Entergy and the NuStart Consortium

While a combination of safe operations and rising oil and natural gas prices have led many industry observers to reconsider nuclear energy, some credit ought to go to private industry -- in particular the companies that make up the NuStart Energy consortium. In the September issue of MIT Technology Review, David Talbot takes a closer look at the development of the group, and how it helped to get nuclear energy back on the national agenda:

[I]n 2003, Entergy, along with the Chicago-based utility Exelon, took the lead in forging a coalition. The companies called five other utilities and suppliers to a meeting near the Atlanta airport. "We called it the 'Atlanta seven' meeting, and our goal was to see if we could respond together to come up with a new reactor design and share those costs and those risks," Keuter recalls. Out of that meeting came a consortium called NuStart, which now includes nine power companies and two major reactor builders, Westinghouse and GE. Each member contributes $1 million annually to the consortium's joint operations.

The consortium has revived the approach to nuclear power that prevailed in the 1950s, says Andrew Kadak, a nuclear engineer at MIT. One of the first nuclear power plants, Yankee Rowe in Rowe, MA--completed in 1960--was built by 10 utilities who shared costs and the resulting power. NuStart "is an important new initiative for the industry," says Kadak. "The new initiative may end up being the same model [as the one of the 1950s]." But before construction of a plant can begin, the utilities will need two permits from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The first would approve the site selection, the other the construction and operation of the reactor.

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