Number-crunchers for Progress Energy know the company will save millions on construction costs and through other efficiencies if it can expand the nuclear power generating capacity at its Shearon Harris plant in southwestern Wake County. Thus the company's widely anticipated decision to start the process that could lead to a second reactor at the Harris site.

Applying for a license from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not commit Raleigh-based Progress to going ahead with the new reactor. But it is a step with potentially huge consequences for the company and the region it serves.

North and South Carolina are growing in population at a dizzying rate, making the search for increased supplies of reliable, affordable electricity a social and economic imperative. New customers bring their own appliances and computers that run all day, every day. They have been drawn here -- and will keep coming -- because of industries locating in the region, industries that are themselves thirsty for power. It would be disastrous economically if the lights flickered.

But is a new reactor at the Shearon Harris site in the best interest of this region? Is it a prudent expenditure for Progress, a regulated utility that will expect its customers to absorb the enormous costs involved in a new nuclear unit? Those are tough questions, and they need to be sharply debated.In its favor, the nuclear industry has provided the nation with electricity for four decades, with a generally respectable track record aside from the troubling issue of waste disposal.

Cleaner than carbon

Nuclear doesn't pose the same kind of pollution problems that coal- and gas-fired power plants do. Despite the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, there have been no catastrophic accidents in this country with large-scale releases of radioactive contamination. Designs for new nuclear power plants feature improved safety measures (Shearon Harris is the last of the old-design plants to go on line, in 1987). Europe, Russia and Japan now quench their energy thirst mainly with atoms, with few problems. They likely will continue that course, if they are to meet the goals of the Kyoto anti-global warming treaty.

Still, nuclear plants old or new are highly complicated and inherently dangerous, posing risks that only multiply in heavily populated regions such as the Triangle. A major accident at Shearon Harris could have consequences over a broad stretch of territory where thousands have their homes and livelihoods. Those risks naturally are part of the debate.

The Bush administration may be pushing nuclear for air-quality reasons, but it also extends a hand to a favored industry. Progress is rushing its plans partly because the recently passed energy bill gives the first few companies to build new nuclear plants hefty subsidies. Progress and North Carolina's other big utility, Duke Power, are racing for that revenue.

The waste dilemma

The administration is less engaged in finding a site to store the highly radioactive spent fuel rods that nuclear plants generate -- a big negative for Progress' plans. By now the federal government was supposed to have opened a repository for plant wastes that remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years. But common-sense environmental concerns have stymied the opening of a facility under Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

It may be decades before Yucca opens, if ever. For now, companies store decades worth of wastes at their power plants. Shearon Harris holds the nation's largest stockpile, submerged in cooling pools.

The waste is dangerous in its own right, but stockpiles also are potentially vulnerable to terrorist attack. Storage near U.S. cities seems on its face not to make much sense. Under the present scenario, a new Shearon Harris reactor would mean even waste stored there.

The Bush energy policy also takes the easier nuclear route rather than pressing for conservation and for alternative energy sources such as wind and solar. It may be true at this point that no alternative source is as cheap as nuclear. But Washington hasn't adequately invested in research into alternatives. Those renewable sources must be more carefully explored, even if they wouldn't eliminate the need for large "base load" power plants.

Notwithstanding all that, Progress wants the option of doubling its nuclear capacity at Shearon Harris. Before it receives the go-ahead, it must convince the federal government and the state Utilities Commission -- as well as the court of public opinion -- that a new reactor in Wake County would represent progress not only for the company, but for the region.