Letter to the Editor

AHEI responds to critics

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Dear editor:

Regarding Edwin Schiender's opinion, we'd consider taking him up on his offer to debate us on the issues. However, on Google and other online people searches, he doesn't appear to exist -- either as an Idaho resident, or as a former CEO/GM of any utility, which kind of makes it hard to debate things.

Nevertheless, we will take Mr. Schiender, or whomever he may be, at his word, and address some of the serious misstatements in the letter.

There are 104 nuclear plants in the U.S. About 10 percent of these are merchant plants and about a quarter of the proposed new plants are merchant as well. Should Idaho's merchant farmers, merchant computer chip makers, merchant cheese factories, merchant supermarkets and merchant construction companies be ashamed for using Idaho resources to create jobs and sell their merchandise out of state? How about the merchant wind farms and merchant geothermal plants?

The AEHI plant would create enough to power all the homes in Idaho three times over, and on just a couple of hundred acres. That's enough power to supply Idaho and beyond.

We all rely on a giant electrical grid (http://tinyurl.com/showgrid) where each state takes and gives. The more power that's on the grid, the more the nation, its businesses and citizens benefit. We have the opportunity for investors to build a plant at no cost to us; compete to sell us the electricity; produce incredible tax revenues; produce no pollution; and create thousands of well-paying jobs that can never be offshored.

Until we get approval and select a reactor, it makes no sense to get power purchase agreements. Idaho has typically ranked near the bottom of Western states for new generating capacity and imports 80 percent of its total energy needs, so there is huge demand for power that needs to be met.

Schiender calls for a state siting authority. If his goal is another layer of bureaucracy, a state siting authority is a great idea. The people who actually fund and develop power plants do not support siting authorities and few states use them.

Mr. Schiender states we "admit in their SEC filings that their intention is to see some unnamed investor to complete the project." Nothing could be further from the truth. We have always made it very clear our intention is to complete the two phases of our project: first, to secure land, water rights, funding and federal and local entitlements and licenses; and second, to construct the reactor and put it into service. Our board and advisors have a total of 357 years of experience in the nuclear industry. We are all retired and could ride off into the sunset if we chose, but we are personally committed to building a power plant as our legacy.

Schiender writes "when it comes to actual construction of a nuclear facility, this is done by highly trained and skilled professional people. In my experience, most if not all workers also require a security clearance in addition to their expertise." I don't now if Mr. Schiender has ever visted Elmore County, but he should know it has a large military base and plenty of people with technical backgrounds and security clearances. Most nuclear plant jobs don't require a degree, just a clean background and training that any committed person can complete. The question is, does Mr. Schiender support having jobs for them?

Supposedly, with our entire team of nuclear veterans, we can't predict the cost of a nuclear plant, yet Mr. Schiender, who admits no expertise in nuclear development, pegs the cost at $15 billion to $20 billion. The latest nuclear plants to be sold to an IPP, Luminant in Texas, consist of two large units for $6.8 billion.

Mr. Schiender states the obvious when he notes AEHI doesn't have enough money to build a power plant -- no one has that kind of cash laying around. When Idaho Power and other utilities want to build a plant or transmission lines, they go in search of financing and pass the cost on the customers before any electricity is produced. This may explain why Idaho Power hasn't built a baseload plant in Idaho since the late 1960s, and why Idaho Power was helpless when two major employers considered the Treasure Valley for major facilities in 2007. Those merchant factory jobs would sure come in handy now! Idaho Power lost the bid to power the state's newest large customer, Areva's fuel enrichment plant, but thankfully they can find power elsewhere. Idaho Power's plan is to meet new demand with high-cost natural gas.

As for the water issue, Mr. Schiender should know there are low-water designs. According to the World Nuclear Association, "Where availability of cooling water is limited, cooling does not need to be a constraint on new generating capacity. Alternative cooling options are available at slightly higher cost" (http://tinyurl.com/nukecooling). Our plant will consume the equivalent of 140 acres of irrigated crops, less than is proposed for Idaho Power's proposed natural gas plant. Any company proposing to build a plant must acquire sufficient water rights and if they can't, they can't build the plant.

Solar and wind literally don't have the horsepower to run our nation. The $12 billion "Pickens Plan" would have covered 200,000 acres with wind turbines to produce 4,000 megawatts of electricity about a third of the time. By comparison, Arizona's Palo Verde nuclear plant produces almost that much on 2 percent of the acreage around 90 percent of the time, with a cost of 1.33 cents per kilowatt-hour. Which would you want to hook your factory up to? Solar also works less than half the time, takes huge amounts of land and is very expensive.

In truth, we need clean coal, wind, hydro, geothermal, solar and more. I check the box that says "all of the above." But we have to understand what each form of power can and cannot do, and what are the tradeoffs.

All the spent fuel from 52 years of American plants could fit on a football field and go 15 feet tall. This is a tiny amount of spent fuel that can and should be properly reprocessed to make more fuel. In the meantime, storing it securely on-site is a perfectly viable option. I just wish all forms of energy captured 100% percent of their waste for later treatment.

Mr. Schiender refers to "downwinders" and "people downstream"; he appears to be confusing nuclear power with nuclear weapons. I certainly hope he knows the difference as the mystery "energy executive." Nuclear generation is the safest of all forms, with no deaths or injuries due to radiation exposure in the United States in more than 50 years of the commercial nuclear industry. If he has safety concerns, he should be more concerned about dams, as dam collapses in the past 40 years have killed about 175,000 people.

After supposedly 30-year career of service, Mr. Schiender appears to be comfortable in his retirement and I wish him well.

Some of us, however, are still eager to get to work.

Don Gillispie

AEHI president/CEO