The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Plant hisses on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, its two reactors splitting apart uranium atoms to drive steam turbines that deliver more than 13 million megawatts of electricity each year to customers in Baltimore and across central Maryland. It has been this way for a generation, and the federal government has deemed it safe. Now Calvert Cliffs, owned by Baltimore Gas and Electric [BG & E], has become the first nuclear power plant in the nation to seek renewal of its operating license. And the nuclear power industry--which operates 102 other plants nationwide--awaits the verdict as a signal of its future. No new nuclear plant has been built since the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster and if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC] rules Calvert Cliffs unfit to continue operation, that could foreshadow the end of an era of nuclear power generation.

It has been a controversial era almost from the start, and the controversy continues as Calvert Cliffs seeks its license renewal. Under political pressure to cut red tape, the NRC says it will not hold formal public hearings on the application. The NRC says its decision will speed the process--and clear the way for other plants to seek license renewal. Without hearings, the NRC says, it can shave one to three years off the renewal process and make a decision within 29 months. Critics say the agency is ignoring the public in a decision that could affect public health and safety. The public hearing process is unquestionably at the heart of nuclear safety, said Stephen Kohn, of the National Whistleblowers Center, which has filed a complaint in the U.S. Court of Appeals to force a public hearing. "For the NRC to bypass that is just outrageous."

The NRC shifted to a fast track after threats from Congress and persuasion from utilities, which are facing competition in deregulated markets and need to know as they craft business strategy whether their nuclear plants will be running years from now. "We're cognizant of the concerns expressed by Congress and the nuclear industry that a drawn-out hearing process could delay business decisions that they need to make to try to position themselves in a competitive marketplace," said Neil A. Sheehan, a NRC spokesman. "We're not the only agency that's been told to streamline…. We are not going to apologize for that."

The decision to apply for renewal of Calvert Cliffs' license was driven by business considerations. The plant now operates under two 40-year operating licenses--one for each reactor-- that expire in 2014 and 2016. But when BGE executives decided last year to replace four aging steam generators at a cost of $300 million, they opted to apply for renewal to protect their investment. The company also is trying to craft long-term market strategy as Maryland begins to deregulate the electric industry starting in July 2000. If the NRC grants Calvert Cliffs a new license, other utilities with nuclear plants and similar concerns about market strategy also may file for early license renewal.

In the 20 years since the Three Mile Island plant suffered a partial meltdown that sent radioactive gases spewing into the air in central Pennsylvania, the NRC has been accused of regulating to little and too much. Last spring, at a hearing before a Senate subcommittee, Republican lawmakers called the NRC "top heavy" and sluggish in handling license renewals. The Republicans threatened to slash 700 positions from the NRC's 2934-person staff. The agency dodged that bullet, but NRC Chairman Shirley Ann Jackson began making some changes. The NRC stopped its regular ratings of the safety performance of nuclear plants, a kind of report card issued every 18 months for each plant. Instead, it will give quarterly reviews of greater breadth but less depth, Sheehan said. And it may drop its "Watch List," in which the most troubled plants in the country are listed and then receive additional regulation until they improve. Critics complained it was too subjective. Last year, the NRC ended formal hearings for licnse transfers even though some NRC staff members believed the hearings were required by Congress.

The NRC's shift away from formal public hearings is the latest step is its drive to become more expedient. "The whole agency is in the midst of changing the way it does business," Sheehan said. The Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the country's 103 nuclear plants, says it makes sense to jettison cumbersome regulation, give plants greater responsibility in assessing safety and speed up decisions. "The industry has steadily improved its safety and performance, and we don't need more prescriptive regulation, just more efficient and effective regulation," said Steven C. Kerekes, spokesman for the institute. "Safety is still the paramount goal, as it should be." He called complaints that the public is being shut out of the license renewal "bogus."

Operators of plants around the country are watching the Calvert Cliffs case, ready to follow its lead, Kerekes said. A second nuclear plant, the Oconee plant in South Carolina owned by Duke Energy Corp., applied for license renewal four months after Calvert Cliffs filed last year. As in the Calvert Cliffs case, a public interest group, the Chattooga River Watershed Coalition, petitioned the NRC for a formal hearing and was denied. It is appealing that decision to the NRC. "The idea that they can throw out these intervenors with hardly a whisper is just astonishing," said Peter Bradford, who served as an NRC commissioner form 1977 to 1982, a term defined by the Three Mile Island accident.

Federal laws allow the NRC to renew operating licenses but do not spell out the process for renewal. So the agency has been figuring it out as it goes along, deciding which issues it will judge, which it will ignore and who has a right to be involved. "You've got an agency making rules and running oversight on themselves," said Nicole Hayler, of the Chattooga River Watershed Coalition in South Carolina.

When it comes to Calvert Cliffs, the NRC insists it is listening to public opinion, by allowing written comment and holding occasional informal public meetings on the application. But public interest groups say only public participation that counts is a formal adjudicatory hearing, which follows the format of a trial complete with testimony, cross examination and discovery. Most importantly, a formal hearing gives the public the right to challenge the NRC's final decision about Calvert Cliffs in court, Kohn said. Without such a hearing the public has no legal standing for a court challenge.

The NRC did accept petitions for a formal adjudicatory hearing but used special rules written just for Calvert Cliffs-which critics say were impossible to satisfy. "They set forward rules that apply to no one else and made it radically more difficult to go forward," said Kohn, whose petition filed on behalf of the National Whistleblowers Center was rejected by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, an arm of the NRC. For example, the NRC gave the public 30 days after the plant filed its initial application to raise new, substantial safety issues not addressed by either NRC staff or the plant. But the plant's application was not complete by the public's 30 day deadline, making it impossible for the public to identify "new" issues. Even if all the information was available, 30 days was not enough time, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit founded by scientists to challenge aspects of science and technology they see as dangerous or destructive. "It's a sham," Lochbaum said about the NRC's license renewal process. "It is not democratic. The public had 30 days to do what the NRC can't do in three years. That's ludicrous."

In the past, the public has flagged significant safety issues regarding nuclear plants that were overlooked by both the NRC and the plant owners. In 1991, the Yankee Rowe nuclear plant in Massachusetts announced its intention to apply for license renewal. The Union of Concerned Scientists argued that Yankee Rowe's steel containment vessel had become brittle with age and eventually would crack, releasing radiation. The group petitioned the NRC to close the plant, the nation's oldest commercial reactor at the time. The NRC rejected the petition but then directed its staff to study that issue. Within months, regulators permanently shut down Yankee Rowe.

Calvert Cliffs, located about 60 miles from the White House, generates about half the electricity sold by BGE. Last year, it produced a record amount--13.3 million megawatts. Most of that power is used in the Baltimore region and in central Maryland, with very little sent to surrounding Calvert County. Still, many of the locals love their nuclear plant. There is little opposition to license renewal in the rural southern Maryland county, where the plant provides 20 percent of the tax base and is the largest private employer with 1340 workers. With the flick of a switch in 1975, when the plant began running, Calvert County was transformed from one of Maryland's poorest counties to one of it's richest. The first tax payment Calvert Cliffs made was more than double the size of the county budget.

More than 1000 county residents work at the plant each day, driving into the long entrance road in Lusby lined with signs printed with one word inspirational messages such as "Safety" or "Teamwork." Past the guard shack, a campus of trailers and buildings is clustered around two dome-topped concrete reactors that loom over the Chesapeake. Inside the building that houses the huge turbine generators, the rumble is overwhelming. Workers, mostly men wearing hard hats, earplugs and safety goggles, are scattered among the shiny silver tubes, cylinders and valves that twist and turn through several floors. They watch as steam piped in from the reactor spins the huge turbine generators to produce electricity. Above them, in the control room, operators stare at walls covered with indicators and alarms, monitoring the reactors next door.

Public interest groups worry about age and the reactor vessels-the steel and concrete containers where nuclear reactions take place. They fear that wear and tear caused by vibration, heat and corrosion over time could be weakening the vessels, making them susceptible to cracks and leaks. And they are concerned relicensing will generate more tons of radioactive waste and no place to store it.

The NRC says it can predict whether Calvert Cliffs could operate safely past 2014. "We believe we have enough data," Sheehan said, adding that if problems arise, the NRC can always shut down the plant, regardless of whether its license has been renewed. "We think we are crossing all the T's and dotting all the I's. The process is going to take two-plus years and a number of inspections to prove that license renewal is not going to raise any questions of public safety hazards."

Others say the plant is applying now to avoid questions about how vibration and corrosion over time may affect its eight-inch-thick steel reactor vessels, the steel -reinforced concrete tanks that contain them, and other components. "A lot can go wrong between now and 2014 and 2016, but they want to get that renewal now. The whole thing smacks of a greased skid," said Paul Gunter, of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an antinuclear group.

While the debate goes on about whether Calvert Cliffs should get a renewal license, the legal fight over the rules--and the publics role--will play out in federal court. "If we win, in any other relicensing case, the NRC is going to have to follow procedures," said Kohn, of the Whistleblower Center. "If we lose, in every other relicensing case, they can change the rules and make it impossible for intervenors."

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