is…

HALSEY: Well…

FUDGE: …that a cheap solution?

HALSEY: Well, thank you, Dan, for the question. There were two parts to it, one was on the safety with the faults…

FUDGE: Uh-huh.

HALSEY: …and the other was on the economics.

FUDGE: Yeah.

HALSEY: Yucca Mountain is a very expensive facility but it is designed to manage the waste from a – very many nuclear power plants and it adds about one mil, one one-thousandth of a dollar per kilowatt hour to the cost of electricity, which is a very minor fraction of the cost of electricity. So when you spread it out over lots of plants, it’s inexpensive. And once the repository has been filled to capacity, some day in the future, and is closed, then the maintenance costs on it are minimal. It’s just some surface observation, so it’s not a high, ongoing cost once you build the repository and – and complete it. But there are other issues.

FUDGE: So what – what happens – Yeah, what happens if we get an earthquake?

HALSEY: Well, of course there are faults. There’s faults everywhere. And the delays in the program, in many ways, were taking the time to go underground with many miles of tunnels and thousands of – of bore holes to examine the geology. The repository is sited in between faults in a block which has been intact since it was laid down volcanically a very long time ago. So, yes, we do expect earthquakes in – in the area and there have been earthquakes even during the site characterization but the ground motion underground is – is no real threat to the – either the natural system or the engineered facility that – that would be put there.

FUDGE: Ken, let me go – let me get back to you and – with this question of – of the cost of nuclear power because that was kind of Dan’s – one of Dan’s main – main questions: How can you say that this is cheap when you have to pay for the Yucca Mountain Repository? I guess you could also say, how can you say it’s cheap when it costs God knows how many millions of dollars to build the plant?

SCHULTZ: Billions.

FUDGE: Billions of dollars.

SCHULTZ: Bill – billions of dollars.

FUDGE: So – so how – how can you say this is cheap energy? I don’t know if you are saying that but…

SCHULTZ: Bill – I am saying that.

FUDGE: All right.

SCHULTZ: Bill’s answer was a hundred percent correct. The cost per kilowatt hour of electricity generated from nuclear power, for all of that work, the digging the hole in the ground, monitoring it, testing it, etcetera, is – is a tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour. We – our – we normally pay about a dime, ten cents a kilowatt hour, for our electricity, so one-tenth of one cent more for the waste repository.

FUDGE: All right.

SCHULTZ: Nuclear power is, indeed, capital intensive but the operating costs are really quite low. The analogy here, you say, my goodness, look how expensive nuclear power is; they cost literally a billion dollars for each plant. Well, the – the average cost over a thirty or sixty year, even sixty year, lifetime of that plant means that the cost of nuclear power is, right now, the cheapest way to generate electricity. A lot of that is due to the fact that these plants were built a long time ago. When I bought my house thirty years ago, I – it was a real stretch for me to – to pay the interest on the – pay the loan payments. It was three hundred dollars a month, and it still is today, three hundred dollars a month. Same with a nuclear power plant. You pay up front, you – then you keep paying that and as inflation goes along, now, today, nuclear power is the cheapest way to generate electricity in the United States.

FUDGE: Three hundred dollars a month, who says that houses are expensive in San Diego?

SCHULTZ: That was…

FUDGE: What are they talking about?

SCHULTZ: That was thirty – thirty years ago, Tom.

FUDGE: Let me ask about insurance because this is a subject that has come up in – in terms of the cost and – and the ability to build nuclear power plants. I – it’s been suggested to me that the cost of insurance is prohibitive and it’s very difficult to get insurance. Can either of you address that? Ken? Bill? Ken?

SCHULTZ: Let me take a whack at it. The – the cost of insuring nuclear power plants is not prohibitive. There are two levels of insurance. One is private insurance pools, two large commercial pools. Commercial entities, can – composed of a number of different insurers provide the first level of in – insurance to nuclear power plants, up to about three hundred million dollars.

FUDGE: Umm-hmm.

SCHULTZ: It’s paid for by the – the utilities that operate those nuclear power plants. The second level is what’s called the Price-Anderson Act coverage where all of the utilities in the United States have banded together and said if there is an accident that exceeds this three hundred million dollar private insurance pool that we’ve all paid for and – and we ratepayers are – are – are paying for in our – our electricity bills…

FUDGE: Umm-hmm.

SCHULTZ: …then we will pull together a pool of up to ten billion dollars from each of these nuclear power plants now to cover it. Over the years, there has never been a payment out of this larger pool. There have been smaller payments, particularly with the Three Mile Island accident out of the private insurance pool but this larger umbrella of ten billion dollars has never been touched.

FUDGE: We’re talking about nuclear power and whether it is going to make a comeback and pro – start providing more of the electricity needs in this country and in the state of California. Bill Halsey joins me by phone. He’s group leader for Nuclear and Risk Sciences at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and joining me in studio is Ken Schultz, Operations Director for the Energy Group at General Atomics here in San Diego. Helen is in North County. Let’s go to her. Helen, go ahead.

HELEN (Caller, North County): Good morning, gentlemen. I’d like to know about the wildfires last year, the San Onofre plant was offline, they said, at the time. If it had been online, would it have been much more dangerous? And with these Generation 1 and some of the Generation 2 plants that are offline, what happens to that area if they’re – if they’re not operating? What are – what are the safety risks with natural disasters?

FUDGE: Okay, safety risks with national – natural disasters. Can you answer that, Ken?

SCHULTZ: I’ll give it a shot. The nuclear power plants come with a wide variety of protective mechanisms, in particular the big concrete, what’s called, containment vessel that you see next to highway 5, those twin domes. A – a wildfire in the area would have absolutely no impact whatsoever on what goes on inside. The general risk associated with a fire, a forest fire of some kind, is that it will – will burn down the transmission lines. With no transmission lines going out, you can’t get the electricity out, you shut the plant down, which means that people on the other end of those transmission lines are now doing without electricity but the – the risk to the plant, risk to the public, is – is truly negligible.

FUDGE: What – what about terrorist attacks?

SCHULTZ: There’ve been a number of studies done on what could one do as a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant, primarily as a result of September eleventh. And the conclusion is you could smash a fully loaded airplane directly into those containment buildings and not cause any di – damage at all inside. You could shut the plant down by knocking the turbine out or taking the wires out that go out, so, again, you lose the electricity product but in terms of harm to the plant or harm that would cause the plant to cause any danger to the public, it – it’s inconceivable that you could – could actually pull that off.

FUDGE: Bill, those – those containment domes, which everybody who lives in San Diego has seen if they’ve drone – driven up the I-5, if you’ve seen San Onofre, is – is that – is that the way they’re going to be built in the future? I mean, the next generation of plants, are they going to have those big containment domes – domes?

HALSEY: The third generation plants will have a full containment. They’re very thick reinforced concrete. One of the trends that’s coming along in plant design is to build the majority of the plant below grade, below the ground level but you will still have that massive containment structure for the facilities above the reactor and the turbine and – and things like that. And then that trend will continue in what we call the Generation 4 plants, which are not yet available for construction but are in the research phase…

FUDGE: Judith in…

HALSEY: …so yes.

FUDGE: Okay, thank you very much, Bill. And Judith is in San Diego, she’s our next caller. Judith, you’re on the show.

JUDITH (Caller, San Diego): Oh, I really appreciate your show. Up

‘til a couple of years ago, when I was in San Antonio and Rockport, Texas, there were regular reports on my NPR station that told of our security guys trying to breach the security of the nuclear power plants and they were virtually, totally successful every last time. And I – and since I moved to San Diego when I was – the year before, when I was in Japan, I had not heard one more word about this and this is very troubling to me because I think terrorism is – you know, stealing fissionable materials is a – a major concern.

FUDGE: Okay, well, thank you very much, Judith. Let’s focus on that – that business of – of stealing the – the nuclear materials. You want to talk about that, Bill?

HALSEY: Yes. And, in fact, following up on – on other questions about terrorism, you – there is the question of people actually attacking the plant. And over the years, nuclear plants have had steadily increasing security requirements, and they have fairly large security forces now, and they’re – they are constantly testing and challenging them. One of the issues is you design those tests to push the security until it fails so that you find out where the weak links are. We do that at many of our military bases and other national security facilities where you – if you just use a small challenge to the security force, you’re not learning much. So when you hear that the security tests fail, that means that they were pushed to the point where they did fail. And there is a steady process of learning and improving those security forces, and right now it would take a fairly large, dedicated, very well equipped force to seriously challenge nuclear power plant security.

FUDGE: Let’s talk about nuclear power as a choice that we could make in this country. I think I mentioned before that one of the reasons we’re looking at nuclear power much more now than we were before is because we’ve been – become much more aware of global warming, and – and the production of electricity through nuclear generation seems to be a good option. What would you like to say about that, Bill Halsey? I mean, why do you think we should choose nuclear in this country?

HALSEY: Well, I’ll start out by saying I think we need to develop all of our energy sources. There’s no simple solution to the energy demand both for the U.S. and for the planet, and I believe that nuclear energy can be a major contributor to that. It is a non – non-polluting, non-carbon source so it’s – addresses the global warming issues. It’s also a very high density source that runs very reliably. And, as we pointed out, once you build the plant, it runs very economically. And in the United States in the last two years, since 2006, we have had 34 license applications in for new nuclear power plants at some state of development, and I believe about ten of those have actually submitted full applications to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the past year and a half.

FUDGE: Some environmentalists say we should focus on wind and solar, not on nukes. Do you think, Bill, that that is a realistic position or not?

HALSEY: I think we need to do all the wind and all the solar that we can realistically achieve and I don’t think that they’re going to be enough. Here at the Laboratory, we work on all of these energy sources and we also look at the longterm energy demands and my belief is that we need to do all of them. We need biomass, we need wind, we need solar, we need carbon sequestration for low carbon fossil, and we need massive amounts of nuclear energy.

FUDGE: Ken Schultz, make your argument for nuclear energy. Why do you think this is a choice that we should make?

SCHULTZ: I think Bill has stated it very well, that, in fact, nuclear is one part of the solution to the energy needs of the United States and the world. Here in the U.S. projections by the Energy Information Agency are that we’re going to need to increase our electricity generation by about twenty-five percent over the next twenty years. This, plus then replacing some older plants, particularly old coal plants as they reach the end of their useful life, means that there’s a tremendous need for new sources of electricity. If we look – look beyond the United States to the rest of the world, we see we’ve got a real serious demand for electricity. The developing world sees what the developed world has achieved with use of elect – energy to improve their lifestyles and they want it, they want a decent life just as much as – as we do, for their children as we – as we want for our children. And so we, in the developed world, I think have a moral obligation to help expand energy production for the rest of the world as well as for ourselves. Some of this is conservation. We can do a – a – get as much bang for the buck with less electricity than we – we currently do. We’re wasteful. We – Fine, we can do some conservation. But even with that conservation, we’re looking at a significant increase in the demand for energy around the world if everyone in the world is to have a lifestyle that you and I would consider acceptable. And that, I think, is a moral obligation that we can face, and part of that solution is solar, part of it is wind, part of it is biomass, part of it may well be fossil, and part of it is definitely nuclear.

FUDGE: Let me ask – let me ask you guys this, nuclear power is obviously a proven source, a large scale source, of providing electricity. I think I mentioned before that in – in France, eighty percent of the electricity is provided by nuclear power. What about transportation? That’s kind of our other big – in addition to electricity, that’s our other big energy need and – and a big source of – of fossil fuel emissions. What about transportation? Can nuclear power play a role there?

SCHULTZ: This is an area that I, personally, have been doing a lot of work in over the past few years, and the answer is yes. Nuclear power can produce electricity and electricity can run public transportation vehicles, train – electric trains as in France. It can provide elect – charging for electric vehicles or – or plug-in hybrid vehicles. Nuclear power can also produce hydrogen and hydrogen can be used in fu – fuel cell vehicles. One of the things that I’m most excited about is the idea of using hydrogen produced by nuclear power with CO2 captured from our existing coal plants which is something that’s going to have to be happening. Take that hydrogen, take that CO2, chemically put them together and make synthetic hydrocarbon fuels from it. It’s energy basically coming from nuclear power carried in a hydrocarbon, a synthetic, manmade hydrocarbon for our transportation sector.

FUDGE: Sounds like – sounds like a good idea to me. I don’t understand the science of it but – but you’re saying you could actually capture some of the CO2 that is…

SCHULTZ: Well…

FUDGE: …would otherwise go into the atmosphere and…

SCHULTZ: …capturing…

FUDGE: …then into energy?

SCHULTZ: Capturing CO2 is something that is going to be required. Europe, for example, already has a carbon tax that – that anyone who emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has to – to get carbon credits or pay the carbon taxes. The U.S. doesn’t have this yet but we surely will as the global warming concerns continue to grow. Those plants that release carbon dioxide and are – are – Right now, we get half of our electricity from coal and that electric – electricity generation from coal results in about two billion tons of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere every year, a third of our total CO2 release. All right, some of that CO2 is going to be captured and sequestered. One of the means of sequestering it is taking it, taking the hydrogen produced by nuclear, putting them together in what’s called the Fischer Tropsch reaction, which is a proven chemical process, to make synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.

FUDGE: Given the poli – We’re almost out of time, unfortunately. Given the politics of – of America today and given the fact that a lot of people in our country are still very skeptical about nuclear power, how realistic is it to – to say that utility companies are going to start building these plants anytime – anytime soon? Bill Halsey, do you want to talk about that?

HALSEY: Well, I think that after this long hiatus in ordering new plants, like I said, we have many of them that are – have license applications in, there are some loan guarantees in place for the first plants to bring those – those investment risks down, and these will cost nothing if the plants are built on time and go into the rate base. They’ll cost the government nothing. I believe that we are going to get the first round of hard orders and construction started within the next year or two.

FUDGE: Any last word from you on that subject, Ken Schultz?

SCHULTZ: That – that’s indeed the case. And if things go well with those first half a dozen plants—and the loan guarantees, again, won’t cost anything if they do go well—we will find then that even without loan guarantees there will be a lot more. Right now, we have a hundred and four nuclear power plants in the United States, 440 worldwide. With – Bill has noted we’ve got something like 35 in the pipeline and we’ll see more. Nuclear power can be part of the – of the solution for the energy needs for the U.S. and – and even more for the world. Not be a total solution but an important part of that solution.

FUDGE: And we’ll have to leave it at that. I need to thank my guests, Bill Halsey and Ken Schultz. Ken, who you just heard from, is Operations Director for the Energy Group at General Atomics in San Diego. Ken, thank you.

SCHULTZ: Thank you, Tom.

FUDGE: Bill Halsey is group leader for Nuclear and Risk Sciences at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Bill, thank you very much.

HALSEY: Tom, thank you for having me on.