Should Oregon champion small-scale nuclear reactors?
Albany Democrat-Herald on how state should push for nuclear reactors as a power source:
Sept. 3
Oregon has a requirement that electric utilities obtain 25 percent of their power from renewable resources such as wind and solar. Even if the goal is met, that still leaves Oregon getting three quarters of its electrical power from conventional sources, including coal and natural gas.
If Oregon leadership had been smart, it would have allowed wind and solar to develop on their own. Oregon would have pushed instead to promote — with state law changes and appeals to Congress and federal regulators — the kind of nuclear reactors that a Corvallis company is designing.
The company is NuScale, formed in 2007. It has designed small-scale nuclear reactors ideally suited to power American cities one at a time, without relying on fossil fuels, needing no long-distance transmission systems, and reliable regardless of whether the wind blows or the sun shines.
NuScale reactors would be small, 9 feet in diameter, and could be built in factories instead of on site. One module would be enough to power a town about the size of Albany. The modules could be arranged in series for bigger cities. They operate under ground, without cooling towers.
In short, they sound ideal for America's energy situation. They could replace all the current gas-fired electric generation, leaving all that natural gas to power our cars and trucks of the future, which raises the possibility of making us independent of oil imports from places like Venezuela and the Middle East.
But our political leaders are either not interested, as in Oregon, or in absolutely no hurry, as at the federal level. Obama has talked about encouraging nuclear power but done nothing to follow up.
The Oregon company expects to submit documents for certification of its design to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2012. Approval is not expected until 2015. Nobody's in a hurry.
Our federal legislators constantly talk of energy independence. If they meant it, our laws would encourage NuScale-type reactors to be certified, built and rushed into use.
