Oregon Public Broadcasting

Monday, on OPB’s series ‘The Switch’, we consider a source Oregonians all but outlawed 30 years ago -- nuclear power.

As Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, while Oregon isn’t likely to see a new nuclear power station anytime soon, the technology’s relatively small carbon-footprint means it’s experiencing somewhat of a renaissance in other parts of the country.

Ballot Measure 7, which passed in 1980, effectively banned the construction of a nuclear power plant in Oregon. But what the law doesn’t do, is stop Oregon utilities from buying nuclear power on the market.

When you flip the switch, where does your power come from? And what will power Northwest homes and businesses in the future? We're asking these questions and more for our special series The Switch.

So currently, about 3 percent of the Beaver State’s electricity comes from the ‘Columbia Generating Facility’ in Hanford.

Older listeners may remember this nuclear power station as the Whoops Facility or Washington Public Power System.

But today it’s got a new name and it’s a hive of activity.

Once every two years, hundreds of workers in yellow suits take the lid off the reactor and refuel it.

From a platform above, nuclear engineer Scott O’Connor watches as old uranium rods are pulled out of the reactor and carefully carried to a deep pool.

Scott O’Connor: “They’ve already picked up a bundle. You can see the nice blue glow on it - shrink-off radiation. That only comes off the bundles that come right out of the core. After a month or two that glow goes down to very dim, where it’s hard to see it.”

That blue glow is one of the things that drew O’Connor into nuclear physics. He pursued the career path in the early 2000s, even as people warned him against "a dying industry."

Scott O’Connor: “I’ve always been fascinated with it. I never though that we would have this resurgence that we have now. The new people coming out of college in the last two years, always say there’s a renaissance. We’re building new plants, we’re moving forward, there’s lots of job opportunities. My experience of six and a half years ago are so foreign to them, they can’t even fathom that.”

Indeed about 30 new nuclear power stations are in various stages of development around the country.

Reasons include: the low cost of nuclear fuel, plus its relatively small carbon footprint.

It takes lot of carbon dioxide to construct nuclear plants, but they’re licensed to run for 40 years -- and many are re-licensed for another 20 years.

But running, nuclear power stations only emit about 17 tons of carbon dioxide per megawatt -- according to a study by the University of Wisconsin.

That’s not much more than the lowest sources - wind and geothermal power.

Coal has the highest carbon emissions at about 1000 tons per megawatt.

So its low carbon footprint, coupled with the fact that nuclear can provide a large amount of reliable base load power, makes it an attractive option in this era of climate change.

But, as most everyone knows, nuclear has problems.

Because of the risks, Wall Street won’t fund it without federal loan guarantees; human errors can be disastrous; and it produces a stream of long-lived and dangerous radioactive waste.

The Trojan plant for example was built by Portland General Electric in the 1970’s and shut down less than 20 years later.

The reactor was shipped off to Hanford and buried; the cooling tower demolished in a widely publicized explosion.  All that remains is a large gravel lot.

Larry Rocha: “So we’re standing at about the spot where the reactor vessel stood inside the containment building.”

Larry Rocha is the radiation specialist here.

Larry Rocha: “Inside that reactor vessel had all the fuel, that’s where the fission went, that’s where all the radioactivity was created and as you can see, the instrument is reading.”

Kristian: “So about seven.”

Larry Rocha: “Right now it’s reading about 9”

Kristian: “And the average is between 5 and 10”

Larry Rocha: “Throughout Oregon right. What we’re picking up now is a little bit of shine as we walk closer to the ISFCE, it’ll start going up.”

The ISFCE is the Independent Spent Fuel Storage Facility and in essence it’s 34 massive concrete cylinders. Inside each one sit the bundles of fuel rods that produced the heat, that drove Trojan’s turbines.

Most of the rods here outlived their usefulness decades ago, but on a cold day, you can still see the heat waves emanating from their vents.

It’s Rocha’s job to monitor them and he says knowledge of what radiation can -- and cannot -- penetrate, allows him to walk up and touch them.

Larry Rocha: “Nuclear power is one source of energy to make electricity from. It does not have the same carbon footprint as burning coal, because uranium you produce no carbon, but it’s only one source, and there are other alternatives and I think the country is going to have to make its decision how many alternatives it wants to use.”

With white hair and an easy smile, Rocha is a veteran of the nuclear industry. He remembers the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and he concedes the industry will never completely disassociate itself with the mushroom cloud.

But a couple of hundred miles away, at the Columbia Generating Station, spokeswoman Rochelle Olsen is too young to remember.

Rochelle Olsen: “You know today at Columbia Generating Station we’ve been operating for 25 years and all of our used fuel that’s come out of the reactor is stored safely and securely right here on our property and we can continue to operate that way for the next 25, 45, 55 years and it would remain safe and it would remain secure. So it’s not an issue.”

She says the U.S. should follow the lead of France, which recycles spent fuel. That, she says, would cut the amount of waste by 95 percent.

But that kind of recycling doesn't make nuclear renewable -- there’s still a dangerous waste stream and the process also produces weapons grade plutonium -- an attractive target for terrorists.

Chuck Johnson: “It’s a little bit like the old lady who swallowed the spider to catch the fly and then she swallowed the cat to catch the spider.

Chuck Johnson helped write the ballot measure that banned nuclear power in Oregon 30 years ago.

Chuck Johnson: “We know that burning hydrocarbons is causing global warming, that doesn’t therefore logically lead us to do something else that has long-term negative consequences. Like develop nuclear energy that has radioactive waste that lasts 10s of thousands of years. I think future generations will wonder, what was so important about generating electricity back in the 20th and 21st century that we now have to deal with these wastes that these people generated 10-thousand years ago.”

They might also wonder why someone didn’t stop people pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

There’s a pilot who likes to inform his passengers when flying over the North Pole, that the water they see 30,000 feet below used to be ice when he started flying -- just 20 years ago.

With the weather changing that fast, it’s not surprising some people regard nuclear power as the quickest way to produce a steady supply of low-carbon power.