A Company's Gain From Energy Report's Recommendation
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
WASHINGTON, March 23 - In Chapter 5 of Vice President Dick Cheney's national energy report, executives of the once-moribund nuclear power industry were probably thrilled to read that the White House supported "the expansion of nuclear power in the United States as a major component of our national energy policy."
The energy report had embraced a wide array of proposals that the executives advanced in private meetings with Mr. Cheney and documents submitted to members of the task force that formulated a national energy policy.
One such proposal was the development of a new nuclear reactor designed to produce electricity - a gas-cooled reactor built on tennis-ball-size graphite spheres - that the report said "has inherent safety features."
"The industry has an interest in this," the report said, "and other advanced reactor designs."
But only one company, the Exelon Corporation of Chicago, which provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns in recent years, has an interest in promoting the so-called pebble-bed reactor.
Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear energy company, is the only American corporation developing a design for the pebble-bed reactor, which it says will lead to a new generation of cheaper, smaller and more efficient nuclear reactors. The company says the pebble-bed reactor will be safer, too, though environmentalists in the United States and in other countries have sharply disputed this, calling the pebble-bed reactor a failed system vulnerable to terrorist attack....
...Critics of the task force have noted that many companies represented at its meetings gave financial support to the Bush campaign or the Republican Party in the 2000 election. Exelon was no exception.
Exelon, its executives and its political action committee, gave the Republican Party a total of $564,661 in the two years before the 2000 election. Last year, Exelon increased its donations to the Republican Party, giving it a total of $347,514, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, a frequent critic of the administration's energy policies, said: "The more we learn about the Cheney task force, the easier it is to understand why the White House is fighting so hard to keep everything secret. The biggest donors didn't just have the best access - it now appears they were allowed to write specific sections of the administration's energy plan."...
... On Friday, Mr. Waxman released a study that identified 65 provisions in the energy report that he said benefit donors to the Republican Party who had met with task force members or Mr. Cheney last year.
The pebble-bed reactor has attracted sharp criticism from environmentalists as being unsafe and vulnerable to terrorist attack.
"There are many safety problems with this reactor," said Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club. "It's not safe, and it's certainly not clean. It has already failed once, in Germany.
"And this pebble-bed facility is not going to have a containment shell. It will be a terrorist target just sitting out there waiting for someone. This is just not sensible."...
... Exelon has a 12.5 percent interest in the project with Eskom, the state-owned utility in South Africa, the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, a state-owned investment firm, and B.N.F.L., the former British Nuclear Fuels Limited. The partnership is studying the feasibility of the pebble-bed reactor, company officials said.
In its papers submitted to the task force, Exelon wrote that the technology "is an evolutionary improvement of a proven design previously utilized in Germany." But several environmentalists said that the Germany prototype failed.
"When you build a design on a proven failure, you are likely to get another failure," Mr. Pope said....
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/24/politics/24ENER.html> -- Yoshie
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