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By Anne Pyburn Craig
Nuclear energy suppliers are riding a wave of success in New Jersey with the relicensing last spring of Oyster Creek, the oldest nuclear power plant in the United States. Oyster Creek, owned by Exelon, along with the three reactors operated at the southern end of the state by PSE&G, account for 50 percent of New Jersey’s energy supply. The PSE&G plants are in the initial stages of their own relicensing process, with initial public hearings having been held in November, and employee Joe Delmar is optimistic.
“We have great local support,” he says. “Hope Creek is the second largest nuclear site in the country, and we’ve never given the community any cause for concern. We employ 1,500 people and power three million houses, and we have a great relationship with the stakeholders.” PSE&G, he says, is also in the early stages of developing an early site permit for a new plant, to be filed in spring of 2010.
But not everyone is as happy about the prospect of New Jersey going nuclear. “The nuclear ‘renaissance’ is a well-funded propaganda machine, and the most misleading thing is their posture that it’s a solution to global warming,” says Matt Elliot of environmental advocacy group Environment New Jersey. “Even if we built 100 new reactors in the US by 2030, it’d reduce emissions by 12 percent and cost $600 billion. Invested in renewables, that money could reduce emissions two to five times that much. We fought Oyster Creek because it was an opportunity to shut down a plant that has leaked tritium into the ground four or five times since the relicensing, and it’s straining the life out of the Barnegat Bay.”
“We haven’t always done a good job of explaining the science to folks,” says Dave Benson of Exelon, the “plant communicator” for Oyster Creek and a former Atlantic City-based journalist. “The unexplained can be scary. But it’s science we live with every day. We have 700 employees, and 80 percent of them live right here in Ocean County. And maybe it’s because 30 or 40 percent are ex-military, but I’ve never seen any industry so organized and methodical. Someone is always looking at everything, and everything is taken seriously.”
Nuclear enthusiasts are quick to point out that while nuclear energy may provide only half of New Jersey’s overall electric power, it supplies 95 percent of its carbon-free electric. “Nuclear is the backbone of New Jersey’s energy supply—beyond that, it’s the backbone and frame of its carbon- free generation,” says Tom Kauffman, senior media relations manager for the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C.
In 2008, for instance, “nuclear power helped New Jersey avoid production of 28.9 million tons of CO2,” Kauffman says. “Nuclear’s big advantage is affordable, reliable, baseload electricity, the amount that’s being generated by continuously operating sources.
“Everybody credible agrees that we need a portfolio of low-emissions sources,” he continues. “Sooner or later, one way or another, carbon emissions are going to become absolutely prohibitively costly. And one nuclear plant could charge millions of electric cars.”
Ultimately, admits Kauffman, “There is no perfect source of energy; all of them have challenges and impacts,” and “no way are we against solar, wind, or geothermal.” The crux of the matter, as he sees it, when it comes to nuclear energy is that “we need all we can get…there will always be the need for that baseload power.”
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