U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and Gov. Ted Strickland, both Democrats, pledged during their 2006 campaigns to join forces in Washington and Columbus to make Ohio "the Silicon Valley of alternative energy." It was a lofty promise, not unlike ones Ohioans have heard before. Gov. Bob Taft launched his Third Frontier high-tech initiative in 2002, only to need two tries to secure the bond money to pay for it. Ohio later hung its high-tech hopes on landing the nearly pollution-free FutureGen power plant but lost its bid last year.

Ohio's greatest wind potential is where its lagging manufacturing base is: in northeast Ohio and along the Lake Erie shore. Bowser said wind developers from Germany, Spain and elsewhere are swarming Ohio looking to position their turbines - and experience in states already using wind energy, such as Texas and California, shows that prices have not spiked.

"Where they want to put up wind turbines, they also want the manufacturing of those turbines to be very nearby because it saves on transportation costs," she said. "These things are enormous and very expensive to ship."

Ralph DiNicola, a spokesman for utility giant FirstEnergy Corp., said consumers seem to be demanding more alternative sources of energy, and his company has contracted for 300 megawatts of wind energy. But he cautioned that wind and solar power can serve only a fraction of the state's energy needs.

"You start doing the numbers on how many windmills would equal 2,000 megawatts of output and you'd cover the state," he said.

He said the visual impact of windmills and the fact that they generate most of their power during fall and spring, when demand is low, are issues that advocates must address. "If a state decides to move in that direction, that's a societal question," he said. "I think what we would object to would be subsidizing alternative energy. In Ohio, generation is not a regulated aspect of the utility industry."

A study by The Renewable Energy Project found that if there is a national investment in wind power - which experts believe will happen soon - Ohio has the chance to gain 22,000 new manufacturing jobs. The 13,000 of those jobs associated with wind power is the largest potential job gain from the industry of any state besides California. The gain pales in comparison to Ohio's manufacturing job losses - 234,000 since early 1998, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

[Montana Governor] Mr Schweitzer's real passion these days is “coal to liquids” (CTL): diesel fuel from gasifying coal. This process is costly and emits lots of carbon dioxide, which is bad for global warming, but Mr Schweitzer says that much of the carbon can be sequestered. Montana's two senators—both Democrats, like Mr Schweitzer—also support CTL; an amendment to the federal energy bill pushed by one of them to help the industry has just failed in the Senate.

Mr Schweitzer's zeal is understandable. Montana has the largest coal reserves in America—120 billion recoverable tons, mostly under the high plains in the east. Although over 60% of the electricity Montana produces comes from coal, relatively little is tapped. Wyoming, with much smaller reserves, mines about ten times as much each year as Montana does, partly because it has better placed railway lines.

Mr Schweitzer's calculation is simple: he wants to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil and, just as important, create jobs in Montana, one of the poorest, least-populated and most suicide-prone states in the nation. His own pickup runs on diesel made from coal—though the fuel is from Oklahoma, as there are no CTL plants in Montana yet.

Greens are dubious. They point out that CTL is polluting and that the power plants use lots of water. The Environmental Protection Agency says that even if carbon emitted can be captured and sequestered, coal-to-liquids conversion would still emit slightly more carbon dioxide than petroleum. Mr Schweitzer claims in response that diesel-powered cars, more common in Europe, are 30% more efficient than regular petrol ones. Environmentalists reject this argument.

California's policy targets plants that would burn the West's abundant coal to produce electricity. The region has at least a 250-year supply of recoverable coal, according to federal estimates, concentrated largely in Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico and Colorado.

Conventional coal-fired plants belch tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Technologies that pulverize coal, turn it into a slurry and convert it to gas before burning it have the potential to capture and dispose of carbon dioxide. Those technologies raise the price of coal-generated power by about 10% a kilowatt-hour.

However, none of the 31 new coal-fired plants planned in the West, including at least 10 that intend to sell power to California, would employ those new technologies, says Nielsen of Western Resource Advocates, who tracks new power-plant proposals.

But an "unwritten rule" of new power-plant development is "the buyers of power determine what gets built," says Doug Larson, who runs the energy arm of the Western Governors' Association. Plants aren't built without long-term contracts to sell power.

A key selling point for the Frontier Line, which is little more than a proposal at this point, is that it would tap abundant wind resources in Wyoming and Montana and solar in Utah and Nevada. "This project is the single largest enabler of renewable energy technologies ever proposed in the U.S.," says Joseph Desmond, chairman of the California Energy Commission and a Schwarzenegger adviser.

But Dan Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California-Berkeley, estimates that the line would boost solar and wind no more than 1% to 2%. "The real big winner here is coal," he says. And there's no assurance the clean energy — renewable or fossil fuel — California wants will be available as electricity demand soars in the next 20 years.

Technologies that convert coal to gas — gasification — are untried on a large commercial scale. Two small gasification plants operate in Florida and Indiana with federal subsidies. The means to separate carbon dioxide in the coal-burning process, capture it and inject it into the Earth to keep it out of the atmosphere is still experimental.

Power-plant developers are reluctant to abandon conventional coal generation and its long and dependable history. Gasification "is certainly a viable technology for the future," says Art Larson, spokesman for Sempra Energy, developer of a 1,450-megawatt conventional coal plant in northern Nevada. "But there are issues with reliability and cost."

In fact, many electric companies are forging ahead with plans for traditional coal-fired power plants, the single biggest source of global warming, despite expectations that federal limits will eventually be placed on carbon dioxide emissions.

A much smaller group of utilities are building a new type of coal "gasification" plant that emits fewer pollutants and can be more easily retrofitted with equipment to trap carbon dioxide before it's released. Of roughly 150 coal-fired plants being proposed by utilities — what would be the biggest wave since the 1970s — only about a dozen are cleaner gasification plants.

Uncertainty about how restrictive any limits might be has left utilities with a dilemma: build traditional coal plants that are cheaper and generally deemed more reliable or "clean-coal" facilities that may be less expensive in the long run?

All agree new generation is needed. Power demand is projected to jump 19% over the next decade, yet generating capacity is slated to rise just 6%, says the North American Electric Reliability Council.

Coal remains the fuel of choice for most power companies, producing just over half of the USA's electricity. Natural gas prices are highly volatile. Nuclear plants, though gaining favor, still face public opposition. And wind turbines and solar panels operate too intermittently to constitute the bulk of a utility's portfolio. Coal is cheap and plentiful. There's enough in the USA to meet demand for the next 250 years.

Standard pulverized-coal plants turn coal into tiny bits that are burned in a boiler. The carbon dioxide produced is released through a smokestack. Technology to capture the carbon dioxide and store it underground — or use it to help extract more oil from existing reserves — would add up to 80% to the cost of the plant, says Ed Rubin, environmental engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Gasification plants turn coal into gases, filtering out carbon dioxide before the gases are burned, a much simpler process that also removes pollutants, such as sulfur and mercury, more efficiently. A gasification plant costs about 20% more to build than a typical $1 billion pulverized-coal plant. But it will be cheaper to add carbon-capture to gasification plants, Rubin says.

Bottom line: Gasification is about 20% cheaper than pulverized coal if both plants add carbon-capture. Equipment to trap and store carbon for both types of generators should be ready in five to 10 years.

Faced with hazy rules and technology, many utilities are sticking with pulverized coal. In Texas, TXU is spending $10 billion to build 11 pulverized-coal plants by 2010, citing population growth. If all are built, TXU would become the fourth-largest carbon emitter, up from No. 10, says environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council.

Initiated in 2003 by President Bush, FutureGen is expected to need $700 million in government funds, plus $250 million from power and coal companies.

Ohio is one of 20 states courting the U.S. Department of Energy for the right to build what could become America's first coal-fired power plant of the future. The $1 billion "FutureGen" project would infuse southern or eastern Ohio with a lot of new money, as well as jobs.

But the biggest selling point - and the one that has attracted the support of the Ohio Environmental Council - is that it wouldn't pollute. Coal-fired power plants are a source of dirty energy production and among the biggest sources of smog-forming nitrogen oxide, sooty particulate matter, mercury, and acid rain.

The project calls for the "world's first near-zero emissions power plant," according to state officials wooing the Energy Department. Coal would be turned into highly enriched hydrogen gas, which can then be burned more cleanly than coal itself. Carbon dioxide, a source of global warming, would be compressed into liquid and injected underground.

Mr. Shanahan told The Blade yesterday that Ohio, Texas, and Illinois are top contenders. Ohio and Texas derive much of their energy from coal. Texas is a leader in sequestering carbon and injecting it deep underground, mostly in abandoned oil and gas fields. Yet Ohio may have some geological advantages for that means of disposal, as well as its efficient and centralized transportation network, he said.

At 275 megawatts, the FutureGen plant would only produce a little more than a quarter of the electricity produced by FirstEnergy Corp.'s Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ottawa County and a little more than a third of FirstEnergy's coal-fired Bay Shore power plant near Oregon.

But supporters say the state that lands the project could become the nation's leader for a new type of energy that helps relieve America of its growing dependence on foreign oil and natural gas. Coal is a plentiful energy-producing fossil fuel. The government estimates that the United States has enough coal for hundreds of years, more than any nation except Russia. The drawback is its environmental hazards. Coal in southern Ohio has a high sulfur content, making it less marketable than coal from Wyoming and other Western states.

The Ohio task force has selected Stark, Carroll, Tuscarawas, Coshocton, Athens, Meigs, Hamilton, and Clermont counties for consideration. Northwest Ohio counties were excluded because there is no coal here.

WHERE'S the best place in the country to build America's first air-pollution-free coal-fired power plant? We think it's right here in the heart of it all: Ohio. The Buckeye State is working to successfully convince the U.S. Department of Energy and a collaboration of electric utilities and coal firms, including the American Electric Power Co. in Columbus, to make this the home of the $1 billion FutureGen Industrial Alliance project. If that happens, Ohio will be out front in weaning the nation from dependence on foreign oil and natural gas.

The Ohio Environmental Council enthusiastically supports the project because the plant will not pollute. The plant would convert coal to an enriched hydrogen gas that would burn cleanly. Carbon dioxide would be compressed into a liquid and stored deep underground. The process would eliminate pollutants such as mercury, which can cause health problems for women of child-bearing age and small children. It would also eliminate sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, major air pollutants that cause smog, and breathing and other health problems.

And the savings will be masked. Electricity supplied by the plant will cost about 10 percent more than today's rates. But these are small issues when weighed against the possibility of Ohio leading the nation in reducing U.S. dependence on foreign energy.

The proposed center would bring together researchers and start-up businesses working on alternatives to gasoline, coal, and nuclear power.

Nearly 80 percent of [France's] electricity comes from 58 nuclear power plants, crammed into a country the size of Texas. Because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases, France has the cleanest air in the industrialized world, and because the price of oil is now around $60 a barrel, it has the lowest electric bills in Europe. In fact, France has so much cheap electricity, it exports it to its European neighbors. French nuclear plants supply power to parts of Germany, Italy and help light the city of London.

Jul 5, 2007 USA Today story:

"California's policy targets plants that would burn the West's abundant coal to produce electricity. The region has at least a 250-year supply of recoverable coal, according to federal estimates, concentrated largely in Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico and Colorado."

"Conventional coal-fired plants belch tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Technologies that pulverize coal, turn it into a slurry and convert it to gas before burning it have the potential to capture and dispose of carbon dioxide. Those technologies raise the price of coal-generated power by about 10% a kilowatt-hour."

"However, none of the 31 new coal-fired plants planned in the West, including at least 10 that intend to sell power to California, would employ those new technologies. Environmentalists worry about more than California. They predict the biggest resurgence in new coal plant construction in the region's history to satisfy Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Salt Lake City and other booming metro markets."

Dec 12, 2006 USA Today story:

"A much smaller group of utilities are building a new type of coal "gasification" plant that emits fewer pollutants and can be more easily retrofitted with equipment to trap carbon dioxide before it's released. Of roughly 150 coal-fired plants being proposed by utilities — what would be the biggest wave since the 1970s — only about a dozen are cleaner gasification plants."

According to MisplacedWindpower.org, "One New California Generating Plant Can Produce More Electricity than the State’s 13,000 Windmills. The California situation illustrates dramatically the small amount of electricity produced by large windmills and the small role that wind energy can play in supplying U.S. electricity requirements."

According to the book Global Warming and Other Eco Myths, "Global fossil fuel supplies are in no near-term danger of being depleted, and a single 555-megawatt natural gas power plant produces more electricity than 13,000 windmills."

Georgia Democrat Senator Zell Miller suggests in his book, "The only way out of this dark valley is a broad-based energy policy that has a strong focus on conservation and efficiency. We should increase America's investment in domestic energy production. We need new technology that will produce clean coal energy."

Wind energy is competitive right now because of hefty federal subsidies. Just wait until those federal subsidies are dropped. The consumer will be left holding the bag, in the form of high electric rates. When something better than wind turbines comes out, the government will allow all the utilities that built them to recover stranded costs. Essentially forcing the consumers to pay for the utility’s and the government’s screw ups.

Wind power is America's fastest-growing energy source, but still accounts for less than 1 percent of the nation's power. By 2020, its market share is expected to be 6 percent, the federal Government Accountability Office has said.

Although wind power bills itself as ecologically superior to nuclear power, Ohio's top bald eagle researcher calls the wind industry "a tremendous eater of land." "It would take [almost] 600 turbines to replace Davis-Besse," said Mark Shieldcastle, of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Crane Creek Wildlife Research Station in Ottawa County. "You're talking 10 times as much land use and habitat as a nuclear plant."

Mr. Shieldcastle isn't sold on wind as a technology. "It's not the green energy the propaganda machine is purporting," Mr. Shieldcastle said, citing the amount of energy necessary for production of wind turbines and the amount of oil needed for lubricating turbine blades.

Being the shallowest part of the Great Lakes and in close proximity to electrical transmission lines, Toledo could become attractive to wind industry developers, Ms. Seymour said.

But Toledo is also in the heart of one of North America's most valuable flyways for migratory birds. That, plus the cost of obtaining offshore permits, could dissuade developers, she said.

While land-based turbines are more practical, offshore turbines benefit from stronger winds. Wildlife advocates are fighting to keep the near-shore from becoming a compromise. They want turbines prohibited within three miles of Lake Erie's shoreline. Putting them farther out into the lake, however, would likely be a problem for maritime shippers.

Last week, a University of Tennessee study projected that Texas would lead the nation in production of renewable energy by 2025, creating more than 173,000 jobs and adding about $22.8 billion annually to the state's economy.

The report was commissioned by the National 25x'25 Alliance, a group of organizations and individuals seeking to have 25 percent of the nation's energy come from renewable sources by 2025. Nationally by that year, the renewable energy effort was forecast to have an annual economic effect of $700 billion and create 5.1 million jobs.

Here's a look at some energy projects - proposed, under way or already in place - that many believe will revitalize West Texas.

Wind

Since the mid-1990s, wind turbines have stretched skyward in Texas; in 1999, the bladed towers began to dot mesas across portions of West Texas. The state last year surpassed California as the nation's leading producer, with 2,370 wind-generated megawatts, enough to power 600,000 homes a year.

Ethanol plants

Three plants are under construction in West Texas. Two plants in Hereford and one in Levelland will produce 240 million gallons a year when completed. Statewide, eight more are planned. Four of those, potentially adding 380 million gallons a year, would be built in West Texas.

Nuclear

The University of Texas System, Permian Basin cities and private industry hope to bring the nation's first High Temperature Teaching and Test Reactor to Andrews County. A feasibility study is under way on the reactor, which would cost $400 million and be completed by 2012.

The reactor would use fuels that include uranium, some types of plutonium and thorium and spent reactor fuel elements now in secure locations across the country.

Fuel pellets about the size of poppy seeds would be covered with three layers of ceramic coating and would not rupture at temperatures up to 3,600 degrees, according to University of Texas-Permian Basin's Jim Wright, a spokesman for the project.

At high temperatures it's believed the reactor can generate hydrogen for alternative energy.

The reactor, which would be part of an energy research facility, is considered safer than traditional nuclear plants. Because it is cooled by helium rather than water, there is no danger of a meltdown, according to Wright. Japan and China are the only countries with high-temperature test reactors, and each is working to generate hydrogen.

A couple of hundred of miles north in Amarillo, a developer is seeking federal approval to build a nuclear power plant. The city has long been home to Pantex, the nation's only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility.

Coal-powered plant

The Permian Basin is one of four sites - two in Texas and two in Illinois - that are finalists for the $1.5 billion project headed by the U.S. Department of Energy and a consortium of 10 energy companies from the United States, China and Australia.

The plant, billed as a prototype coal-fueled power plant that produces almost no pollutants, would store carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping "greenhouse" gas, underground. Possible locations are Mattoon and Tuscola, in eastern Illinois, and Odessa and Jewett, in Texas. A site is expected to be chosen in September.

Mayor Carty Finkbeiner says he’s signing up the city for the global environmental movement, a “Live Earth: Toledo” program that will include efforts to get state government to place a center for alternative energy here.

At a news conference recemtly along the banks of the Maumee River, the mayor said the Toledo region already is known for solar and wind-power research and development, as well as development and use of alternative fuels.

“It think there’s a very strong argument to be made ...” the mayor said. “Why not Northwest Ohio for the center for alternative energy?

“The city will be forwarding to Gov. Strickland and Lt. Gov. Fisher shortly a proposal for the state of Ohio to locate a Center for Alternative Energy right here in Toledo. We have solar power, wind turbines, ethanol, bio-diesel and co-generation from methane gas already in place in the Toledo area.”

In addition to department heads, joining the mayor was Dr. Frank Calzonetti, vice president for research development at the University of Toledo.

[Carty's] program includes greater effort to increase the 22 percent participation rate in household recycling and more vigorous prosecution for littering in streets and streams, he said. The city will continue to promote the construction of rain gardens to improve water quality, will “raise the bar” on permits seeking to compromise pollution control standards impacting air, water and soil, will encourage “green” building codes and practices, and will encourage businesses and individuals to practice “green policies.”

The mayor included the Toledo Waterways Initiative, the $450 million reconstruction of the sewer/stormwater system, as part of Live Earth: Toledo.

“Toledo can and will be a clean and prosperous city by melding good environmental practices into a solid economic development plan,” Mayor Finkbeiner said. “You may see, actually, the alternative economy of the future being developed right before our eyes.”

Some countries never lost their enthusiasm for nuclear power. It provides three-quarters of French electricity. Developing countries have continued to build nuclear plants apace. But elsewhere in the West, Chernobyl, along with the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, sent the industry into a decline. The public got scared. The regulatory environment tightened, raising costs. Billions were spent bailing out lossmaking nuclear-power companies. The industry became a byword for mendacity, secrecy and profligacy with taxpayers' money. For two decades neither governments nor bankers wanted to touch it.

Now nuclear power has a second chance. Its revival is most visible in America (see article), where power companies are preparing to flood the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with applications to build new plants. But the tide seems to be turning in other countries, too. Finland is building a reactor. The British government is preparing the way for new planning regulations. In Australia, which has plenty of uranium but no reactors, the prime minister, John Howard, says nuclear power is “inevitable”.

Managed properly, a nuclear revival could be a good thing. But the industry and the governments keen to promote it look like repeating some of the mistakes that gave it a bad name in the first place.

Geopolitics, technology (see article), economics and the environment are all changing in nuclear power's favour. Western governments are concerned that most of the world's oil and gas is in the hands of hostile or shaky governments. Much of the nuclear industry's raw material, uranium, by contrast, is conveniently located in friendly places such as Australia and Canada.

Simpler designs cut maintenance and repair costs. Shut-downs are now far less frequent, so that a typical station in America is now online 90% of the time, up from less than 50% in the 1970s. New “passive safety” features can shut a reactor down in an emergency without the need for human intervention. Handling waste may get easier. America plans to embrace a new approach in which the most radioactive portion of the waste from conventional nuclear power stations is isolated and burned in “fast” reactors.

Technology has thus improved nuclear's economics. So has the squeeze on fossil fuels. Nuclear power stations are hugely expensive to build but very cheap to run. Gas-fired power stations—the bulk of new build in the 1980s and 1990s—are the reverse. Since gas provides the extra power needed when demand rises, the gas price sets the electricity price. Costly gas has therefore made existing nuclear plants tremendously profitable.

Some environmentalists retain their antipathy to it, but green gurus such as James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and Patrick Moore have changed their minds and embraced it. Public opinion, confused about how best to save the planet, seems to be coming round. A recent British poll showed 30% of the population against nuclear power, compared with 60% three years ago. An American poll in March this year showed 50% in favour of expanding nuclear power, up from 44% in 2001.

How, then, to get new plants built? America's solution is to lard the industry with money. That is the wrong answer.

Nuclear and other clean energy sources do indeed deserve a hand from governments—but through a carbon tax which reflects the benefits of clean energy, not through subsidies to cover political risk. Exposure to public nervousness is a cost of doing business in the nuclear industry, just as exposure to volatile prices is a cost in the gas industry.

It may be that fears of nuclear power are overblown: after all, the UN figure of around 4,000 eventual deaths as a result of the Chernobyl accident is lower than the official annual death-rate in Chinese coal mines. Yet there are good reasons for public concern. Nuclear waste is difficult to dispose of. More civil nuclear technology around the world increases the chance of weapons proliferation. Terrorists could attack plants or steal nuclear fuel. Voters will support nuclear power only if they believe that governments and the nuclear industry are doing their best to limit those risks, and that such risks are small enough to be worth taking in the interests of cheap, clean energy.

One of the reasons why the public turned against nuclear power last time round is that it found itself bailing the industry out. It would be wrong, not just for taxpayers but also for the industry, to set up another lot of cosy deals with governments. The nuclear industry needs to persuade people that it is clean, cheap and safe enough to rely on without a government crutch. If it can't, it doesn't deserve a second chance.

OVER the next few decades global electricity consumption is expected to double. At the same time, many power plants in rich countries, built back in the 1960s and 1970s, are nearing the end of their projected lifespans. Meanwhile, concern is swelling both about global warming, and about the Western world's increasing dependence on a shrinking number of hostile or unstable countries for imports of oil and gas. The solution to this conundrum, in the eyes of many governments, is nuclear power.

Around the world, 31 reactors are under construction and many more are in the planning stages. Some of the most ambitious programmes are under way in developing countries. Both China and India are building several reactors and intend to increase their nuclear-generating capacity several times over in the next 15 years. Some countries, such as Turkey and Vietnam, are considering starting nuclear-power programmes, and others, including Argentina and South Africa, plan to expand their existing ones.

The rich world is also re-examining the case for nuclear. America is expecting a rush of applications to build new reactors in the coming months—the first in almost 30 years. Britain's prime minister, Gordon Brown, recently affirmed his support for a new generation of nuclear power plants. Construction of a new one in Finland, western Europe's first for 15 years, began in 2005; work is just starting on another of the same design in France. Other European countries that had frozen or decided to scrap their nuclear programmes are rethinking their plans.

There are good reasons for this enthusiasm. Nuclear reactors emit almost none of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. They are fuelled by uranium, which is relatively abundant and is available from many sources, including reassuringly stable places such as Canada and Australia.

At the moment 439 nuclear reactors in 31 countries supply 15% of the world's electricity. Even without a price on carbon emissions, says Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA), the worldwide generating capacity of nuclear power plants will probably increase from about 370 gigawatts today to 520 gigawatts in 2030. But if there were a price on carbon dioxide, says Mr Birol, “it could grow even faster.”

Nuclear plants are expensive: each can cost several billion dollars to build. Worse, in the past, ill-conceived designs, safety scares and the regulatory delays they gave rise to made nuclear plants even more costly than their hefty price-tags suggest. Vendors of new nuclear plants, such as Areva, General Electric (GE), Hitachi and Westinghouse, argue that things are different now. The latest designs incorporate suggestions from utilities and operators with decades of experience, and should, their creators say, make new plants safer and easier to operate. They believe the simpler new reactors, with their longer lifespans and reduced maintenance costs, will also improve the economics of the industry.

America's nuclear industry is about to embark on its biggest expansion in more than a generation. This will influence energy policy in the rest of the world.

OVER the next few months America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) expects to receive 12 applications to build new nuclear-power reactors at seven different sites. It is preparing to see plans for another 15 at 11 more locations next year. These will be the first full applications to build new nuclear plants in America for 30 years. If they are all successful, the number of reactors in the country will increase by roughly a third.

America's most recent nuclear plant, at Watts Bar in Tennessee, started operations in 1996. But it took 23 years to complete at a cost of $6.9 billion; a second reactor at the site has been under construction, on and off, since 1973. Another plant, at Shoreham in New York, was completed and tested, but never allowed to start commercial operations because of local opposition. By the time it was decommissioned, in 1994—21 years after construction had begun—the costs had exploded from $70m to $6 billion. The local utility was able to pass most of this bill on to its customers. Not all energy firms have been so lucky: in 1988 Public Service Company of New Hampshire became the first American utility to go bust since the Depression, thanks largely to the fallout from a much-delayed nuclear project.

What is worse, nuclear power has a spotty safety record. The next generation of nuclear plants is said to be very different. Firms which make them, such as America's General Electric and Westinghouse, and foreign manufacturers like France's AREVA, insist that such episodes will soon be a thing of the past. Their latest designs, they maintain, are simpler and safer than existing nuclear plants. That should make it easier to obtain operating permits, allow them to be built faster and be cheaper to run—and so much less risky financially.

All this has turned nuclear-power plants into virtual mints—as long as the bill for construction has been paid down or written off. In most of America, the wholesale power price is closely linked to the price of natural gas, since gas-fired plants tend to provide the extra power required at times of peak demand. So the price of power has risen along with that of gas over the past few years, whereas the operating costs of nuclear plants have remained relatively stable. According to the Energy Information Administration, a government agency, the average wholesale power price in 2005 was 5 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh); the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, reckons that the average operating cost of America's nuclear plants was 1.7 cents per kWh that year. So their margins were almost 200%.

Until recently coal-fired plants seemed to be safer investments. But nowadays most utilities expect—and in some cases are calling for—Congress to limit emissions of greenhouse gases in the near future to temper climate change. Coal-fired plants, which have a working life of 40 years or more, spew out globe-warming pollution, whereas nuclear ones produce almost no greenhouse gases at all. So coal is now subject to a massive “regulatory risk” of its own. Utilities are piling into green-generation technologies, such as wind turbines and solar panels. But for a constant source of clean power, they have few choices other than nuclear.

Meanwhile, nuclear waste continues to pile up in ponds and containers at nuclear plants around the country. The NRC monitors these and claims that they are safe for the foreseeable future. But Mr Klein, its chairman, tactfully hints that it would be prudent for the government to find a more permanent solution, especially since it is encouraging a dramatic expansion of nuclear power.

Nonetheless, Mr Klein believes that the expansion of nuclear energy is now in motion and is unlikely to be slowed down by concerns about what to do with the waste. The only thing that could stop a nuclear renaissance now, he suggests, is a serious accident at an existing plant. Unfortunately, it would not be the first.