Sen. Scott McCoy says his nuclear-power bill makes sense, making sure that ratepayers don't wind up paying for a reactor boondoggle and that residents don't get stuck with storing containers of nuclear waste.
But Aaron Tilton, promoter of the state's first nuclear power plant, called the measure "a backhanded slap" at nuclear power and "a grandstanding bill" that will be dead on arrival in the upcoming 2009 Legislature.
"The bill is basically going to go nowhere," said Tilton, a Republican who lost his own House seat last year, in part, over his involvement with the power plant, a 1,500-megawatt nuclear station.
McCoy, a Salt Lake City Democrat, said the bill is timely because there are no reactors in the state -- yet.
"Now is the perfect time," he said. "We haven't developed nuclear, but there are plans out there."
McCoy noted that the Legislature is already on record in favor of nuclear plants. And Utahns of all stripes have spoken out that they don't want high-level waste in the state.
His bill "basically says nuclear is part of the mix," said McCoy, "but we develop it responsibly and put some planning conditions in place before we go down that road."
The senator said he wasn't aware of any opposition, but Tilton questioned the seriousness of McCoy's effort in light of the fact that his company Transition Power Development LLC wasn't included in discussions about the bill.
He doubted whether the Senate Rules Committee would allow it to have a public hearing. "They wouldn't pass along anything to discourage development," Tilton said.
Utah has never had a commercial nuclear facility of its own, but the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a waste storage site on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation before the Interior Department derailed the proposal more than two years ago.
Tilton said the public objected to storing nuclear waste from outside the state, not waste generated within the state and stored safely on the site of a Utah reactor. His Transition Power has promised federal regulators to submit an application for Utah's first reactors by April 2010.
