Reports of nuke plant on base 'premature' Air Force says

Reports that Mountain Home AFB is in line to have a nuclear power plant built on base are "extremely premature," officials of the Air Force told the Mountain Home News last week.

Last week stories appeared on several internet sites, as well as in newspapers in New Mexico and at least two daily newspapers in Idaho, that the Air Force was considering placing nuclear power plants at Cannon AFB in New Mexico and Mountain Home AFB in Idaho.

The reports caught officials at Mountain Home AFB completely by surprise. "We hadn't heard a thing about it until we started getting calls from the media," said Maj. Damien Pickart, the head of public affairs for the base, who spent most of the day referring reporters to Air Force public affairs in Washington, D.C.

Some of the reports indicated that Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho and Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico had offered their home-state bases to the Air Force for a nuclear power initiative.

But a Craig spokesperson said the senator had only encouraged the Air Force, in an August 2007 letter, to consider the possibility of using nuclear energy "as a preferred source of electricity for military facilities for which reliability and security of supply are of paramount importance."

Noting that the nuclear industry has "developed an impressive operational track record, providing 20 percent of the nation's electricity in a reliable, cost effective and environmentally responsible manner," Craig continued in his letter to the Secretary of the Air Force, Micheal Wynne, that "I would appreciate your thoughts on the merits of placing nuclear reactors at Air Force bases to meet on- and off-site electricity requirements, as well as the willingness of the Air Force to consider demonstrating the concept at one of its bases." He did not name any specific base in his letter.

Col. Karen Platt, an Air Force spokesperson in Washington, D.C., said the story apparently began as an off-hand comment made by Secretary Wynne when asked a question by a reporter while he was walking down a hallway after attending the Air Force's recent Energy Conference.

The Air Force had just concluded its second force-wide energy conference to look at more efficient uses of energy, "greener" energy resources, and alternative energy sources.

"Apparently," Platt said, "he got asked a question (about nuclear energy) and said something about 'we're looking at different places,' and when pressed threw out the names of Mountain Home and Cannon," in part because of interest the state's two senators had shown in such an initiative.

But, she said, he did not mean to indicate that the Air Force actually has any plans to build reactors at either base.

Siting nuclear power plants on military bases is simply one of the initiatives the Air Force is looking at for the long-term future, but no plans have actually been developed and no lists of potential bases have been drawn up.

She said any such plans would "probably be 14-20 years down the road," and if the Air Force were to decide to do so, and any bases that would be considered for such a project would have to undergo lengthy environmental impact statement and economic assessment studies (which usually take several years to complete) as well as having to comply with the permitting procedures of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (a process that usually runs 7-12 years).

"This is so far down the road," she said, "that to identify specific bases now would be extremely premature."