Read the Nuclear Industry Spotlight - Intergraph

for meeting or beating cost and schedule estimates
on all of its current power plant and nuclear component
replacement projects. Utilities also like the fact
that Washington Group has an in-house cadre of
expertise to complete all phases of licensing, design,
engineering and construction. As a result of the
varied project experiences of the company’s combined
business units, Washington Group employs
significantly more high-level nuclear experts than
any other engineering and construction company.
Despite the decades-long downturn in the industry,
the company is already fully staffed to design, engineer
and build new nuclear power plants.
“One of our differentiators in this marketplace
is, ‘If you start with us, you can finish with us,’”
Nash said. This has been a successful selling point
in other power projects. Utilities like the fact that
Washington Group business units operate as one
company, with seamless transition between project
phases and a demonstrated ability to synergistically
leverage the key competencies of each unit.
While the current U.S. administration and Congress
clearly want to create incentives for nuclear
development, unresolved political issues may
still have the potential to slow or halt progress.
The foremost concerns relate to spent nuclear
fuel, which continues to be stored at each plant
site. The waste is neither bulky nor unstable, but
storage solutions must contain the radioactivity for
hundreds of thousands of years. For security and
long-term storage reasons, the NRC had planned
to transfer all spent fuel to a permanent, secure
waste facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, starting
in 1998. However, Nevada politicians oppose
the site and the facility remains unfinished and
entangled in political battles that have no clear
timetable for resolution.
Many utilities do not believe the unresolved spent
fuel issue will have the power to delay their proposed
new plants, and the Energy Policy Act gives
the DOE only one year to deliver a long-term, highlevel
nuclear waste plan to Congress. However, the
utilities’ comfort level could change if the public
does not view current technologies as safe.
“It is also still too early to gauge the true level
of public support for new plants,” said Cynthia
Stinger, Washington Group’s vice president of
government affairs.
Although some polls show nearly 70 percent of the
public supports nuclear power expansion, Stinger
said, “We’re looking at things from the 30,000-
foot level right now.” She believes the real test will
come when utilities begin to submit formal license
applications for specific locations.
Today’s Americans have been inundated with
images of terrorist attacks and hurricane evacuations,
so there is no telling how they will react to
discussion of emergency-evacuation plans in their
own communities as a response to a potential
radioactive release.
“But if consumers are paying $4 or $5 per gallon
of gas, politicians will feel the heat to make things
happen,” said Stinger.
The continued nuclear renaissance also depends
on an essentially perfect safety record at current
power plants. An irony of the accident at
the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in
Pennsylvania in 1979 is that the only fallout was
political – the safety systems actually contained the
release of radiation. Stinger said that politicians, if
not the public, are now generally comfortable with
the safety of today’s nuclear plants, which have
multiple redundant safety systems and backups to
ensure that a reactor is kept cool even if primary
and secondary systems fail.
Whenever new reactors are built, they will be in
a new league of safety features. Most important,
these generation IV designs are “passive nuclear
plants,” which are even safer because they require
no electrical systems or pumps to cool the reactor
– only a water supply and gravity.
While Washington Group gears up to create new
nuclear power plants, there is still big business
among the 103 nuclear plants currently operating.
Until about 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom
was that the big money would be in decommissioning
and decontaminating the nation’s aging
fleet. Instead, the revenue now comes from keeping
those plants running.
“Deregulation made these very valuable economic
assets for the utilities,” said Joseph Ruggiero,
Washington Group’s director of nuclear services.
He said the original 40-year operating
licenses for these plants have been upgraded to
60 years in dozens of applications to the NRC.
“There is still a large amount of work available
from the maintenance and upgrade of these
nuclear plants,” he said. Washington Group performs
a sizable share of the major engineering and
upgrade work on existing plants. Gross predicts
that both this market and the company’s market
share will escalate.
Lou Pardi, president of the Power Business Unit,
said that Washington Group is pushing for legal
changes that will help the company enter the growing,
lucrative overseas nuclear power plant market
as well. Under current international law, should an
accident occur at a foreign nuclear plant that was
engineered or constructed by Washington Group,
the company would have no protection from class
action suits in American courts. Washington Group
belongs to a consortium that is pressing for an
international convention that will provide protections
similar to the U.S. Price-Anderson Act.
“The probabilities of an accident are extremely
remote, but the consequences to companies like
ours are very high,” Pardi said. “We don’t want to
get into this market until these issues are resolved.”
Over the long term, nuclear power is far cheaper
to produce per kilowatt than other fuels, but few
utilities can afford to tie up billions of dollars in
capital for a decade before the generators start
running. Utilities in the United States and abroad
still have a high interest in traditional fossil fuel
power plants – particularly coal – and increased
power demands will help the Power Business Unit
continue to grow even if nuclear energy again falls
out of vogue.
“There has historically been a rotation of technologies
as one fuel becomes favored above another,”
Nash said. “Our strategy is to be diverse: gas, coal,
hydroelectric and nuclear. We want to do a mix in
services business, new generation, maintenance
and engineering, the upfront assessing of capital
projects, a lot of retrofit, modification and facilities
work. A diverse business is a strong business.”
As energy needs grow throughout the world,
Washington Group will continue to offer a full
spectrum of power and nuclear services. “We’re
keeping our engineering and construction pool as
deep and broad as possible,” Nash said.
Nuclear Industry
Insight
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