The Future of Nuclear: Inside the South Texas Project

- [Narrator] Nuclear energy makes about 20% of US electricity and has for nearly 30 years. The South Texas Project provides power to Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. - This is a steam electric plant. It's pretty similar to any other steam electric plant, be it coal, or other fossil fuel. It is just generating heat using a nuclear source to generate the heat. It simply makes steam, steam turns a turbine, turbine turns a generator, makes electricity. It's all that same standard process. The unique part of it is we use nuclear energy to generate the heat that makes the steam. This is the control room of unit two of the South Texas Project currently operating at full power. Generating about 1350 mega watts of electricity going out to the state of Texas. - - [Interviewer] 24/7, 365. - Everyday. - Yeah. - [Mark] All day, all night. Whether the wind blows, whether the sun shines, whether it rains, no matter what, that plant's running, generating power, going out. Then this plant produces about enough power for about a million homes. - [Interviewer] Yeah. - Just this one unit. - So just how efficient is this facility in terms of efficiency or capacity factor? - We achieve you know, a capacity factor of 98.7%. - 98.7%. That's gotta be the most efficient power plant in the world. - It is, actually. Where we're at, we currently hold the US record for capacity factor on all these plants. - [Interviewer] And in a CO2 sense, it's clean. - It's clean. We generate no carbon dioxide emissions while we're operating this plant. - What is the cost to put a big facility like this in place? - The plant's expensive. The price for a two unit site is somewhere on the order of 10 billion dollars. I mean a large investment. But as overall, when you put it over the life expectancy of the unit, the 40 years plus that the units will operate, and look at the overall cost of power, nuclear power is still on a very low cost. - [Narrator] While unit one was fully operational, unit two was undergoing some maintenance. - [Interviewer] We're in a situation now where the reactor's down. - We're in a revealing outage and during this revealing outage we're also doing a number of major maintenance activities. And one of them in particular is we're replacing the reactor head. And what you see when you look down, I mean, you're looking straight down here into this is the reactor vessel. You're looking straight down to the bottom. It has no fuel in it right now. - Okay. - And so you're just looking straight down through water. You're looking through about 60 feet of water. - [Interviewer] Why put it under water? - [Mark] Water provides cooling. - [Interviewer] Okay. - And primarily in this case, it's there for shielding. As right now there's no fuel in it so there's nothing to cool, but it's shielding because down in the very bottom these things are quite radio active. - [Interviewer] You stored 20 to 25 years of spent fuel from this facility here. - [Mark] We take that fuel assembly out of the reactor and we store it in the used fuel pool. - [Interviewer] What are some of the risks of this? - Of that? - Yeah. - Virtually none. And it's sitting here under you know, 45 feet of water, cooled, shielded by the water. The ultimate disposal or reprocessing of used fuel is not a technological issue. It's strictly a political decision is to have you know, the will to move forward with nuclear energy and the closing the fuel cycle. - [Interviewer] So two reactors are in the backdrop, yeah. You were just talking about over here, they're actually breaking ground. What's gonna go on over there? - Yeah, we're doing some pre-construction activities for our new units, units three and four. They actually are scheduled to come online commercial operation in 2016 or 2017. - [Interviewer] And they're gonna be similar size as the two you've got? - [Mark] Yeah, it'll actually double the size of this facility and make it the largest nuclear power facility in the country. - [Interviewer] What's allowing that to happen? - We need base load power. - Yeah. - And your options when it comes to base load power are coal, natural gas and nuclear. And for 30 years we haven't built nuclear. And when you look at an issue like climate change, you realize this is the only carbon-free source of base load power we have. - [Narrator] After the Fukushima nuclear accident, STP canceled their plans for the new reactors. And the future of nuclear in the United States seems unclear. But if we don't build new reactors, what will replace our old ones when we need to decommission them? Coal or natural gas?"