Whoops nuclear icon felled

The West Australian, Page: 28
Tuesday, 23 May 2006

The cooling tower from a former nuclear power plant in the US has been blown to smithereens at a time when nuclear power is being touted as a saviour from global warming. The controlled destruction of the Trojan plant tower symbolised the end of a shambolic episode in Oregon history. For most of the past three decades, the tower loomed as a symbol of all that was sneaky, leaky and insanely expensive about nuclear power. The softening of political opposition to the nuclear industry that seems to be occurring elsewhere has not occurred in the States of Oregon or Washington.

For that, the Trojan plant, which began making electricity in 1976 and was closed in 1993, has much to answer. Besides chronic technical, safety and reliability problems, it cost local ratepayers more than $US400 million to build and is costing them $US410 million ($550 million) to decommission. In a spectacularly ill-conceived scheme, work began on five other nuclear power plants as part of a consortium of utilities called the Washington Public Power Supply System, which quickly became infamous as Whoops. Whoops, indeed.

Construction of five plants - only one of which ever produced electricity, none of which were then needed - led to what, at the time, was the country's biggest municipal bond default. Ratepayers across the North-West are still paying for Whoops in their electricity bills - a catastrophe that in one five-year stretch pushed up electricity rates about 600 per cent. The demolition was a major step in Portland General Electric's long, costly and embarrassing effort to extricate itself from the plant. Problems ranged from chronic steam leaks to an exceedingly unfortunate location - on a major earthquake fault, sitting on the southern bank of the West's biggest river and just upwind from Portland, the second biggest city in the North-West.

Highly radioactive fuel rods remain in storage at the site because the Federal Government has still to decide where they can be safely buried. PGE spokesman Scott Simms was eager to talk about how his company had shifted focus to wind power and high-efficiency, gas-driven turbines. Asked about the irony of knocking down a nuclear plant as other utilities were planning to build them, Mr Simms said that Trojan was"outmoded compared with anything that might be built today".