Japan's nuclear tragedy turns eyes to Florida's industry

Old fears about nuclear energy leapt back to the surface this week, giving a leg up to atomic energy foes in this country and prompting Germany and Switzerland to halt power plants abroad.

Progress Energy could have a lot to lose from the public fear. The company hopes to build a new nuclear plant in Levy County, just north of its existing Crystal River plant, and it may restart the Crystal River plant as early as next month.

The latter facility has been under repair and hasn't operated in a year and a half.

Foes of nuclear energy hope the Japanese crisis opens people's eyes in this country. People have been warming to atomic energy in recent years because it's considered cleaner than coal and other fuel sources.

"What I hope it will do is be a wake-up call for younger people, who weren't around for Chernobyl and Three Mile Island," said Cara Campbell, chair of a small political party called the Ecology Party of Florida, which opposes the proposed Levy County plant, a little more than 100 miles north of Tampa.

While Japanese energy companies scrambled to prevent reactor meltdowns Monday, Progress Energy spokespeople sought to reassure Floridians that such a problem is extremely unlikely here.

The company owns an 838-megawatt nuclear plant near Crystal River, but it hasn't operated since September 2009. That's when the company discovered a crack in a 42-inch-thick containment wall. Company spokeswoman Suzanne Grant said the crack formed while Progress Energy was cutting a hole in the wall to do routine maintenance, not beforehand.

The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a public meeting on Tuesday, March 22, in the nuclear plant's training center to discuss the plant's potential restart.

Theoretically, a massive hurricane could slam into the Crystal River plant and bring floodwaters from storm surge.

In fact, it was water from the tsunami that really caused the crisis at the Japanese nuclear plants. The tsunami waters caused backup diesel generators at Japan's nuclear plants to stop functioning and disabled the plants' cooling systems.

Jessica Lambert, a spokeswoman for Progress Energy, said the Crystal River plant also uses backup diesel generators. But, she downplayed the risks of a Japanese-style crisis. The Crystal River plant is built on a berm that's more than 30 feet high.

And, the threat from a tsunami wave is different from a hurricane, because tsunami waves tend to go up and over, where storm surge tends to flood more gradually. The Crystal River plant also was built to withstand hurricane-force winds, although Lambert didn't immediately know what strength storm it could withstand Monday.

In Florida and worldwide, at least some politicians have started rethinking their nuclear policies.

State Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda (D-Tallahassee), has introduced a bill that would eliminate utility companies' ability to charge customers upfront for the cost of building nuclear power plants. She has been a longtime opponent of nuclear power and actually drew up her bill before the recent Japanese crisis.

Countries that use nuclear power have to find somewhere to store the spent nuclear fuel and have to find huge sums of money to build the plants, she said.

"Then, you couple it with the fact that it is not the safest thing in the entire world, which the Japanese crisis has just demonstrated," Rehwinkel Vasilinda said.

This weekend, U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman appeared on CBS' "Face the Nation" program and called for a temporary moratorium on new nuclear plants until the country studies the Japanese crisis. Overseas, Germany and Switzerland each enacted temporary moratoriums on building new nuclear plants or extending the life of existing ones.

So far, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has no such plans. Roger Hannah, a spokesman for the federal agency, said the government will study the Japanese crisis. If the NRC discovers some safety risks to American nuclear plants after the study, it could play into future requests for nuclear power plant licenses.

However, the agency is going forward next week with the hearing on restarting the Crystal River nuclear plant. The agency also continues to review Progress Energy's application for a new nuclear plant in Levy County, Hannah said.

If the company gets the OK, it would build a nuclear power plant with two reactors in southern Levy County, about eight miles north of its Crystal River plant. Grant, the Progress Energy spokeswoman, said the company expects to learn from the Japanese crisis, but she didn't expect it to tie up their future plans.

"I don't see it having an impact on what we're planning in Levy County," she said.

Most likely, what's happening in Japan won't change people's opinions about nuclear energy here, said Stephen Ansolabehere, a government professor at Harvard University who has done surveys about people's attitudes toward atomic energy.

Only a third of the American public supported expanding nuclear energy in the years after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, which caused a near-catastrophe in Pennsylvania in 1979.

But people began warming to it more recently, especially as people began worrying about global warming. Today, somewhere around half of the public support expanding nuclear energy, Ansolabehere said.

Geography seems to play a big role in people's opinions. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Europeans' support for nuclear energy declined, but it didn't seem to affect Americans' support. Similarly, Europeans weren't swayed by Three Mile Island, Ansolabehere said.

Ultimately, the energy industry will be impacted most by the Japanese crisis.

"My guess is that the industry will actually learn a lot from this," he said.

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