VICKSBURG - It hasn't made big headlines yet, but it seems certain that Mississippi, perhaps in a decade, will host a second nuclear-fired electricity plant.
As the process continues, there will be a couple of things to watch. First is how Claiborne, the odds-on host county, will position itself. Second will be whether Entergy Nuclear tries to tap public sources for construction funding.
Grand Gulf Nuclear Station, on the Mississippi River about 20 miles south of Vicksburg, has been ginning along, setting records for safety and productivity since 1985.
Five years ago, the process of seeking what's called an early site permit for a second unit at Grand Gulf was begun. Federal funds paid half the tab, and earlier this month the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted the permit. It means safety and environmental questions are sealed and settled.
Entergy, a member of the 11-company NuStart consortium that would own a second plant, has said the next step - seeking a construction and operating license - will begin before the end of this year. That will take five years and then, depending on "conditions," including power demand and unnamed factors, a decision will be made on whether to initiate an estimated five years of actual building.
NuStart also has a second site, Bellefonte, owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority near Scottsboro, Ala., in the running.
When Grand Gulf I was begun around 1971, the existing regulatory and taxation structure could not have been designed to be any worse than it was.
The worst aspect was that Mississippi had a rule saying public utilities could put the cost of future assets into an existing rate base. The provision was meant to keep local water clubs as "pay-as-you-go" operations. It kept them from building up huge slush funds to cover expansions that might not be needed. When applied to what was then Mississippi Power and Light Company and what is still Mississippi's largest-ever construction project, it meant all the money for Grand Gulf had to be borrowed.
Those were the years of the Jimmy Carter economy, so, during the 11-year construction period, MP&L was borrowing money in $100 million increments at double-digit interest rates. The plant, which was to have two reactors and cost about $1 billion, wound up having one reactor and costing more than $3 billion - including about a billion or more dollars in interest that Entergy customers have been paying back to New York bankers since.
Another provision was that the county where a public utility was located got all the property tax revenue. That gave Claiborne, with 12,500 people and a $700,000 annual county budget, $16 million in new revenue. Good things did not happen in the county that got real rich, real fast. Even today Claiborne is a state leader in unemployment and poverty.
Today, the story is that bad conditions persist in Claiborne because the Legislature ordered half the money split among the other 45 counties that receive Grand Gulf power - leaving Claiborne with a mere $8 million a year. The truth is there was a complete lack of planning, accountability or responsible use of the overnight 10-fold revenue surge.
Claiborne officials have heartily endorsed a second nuclear plant at the Grand Gulf site, and they've also hired Jackson attorney Mike Espy, former member of the U.S. House and former head of the Department of Agriculture, as their negotiator. Espy is an eminently reasonable guy, but his task is to get the best deal for the locals - and it's not beyond belief that his employers will push him to kill a second goose about to lay a second golden egg.
An actual design for a second reactor has been chosen by NuStart, but there's no firm guess as to how much a new plant would cost. Remember, there hasn't been a nuclear plant started in the United States in more than 30 years.
However, even if a second reactor cost the same as the first one did, the investment will be the same as the Nissan plant near Canton ($1.4 billion) and the Toyota plant in Union County ($1.3 billion) combined. For those two projects, the Legislature approved about $600 million in tax-funded incentives.
In this new age of public-private partnerships, will Mississippians be asked to help pay for a second reactor at Grand Gulf? Will a "threat" to use only the Alabama site loom as leverage?
Unlike with car plants, it matters where power plants are built. They need to be reasonably close to their customers, as Grand Gulf I is to sell power in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas. It's logical that NuStart may plan to build on both sites, depending, of course, on demand.
