San Antonio's CPS Energy is considering two more nuclear power plants to fill our area's ever-growing need for electrical power. Going down the list, there seem to be few alternatives - coal releases CO2, which terrifies environmentalists; natural gas prices go up and down more than the Steel Eel roller coaster at SeaWorld; solar power is a great idea that still doesn't work, windmills work great, but only when the wind blows between 10 and 25 miles per hour, and even in Texas, that's not all the time.

"There are large, modern nuclear power plants with reliability records that match the top records of plants burning gas, oil or coal," one newspaper editorial has urged. "Nuclear power is no experiment...power companies all over the United States have realized that nuclear power must be used to generate electricity," it continued. That is from an editorial in the San Antonio Express on June 21 - of 1973. At the time they were telling the San Antonio City Council to man up and vote for nukes. Four days later, the editorial was headlined "Council Energy Hearings: What Are the Options?" which was answered as nuclear and nothing. That week the San Antonio Light ran an above-the-fold story on the Sunday front page pointing out, for about the five millionth time, that nuclear reactors cannot explode like atom bombs and that, even for people with irrational fears like that, our reactor would be 165 miles away in Bay City, not downtown.

City council did vote for nuclear power on June 27 of 1973, after a tumultuous 9-hour public hearing the night before where all the old myths were brought up. The next day, the Express editorial said the plant's building would begin at the start of 1976, would cost $900 million dollars, and would produce only 6 pounds of nuclear waste a day, the weight of what a coal-fired plant produces as ash in a minute. The vote didn't end it, of course - opponents of nuclear power continued to complain - but the concrete was poured in early 1976. Power didn't flow from the plant until August of 1988, but it's been fairly constant for the past 21 years, although the cost of the plant zoomed due to inflation and alleged mismanagement by the contractor. Still, the cost of nuclear power seems cheap today. And how many people has it killed in 21 years?

Now the mayor, thinking more like a politician than a chief executive, is waffling on the CPS nuclear issue. Maybe we'll buy less than 50% of the new reactors, maybe we won't. Perhaps he should look at a few old newspapers from the 1970s - the world was about to end, gasoline was going to be $10 a gallon, nuclear power would kill us all, Vietnam, Watergate - and yet we built the South Texas Project and have benefited from it. I'll put it this way - in fifteen years would you rather this city have extra power to sell to other cities - or have us beg for power? Which one of those situations is going to lead to more jobs and a richer community?

What the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should have done years ago, of course, is to approve nuclear plants of a certain size built by certain companies to certain specifications, so utilities could simply pick what they need and build it, saving billions But the government seems to really enjoy reinventing the wheel every month or so, so we pay the higher price of being regulated.

The earlier vote for nuclear power came in the midst of one of this country's worst times . Here we go again, with a weak economy, high energy prices, etc. But if San Antonio doesn't keep up with its energy demands (even organic granola-types with notebook computers use a lot of power), we'll end up like California, with blackouts, no jobs and high taxes - and considering this summer, we can't even brag about the good weather.

3 Comments

alfie cordaway said:

Right on Chris... we need the two plants which won't come omline till 2020 and there are no viable alternatives.

August 6, 2009 5:25 PM

Larry Lim said:

I was recently contacted by a phone survey on this issue. I admitted that I didn't know enough about it to answer appropriately. A few of the scenarios that the operator played out resulted in higher CPS bills so I said 'no thank you' to those. I hope my desire to not pay 340 in energy bills didn't give them the wrong impression about nuclear energy.

August 6, 2009 6:48 PM

Joey C. said:

I, too, don't know much about the issue of nuclear power and because I don't know much, it makes me wonder if it's safe.

While you bring up a good point that in the 21 year history of our reactor, it has never killed anyone, that doesn't actually mean the technology has never killed anyone before. Of course, the chances of it happening are pretty small, if an accident should happen, it isn't gonna be as simple as sweeping a few brooms around to clean up the mess. But I will say that the benefits of having this kind of power completely outweigh the risks if the plant is run with every ounce of safety mechanism known to man running properly.

But what is so wrong with solar power? One of the points that you made about nuclear energy is that, while it isn't a great amount of waste, trash is still trash and it has to be put somewhere. From what I understand, this nuclear waste can be transferred by truck or by train. The one thing we have around here is railroads. But I'm sure the people who have lived longer than me will attest that San Antonio isn't exactly accident free when it comes to rail road accidents.

Solar power doesn't need anything but a large amount of space to catch the rays of the sun. Last I understood, there's a lot of sun out in west Texas and if you've lived in San Antonio in the past 3 or 4 months, you will have known by the burns on your skin that the only thing that the sky seems to do around here is show that great big fireball in the sky we call the sun.

Yes, we don't have the technology in place yet to fully use the amount of energy that we would be producing, but wouldn't that mean if we actually did want to use solar power, we'd have to put people to work actually building that sort of infrastructure? Doesn't that mean that we'd have to create jobs for people to build these solar power plants and build a new power grid?

I completely agree with you, Chris, when you say that we need power now before things get out of hand. I'm all for creating these things if they can be made fast and be worth their price tag. But what I want to know is: If we make these plants and then in the near future we decide that solar is a better way to go and can build the needed infrastructure and can replace a nuclear plant with a solar plant, can we safely shut them down as we find out we don't need them?

August 22, 2009 1:08 PM

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