Bring It On

"Dirty coal versus nuclear is really the debate," said Stuart Brand. He's the founder of the prestigious Whole Earth Catalog, a well-known eco-technologist and a recent nuclear power convert. "The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power," he wrote last year in MIT's Technology Review. "The industry is mature, with a half century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it."

Brand joins a prestigious eco-sect of pro-nuke heretics that now includes Patrick Moore, the estranged co-founder of Greenpeace; scientist and best-selling environmental author Jared Diamond; and James Lovelock, the progenitor of the Gaia theory of earth as a self-replicating organism. "Nuclear power," Lovelock wrote recently in the London Independent, "is the only green solution."

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The interest of environmentalists and the media in nuclear power has created the industry's greatest public relations opportunity in 25 years. The shift in tone among erstwhile skeptics is so massive that one could almost presume it's a trap set by devious puppeteers.

Perplexed and rather suspicious local nuclear power plant spokesmen didn't know what to make of enthusiastic calls from the Houston Press. STP nuclear facility spokesman Ed Conway refused to give a tour of his plant. So did an official with the Comanche Peak nuclear plant in North Texas. They both cited terrorism worries. They suggested interviews instead and later backed out of them. "Our owners have no interest in expanding the facility" was Conway's excuse. At least he doesn't discriminate. The Austin chapter of the American Nuclear Society gleefully announced on its Web site last year: "STP tour!" and then had to cancel it. "Security has become considerably more tight since 09/11/01," wrote the group's president, "which seems to be our main roadblock."

Terrorism is apparently such a concern to STP that the plant has given up all pretense of reaching out to the public. The vintage geodesic dome that is the STP visitors center is abandoned and falling apart. On a recent visit, a Dumpster was sitting near the peeling roof, and a dead palm tree in a weedy garden tilted toward a dry bird bath.

Across the vacant rural lanes of FM 521 and past an open gate in a barbed-wire fence, a driveway wound toward the bell-shaped domes of the plant's twin reactors. It ended at a guard booth where a man in a ball cap emblazoned with a spinning-atom logo blocked the car. A Glock pistol clung to his leg. "Uh, we're not taking visitors right now, sir," he said. "What were you taking pictures of?"

In short order a beet-faced police officer ushered a course back to the highway.

"Go ahead and leave," he said near the gate. "Don't come back, okay?"

The plant's caution is understandable, given public fears of nuclear sabotage and images such as a recent Greenpeace flyer showing two nuclear reactors Photoshopped with giant red targets. But how real is the threat? After all, nuclear plants today are designed to withstand the impact of a commercial airliner. Houston-based former CIA agent David Adler thinks any sort of strike on a plant is unlikely. "It's going to be harder than finding a shopping mall or movie theater or Ringling Bros. circus or getting into an NBA game," he said. "My concern would be the targets that could be more easily attacked."

Of course, terrorism is only the newest in a long line of anti-nuclear worries.

Even non-environmentalists have soured on nuclear after seeing plants such as STP weigh in at billions over projections. In reality, though, nuclear development in countries such as France -– which gets 75 percent of its electricity from atom power -– have driven nuclear costs lower internationally than any other major alternative. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, even accounting for the higher construction, decommissioning and waste-disposal costs in the undeveloped U.S. market, nuclear is by far the cheapest clean option, producing electricity at a mere 12 percent premium over dirty pulverized coal.

Like coal plants, nuclear generators are fueled by destructive mines. Uranium Resources Inc. is pushing Texas lawmakers for environmental exemptions for its mine near the King Ranch, where it has polluted a nearby aquifer with so much uranium that the EPA in 2004 told local residents to stop drinking the water. Yet coal mining is far more ravaging. It kills dozens of miners every year, has leveled literally hundreds of mountains in Appalachia and buried more than 700 miles of streams.

Many opponents of nuclear still worry about how we'll store radioactive waste. Smith asked the same question 20 years ago. He's incredulous that Texas is now privatizing its nuclear waste disposal program: "Giving the contractor every incentive to cut corners and leave us the bill for the cleanup that inevitably will occur," he said.