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]]]]]] SHOREHAM AND THE ENVIRONMENTALIST GUERILLAS [[[[[[[[
By Sam McCracken 12/2/1988
From National Review, 24 June 1988, p. 14
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
Late last month, the people of New York State got quite a
bargain: the Shoreham nuclear-power plant on Long Island,
complete and almost ready to run, a certified $5.3-billion value
for only one dollar.
If you wonder why the plant's owner, the Long Island Lighting
Company (Lilco), was willing to sell at such a discount, the
answer can be found in that phrase ``almost ready to run.'' All
Shoreham lacks is an operating license, for which it has been
waiting since its completion in 1984. It doesn't have an
operating license because the State of New York and its creature,
Suffolk County, have refused to take part in developing the
emergency-evacuation plans that are a requisite to securing the
license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Earlier
this year, it looked as if the NRC had finally lost patience with
the persistent nonfeasance of the local authorities and would
grant the license without their participation; but this relief
came too late.
Crushed by the burden of debt incurred in building a plant it
could not use, Lilco settled for a deal under which, through a
huge tax deduction, the federal taxpayers will ante up for part
of its losses, and its customers will take care of the rest.
Shoreham was in deep trouble long before the state and the
county went on their sit-down strike. Its construction was a
remarkable example of delay in an industry where delay is
routine. It was ordered in 1967, but did not get a construction
license until 1973. (By contrast, the Millstone Point II plant
across Long Island Sound, ordered the same year as Shoreham, got
its construction permit three years earlier.) Building Shoreham
took 11 years. (Millstone Point II was completed in five.) And
finally, building Shoreham, difficult as it was, was easier than
operating it, which turned out to be impossible.
Meanwhile in Connecticut, Millstone Point II cost $424 million
and, by the time Shoreham was completed, had already paid for
itself by fuel savings, which now total approximately $700
million.
Shoreham proved so expensive for a number of reasons,
including management failures, leaden-handed regulation,
environmentalist guerrilla tactics, and the malevolence of the
local governments. All of these operated through delay. Delay
ensured that the plant was constructed through a period of
swinging inflation and swinging interest rates. (Shoreham has
been costing Lilco upwards of $1 million a day in interest.) It
cost $4.8 billion more than Millstone Point II.
The final and fatal delay was the most unnecessary of all, the
delay in the operating license. This delay was not imposed by
the authorities responsible for ensuring the safety of
nuclear-power plants -- those whose supervision has meant that
not a single member of the public has been injured. They had not
concluded that Shoreham was unsafe to operate. Rather, the local
authorities had yielded to anti-nuclear hysteria.
Nuclear power is held to a standard of safety which no other
industrial technology could possibly meet. If the standards were
generalized, tankers carrying liquefied natural gas could not
enter our harbors. Semiconductor factories could not operate.
And indeed, cola-fired power plants, most of which emit more
radiation than is permitted for nuclear plants, could not
operate.
Nuclear power has been meeting this standard. But Governor
Cuomo and his allies have devised something new: an infinitely
high standard.
Speaking some years ago about the financial prospects of
Lilco, Governor Cuomo compassionately remarked, ``Let them take a
bath. They're a private corporation.'' In the event, the bath
will be taken by practically everyone but Lilco. It will be a
crowded tub. Lilco's customers and the federal taxpayers will be
there. So will all the inhabitants of Long Island, who will
suffer from unreliable sources of electricity. And since some of
the replacement electricity for Shoreham will be generated by
burning more coal, which kills people through air pollution, some
of the people in the tub will be not merely clean but dead.
The nuclear industry is in a mess in America, especially
compared to countries like France, where 55 percent of the
electricity comes from the atom. Some of the blame must got to
the regulators, who, among other things, have ensured that each
plant must be custom-designed and custom-built, incorporating
hundreds of design changes over the period of construction. And
a great deal of blame must go to the anti-nuclear movement,
which, unable to make nuclear power illegal, has done what it can
to make it uneconomical. To this, the New York State and Suffolk
County authorities have added civil disobedience by government
itself.
They already have emulators to the north: Michael Dukakis is
trying to kill the Seabrook plant with his own sit-down strike
over emergency planning. Most of the politicians involved in
these tactics will have moved up or out when the bills come due,
but their names should be remembered for the history books.
[More: IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 24, No. 11 (November 1987), Special
report: the Shoreham saga.]
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