Louisiana: The State We're In; Nuclear Power Plant

Louisiana The State We're In with public affairs director Beth George. Good evening. Thank you for joining us on this edition of Louisiana The State We're In. The harsh winter of 1977 has focused attention on the nation's energy problems. The immediate concern is a severe shortage of natural gas. Long range plans call for developing alternative sources of energy. One of those alternatives is nuclear energy. Our show tonight focuses on one of the proposed nuclear power plants. The River Bend station located in West Feliciana Parish some five miles from St. Francisville, Louisiana. Gulf State Utilities is still waiting on a final construction permit for the proposed $1.8 billion nuclear power plant that will house two 940 megawatt generators. But already Gulf States has expended millions of dollars in preparing the 3200 acre site, an investment that would make it very difficult for the company to withdraw from their decision to go nuclear.

Nuclear energy is an issue that polarizes opinions and raises questions that are not easily answered. Tonight we will look at some of those questions with residents of St. Francisville, a spokesman for Gulf States Utilities and an LSU professor who has been an outspoken critic of nuclear energy. As we look at the question -- Why nuclear? Why not? [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] The River Bend nuclear power plant is to be located near the town of St. Francisville. St. Francisville is the third oldest settlement in Louisiana. It is a town of charming beauty set in the Tunica Hills of West Feliciana Parish. The people of St. Francisville cherish the history of their town and parish that contains reminders of the past such as Grace Episcopal Church and numerous plantation homes. It is an area that young people are returning to. An area where a quieter and more peaceful way of life still exists. The advent of the nuclear power plant may disrupt that way of life, but it may also bring more jobs and a boost to the economy. Residents of St. Francisville disagree on the effects the plant will have in their community when we talked to some of

them about their feelings. Ann Poindexter is a young mother who is opposed to the construction of the River Bend Plant. Ann, why are you opposed to a nuclear power plant being here in St. Francisville? Well, I'm opposed to it for technical reasons about the safety of nuclear power, but primarily I am opposed to it because of the effect it's having on life in St. Francisville and in the parish. We're just not ready for an influx of construction workers and the resulting problems of cheap speculation. We haven't got adequate zoning ordinances or sanitary regulations. It's just having terrible effects on life up here. Why did you decide to live here in St. Francisville? Because it was a different place, special? I think it's special for environmental reasons and also I've got very strong roots here. My daughter Chase who's a year old will be the eighth generation of my family to live in this house. I'd like to preserve some of

the quality of life here for her when she grows up. I think I'm not opposed to progress here. We've got a lot of poverty and we need to make some progress. But I think we've got to look at the quality of it as well as the quantity. Carter Percy owns a 500 acre farm in West Feliciana Parish and he supports the nuclear plant because he says the country needs more electricity. Mr. Percy, what is having a nuclear power plant here in St. Francisville going to mean to you? This means that we would probably have a good supply of electricity which you've got to have to farm and is very important. You've had problems with that in the past? We've had enough problems with electricity. Yeah, with problems in the past and we want a good supply. That's what all farmers need. And in 1973 when we ran out of diesel fuel in the fall it took me 35 days to get fuel with a high priority. And I don't want the federal government to get into the electric business

because if we've got to get electricity through the federal government, I just own a farm. Weren't you one of 10 residents who went up to a nuclear power plant? What did you find when you went there? Well I found out that the, the uh, we went through the power plant. I couldn't see too because much was just a whole lot of concrete and everything that were changing the fuel. But I went through the school and it showed a side of how they work tried to make heat with the reactor and that's fairly simple. I don't know exactly how safe it is but they're got sixty of them operating and improve them as we go along just like you improve automobiles. And if they're if we just keep on one day and are gone they have a shortage of electricity and told us we have to have electricity. So let's get to going with the plant. Like I told them before we have that oil line to Alaska and look how slow that is we haven't got that oil yet. And we short. We're short on energy. We can make electricity with gas and there's not enough oil. We're not getting enough oil

and we've got coal digging up some coal, but we can't make all electricity with just coal. We've got to kind of divide it up and make some with coal and some with nuclear power. Did GSU pay for that trip up to Arkansas? That's right. They paid, that's right. They sent ten of us up there from the parish. What did they tell you? They wanted you to find out for yourself what it was going to be like? They didn't tell me. They told me to go up there and take a look at it so you could tell the rest of the people and that's what I've been doing. They didn't tell me it was a good or bad or anything. They just took us to show us. And we went through that school to see how the plant worked. This is a where they teach them to operate the plants you know. And have they answered your questions or do you have any more reservations? Well, everything breaks down. So nuclear plants gonna break down and every time one breaks down everybody in the world knows it. But when they when other factories break down they don't advertise so much but you've got break downs, little ones and big ones. But we still need electricity.

Camilla Truax disagrees. She also went to Russellville at her own expense and saw a different picture. I didn't find as rosy a picture as had been painted by the authorities who had gone from here earlier on their investigative trip. There wasn't any new industry that had come in or the taxes we wouldn't benefit from. Is that right? No because we will not have an ad valorem tax in force until after the plant has been in operation for a full 10 years. And there is no tax except sales tax collected during the period of construction. Now the sales tax has been allocated for the school board to use for constructing a new school or whatever they see fit to do. So that will not help the services, the added services and the pressure of the community and maintenance of roads and things like that. I'm seeing you asked the sheriff a question up there. Oh we did, we asked him how he would feel

if the nuclear plant there at Russellville were within 20 miles of the state prison of Arkansas. And he just sort of rolled his eyes and looked up and said no way. Some of the residents who support the plant already see evidence of economic growth. I asked Gordon Dippell, a retired Texaco distributor and real estate owner if he supports the plant. Yes, I think that it will help St. Francisville quite a bit. And these trucks that you see in the background are trucks that are hauling sand to the nuclear plant now and they're hauling five days and six days a week and they're stockpiling at the present time to supply the sand for the plants. I understand a lot of the residents signed a petition saying that they wanted jobs. That's right. There's about 800 people that signed a petition that said that they would like to have jobs working for the plant when they started up here.

Do you see a problem with maybe things growing too fast in St. Francisville? Well, they will grow fast. But I think the surrounding area was well equipped to take care of the incoming people who will come here. St. Francisville has already attracted new residents who enjoy a quieter pace of life. Kenwood Kennon is a lawyer who owns an antique store in the town and he tells how he became involved in the nuclear plant controversy. Kenwood, why did you become involved in a fight against nuclear power plant? What's your primary objection? Well, when Will Posey the intervener in the power plant proceedings up here asked me to represent him. He was looking for a lawyer. I read a couple of books to find out about it and continued reading. Got more interested in it and the more I read the more concerned or I should say horrified I became at what was going on in the entire industry. After looking

into it, I found that the question was not a technical question, but basically a moral question about the right of this generation for its own selfish power production, for its really wasteful power production. For it to to forever obligate future generations, unborn generations to take care of our waste. This uh, this option, so-called nuclear option is only good for 30 years the most. And that's the most strenuous, the most strident proponent of it will tell you it's only good for 30 years, but yet the waste the the hawks of the plants, the problems and the capability to produce weapons with the byproducts of this technology will remain for literally hundreds of thousands of years. There are a lot of questions that remain unanswered for you. Is that it primarily? There is

there are...the industry to me, Beth, is one of unanswered questions. In the medical area, there is raging controversies about just how bad radiation is for you. Every, as science makes advances and as research gives us answers to questions we keep coming up with more and more questions. We simply don't know what are the long term medical effects of widespread nuclear power production. Do you think the people in St. Francisville are aware of all the problems or the issue itself? I am not really completely aware of all the problems. I have read extensively in it but yet it is just too huge a field. I am certain that very few if any of the people in the St. Francisville area have taken the trouble to become knowledgeable in the issues involved. And they are not simply technical issues. It's basically a moral issue about the right of this generation to use a technology this poisonous to produce power for its short term needs and needs which are wasteful and extravagant by in terms of the rest of the world.

Some of the questions about the need for nuclear energy are being answered by a spokesman for Gulf States Utilities, Bill Benedetto. Mr. Benedetto, we are hearing a lot about an energy crisis in this country. Is Louisiana part and parcel of that crisis? And is this one of the reasons that prompted you to go nuclear? Yes, very much so. A few years back when we decided to build a nuclear power plant one of the main considerations of course was the supply of natural gas. Now we're talking about two different types of natural gas when we're talking about utilities and natural gas. We have a natural gas that we buy and re-sell. This is the, this is the gas that we resell to our customers, our gas customers for their home use, industrial use, commercial use. Now there's another area of natural gas that utilities and Gulf State Utilities has to buy. And this is the gas that we use in generating our electricity. We use this gas as a fuel

of course for the generation of electricity in our power station. What's happened now is we realized at that time that this particular supply of gas was becoming very scarce. Our contracts we had with United Gas Line were canceled. We had, oh I think, 20 year contracts that were canceled on us. Our supplies from that particular gas line, our major supplier of gas went down tremendously. We knew this was happening then. We knew that in the next 10 - 15 years the situation would get even more critical. So at that particular time we had two decisions to make. One was to take our present facilities and convert them from natural gas burning facilities to fuel oil facilities. And two to go to another source another fuel source which was nuclear energy.

One of the alternatives we're thinking of would be a coal burning plant. Are you firmly committed to nuclear? No, we're committed, Beth, to all fuels. Now we up until this time, up until about five years ago we relied exclusively on natural gas as a fuel for our plants. At that time we realized that we were going to have to broaden our fuel base. This would take in oil, coal and uranium. And we're very definitely going to have to depend on coal as fuel for the future. Let's talk about the River Bend plant itself in St. Francisville. Why did you choose that particular site? That particular site was chosen on several reasons. In particular, we needed a site that of course was had access to the river. We needed a site that the geological foundation and structure of the ground was suitable to house a nuclear power plant. The specifications are set forth by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and we had

to have a site that met those qualifications. And, of course, secondly was the availability of the land and the price of the land. Is it also because it was a rural community and perhaps you wouldn't have as much flak from local residents because you would have an impact on the economy? Well, strange to believe at that time I don't think we really took that in consideration. I don't know if we were really counting on very much flak from, from residents in the area. Let me point out one thing to you that most of our plants regardless of what type of fuel they use are built out and away from populated areas. This is just a uh, I guess most industry is you know is moving in this direction. Moving away from populated areas. As far as what kind of response we were anticipating from the residents in those particular areas has been really at that time didn't didn't anticipate any anti-nuclear feelings. And what

did you find when you went up there? Well, we, uh at the time when when we bought the property, made the announcement there wasn't very much anti-nuclear feelings. As a matter of fact there was a petition signed by 2000 residents in that area, for the nuclear power plant, in favor of it. Most of our negative feelings about nuclear energy in this area has come from the Baton Rouge area, strange as it seems and and mostly it's come from the university area. There are several and I think two professors in particular at LSU who have been vocal, vocally against the nuclear power plant. The GSU when they went into the community when you were first proposing a plant, didn't you take a group of citizens up to plant in Russellville, Arkansas? Yes, yes we did Who went on on that trip? How did you decide? It was the civic leaders of the area and also residents who were directly or in some

cases indirectly affected by the plant, construction of the plant. We took the governing officials up also and we tried to get a cross section pretty much of the people in West Feliciana Parish. Let's talk about one of the biggest questions surrounding nuclear power plants and that is waste management. We hear a lot about that and that's one of the reasons, isn't it, that your construction permit was held up? Yes, this is so. Waste management is I would say a concern, a concern of a lot of people probably maybe a little bit more then it should be in some areas. The industry and when I say industry I mean the nuclear industry, Beth, is convinced that the waste management problem from a technical standpoint has been solved. As it stands right now the industry has set forth a plan where the nuclear waste, waste from nuclear power plants in particular

can be utilized to the extent that it can be taken and solidified, encased in a glass-like material, Pyrex-type material then put into stainless steel containers, canisters and then stored in geological stable formations underground. You're talking about salt domes? Salt Domes, one of the geological formations that we're talking about. And the reasons why I think salt domes are brought up because there are quite a few salt domes throughout the country. They are quite stable. They haven't moved, the formations haven't moved in millions of years. There hasn't been any indication of any movement of these domes and it would be quite safe to store this material in these formations. A lot of people are bringing up the point, well, some cases, some material is radioactive for thousands of years. How are you going to store and guarantee that these materials can be safe and kept away from the

public for that length of time? Here again, I think the industry feels that, that the time that these materials have to be stored probably at the most would be maybe in the neighborhood of 75 to 100 years. Dr. Joel Selbin is a professor of chemistry at LSU and has been an outspoken opponent of the construction of a nuclear power plant in St. Francisville. Dr. Selbin, are you opposed to the construction of nuclear power plants in general or just the River Bend Plant in particular? Oh yes, I'm opposed to the building of all nuclear power plants, not just River Bend. There are many reasons for that. Partly economic, partly safety, partly having to do with the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. Many reasons, many safety problems with not just the nuclear power plant, but the whole nuclear technology.

There have been lengthy hearings before the plant could be built. A number of hearings that were held in Baton Rouge and in St. Francisville. You appeared at some of those hearings. What were some of the questions that you raised at those hearings? Well, the questions that we felt were most critical for River Bend and for other nuclear power plants around the country had to do with, first of all the supply of uranium. The amount of uranium that the United States has is really insufficient for us to have a nuclear energy option. The amount of uranium in the rest of the world isn't sufficient either. So we raise the question of the uranium fuel supply. We raise the question also of how efficient uranium is, is burned in a nuclear reactor. Sort of the problem or corresponding problem of an automobile of how many miles per gallon do you get. We were concerned with how much electricity you get from a ton of uranium.

Then we were also concerned beginning about a year ago with the release of some internal memos from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that there were a great many, a couple hundred unresolved technical safety issues still existing in nuclear, in operating nuclear power plants and in those proposed. Is one of those the emergency core cooling system? Well, the emergency core cooling system is a, is really an unsolved problem for nuclear power plants because the emergency core cooling system has never really been tested. It has never been physically tested to see whether it works. There are only calculations which show that it should work. But in fact when the old Atomic Energy Commission back in 1971 ran a series of tests, six tests on a very small scale with the emergency core cooling systems, all of those tests failed. But we've never had a full scale test. And

I think that there has been a recent additional delay for Gulf States Utilities because General Electric Company which is going to supply their reactor has found some errors in the calculations involving the emergency core cooling system. But that's all we really have with emergency core cooling systems are calculations. So these series of hearings are supposed to really answer a lot of questions, safety questions, environmental questions, but are they for real? I mean are they just sort of a sham. Has a construction permit ever been denied? Well, generally the Atomic Safety and Licensing board hearings appear to be a sham. There is really very little opposition normally because all of the money, the information is on the side of the utility wanting to construct a nuclear power plant. It is very difficult for intervenors to

raise the money necessary to get information and to and to intervene. I think that we have done a remarkable job here in bringing out to the public the various critical issues involved with nuclear power and the Atomic Safety and Licensing Appeal board in fact agreed with us on the matter of the efficiency of uranium and remanded a decision of the board for further hearing. We now have under appeal the decision. Again I say we the state of Louisiana has appealed the decision of the board to accept the new results of uranium efficiency information. I don't know what the result of that is going to be yet. We can't get a construction permit, that is Gulf States will not get a construction permit I think until the Atomic Safety and Licensing appeal board has ruled on those

issues, on those appeals that the state has raised. One of the things delaying the issuance of some of these construction permits is the whole question of what do you do with the radioactive waste that's being addressed in some places in the country. I think this is a problem. There was a special on television the other evening concerning nuclear waste. Is this one of the things that concerns you about nuclear power plant? Well, very much this is one of the major unresolved problems with nuclear power. You know we went ahead and started constructing nuclear power plants in this country before we had solved all of the problems. People think that all we have to generate electricity is a nuclear power plant. But there's a, there's a whole technology a whole what is called a nuclear fuel cycle that is involved. And part of the nuclear fuel cycle is a waste management. And we haven't solved that problem. For more than 30 years, scientists, the best, have been trying to solve the problem of what to do with the waste.

This country is facing somewhat of an energy crisis right now, the winter of '77. There is a real gas shortage, natural gas shortage problem. Do you think this whole focus on the energy crisis may make people say we should turn to nuclear energy if people were given the choice between say freezing in their homes. They would indeed choosing another alternative. You think this will make it easier for nuclear power plants? I think if people were given a choice of freezing in their homes or accepting nuclear power they would certainly accept nuclear power. But I don't think those are the alternatives. I think we have many other alternatives in this country and we can't believe what vested interests in nuclear energy are telling us, that that is our only alternative. But do you think that so much money is invested in this industry that it will be hard to pull back from it? Well exactly. There's perhaps been a hundred and fifty billion dollars spent already and this is a potentially trillion dollar business for the nuclear energy industry. It is very difficult to turn that kind of money around. But I think that in fact the economics the what I consider the uneconomics of nuclear

power is already turning it around. In the past two years we have had 24 nuclear power plants cancelled and only eight have been ordered in the past two years. That is a de facto moratorium. I think the business community is beginning to see that nuclear power is a bad buy. It's bad for them and it's going to be bad for their customers. As we said when the show began nuclear energy is an issue that polarizes opinions. In the brief time we've had tonight we can hardly cover the entire nuclear energy issue, but we have looked at some of the questions some of the people in St. Francisville have asked about the proposed River Bend Power station. Questions concerning nuclear safety, waste management, economic feasibility and the impact that a nuclear power plant might have on their community. And maybe you will want to know more about the question -- why nuclear? Why not? [Music]

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