Duke Plans on Putting Plutonium to work

Charlotte, North Carolina-- Duke Power reaffirmed that it plans to use a blended plutonium fuel in two Charlotte area nuclear plants despite a promise by South Carolina's governor to block shipments of former bomb-making material to a reprocessing site.

Duke Power, an electric utility subsidiary of Duke Energy, won't seek permission to test the mixed-oxide, or MOX , fuel for at least two months, the company's MOX fuel program manager Steve Nesbit said. The company has planned to apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March, but the Energy Department has not decided who will make the test material.

A business consortium that includes a Duke Energy unit has applied for permission to build a fuel plant at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. , to process 34 metric tons of plutonium. Critics are trying to block the plant and have won a formal hearing.

The utility will use MOX fuel in four reactors at its McGuire Nuclear Power Station near Huntersville and the Catawba Nuclear Power Station near York, S.C.

Catawba and McGuire would become the first U.S. plants to burn MOX fuel, which would contain a small percentage of weapons-grade plutonium. MOX made from plutonium is used in Europe.

If approved, four fuel-rod assemblies would be installed at the nuclear power plants in 2004 and would be tested for 41/2 years. Full scale use probably would begin in 2008.

Three facilities in Europe-- the only place MOX is now made-- could make the test assemblies, Nesbit said. Energy Department spokesman Lisa Cutler would say only that the agency has not decided where it will be produced.