(Photo by Phil Taylor)Gaffney, South Carolina’s one-million gallon “Peachoid.”

Did you know Cherokee County, S.C., once produced more peaches than the entire state of Georgia? A million-gallon, peach-shaped water tower built along I-85 was my first hint while driving into Gaffney, where Duke Energy plans to build a 2,234 megawatt nuclear power plant.

The once-controversial technology seems to have few critics, winning support here even from those you might not expect.

Bryan Stone is the business manager for a hydroelectric power plant in Lockhart, about 30 miles downstream on the Broad River from where Duke hopes to build its plant. Nuclear reactors keep cool by sucking in enormous quantities of water from nearby streams or lakes, much of which could be used by Stone’s plant to generate its own electricity. It not an ideal situation, Stone acknowledges, but nuclear has too much potential to be passed up.

“There’s no perfect fuel technology that’s out there,” says Stone, who holds an electrical engineering degree from Georgia Tech University. “Even the renewables have their own environmental impacts, and I think that nuclear is a very important part of the portfolio,” he says.

Not to say hydroelectric isn’t important, he adds.

Hydroelectric produces 8 percent of the energy we consume as a nation, compared to about 20 percent from nuclear. But the carbon-free source of energy is near its capacity in the United States, while nuclear power has abundant room to grow – that is, if it can pay for itself. Nuclear plant costs range from an estimated $3 billion to $9 billion. Just as troublesome is the fact that uncertain delays in the regulatory process can take several years.

Stone says he has concerns with the potential for water flow loss, and suggested using some of the electricity from the plant to mitigate the expected loss of water. Still, he calls himself a nuclear proponent.

“You’re talking about taking a relatively small amount of fuel on a mass basis and getting a huge amount of energy out of it,” Stone says, while giving me a tour yesterday morning of the plant. “People are now starting to understand what the carbon dioxide benefits are to nuclear compared to the other fossil fuels.”

It’s interesting how energy has changed over the years in Lockhart, which once used the river to mechanically power a textile mill before the discovery of electricity. The hydroelectric dam, which uses turbines to generate up to 16 megawatts of electricity, was built in 1920 and can power several thousand homes.

The plant is carbon neutral, but only because it is able to rely on a stable backup source when water flow is down. That backup source happens to be Duke, which could cut its own emission rate with the addition of more nuclear plants such as Lee. And as Stone argues, it’s imperative for Duke to keep up with energy demand to keep costs low for consumers.

“You need to have a holistic view of the environmental aspects, and the economic benefits to the rate payers,” Stone says.

He, along with Gaffney Mayor Henry Jolly, say the risks associated with nuclear energy are a thing of the past. Jolly says he is ready to embrace it.

“We’ve deemed that nuclear energy is safe and safe for the environment, so we welcome it,” he says.

The Lee plant would use Westinghouse Electric Company’s AP 1000 reactor, a design that uses passive safety mechanisms that turn on automatically in the case of reactor core overheating without the need for human intervention. Though the reactor has been certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, there is still no certified place to store the radioactive spent fuel. Duke would have to store all of its waste onsite until at least 2017, the earliest date at which a repository like Yucca Mountain will be available.

The executive director of Cherokee County’s Chamber of Commerce, Gene Moorhead, joined Jolly in welcoming the proposed plant, citing its economic potential to the region.

“Fossil fuels will still be around in our lifetime, but sometime in the future that will not be true,” he says. “Energy and effective use of energy is one of the problems facing this nation. Nuclear energy is the cleanest, and it’s also one of the safest.”

The response of area leaders and most residents who attended a public hearing on the matter last month in Gaffney is a resounding ‘yes’ to nuclear power. It’s a stark contrast to the response Wise County, Va., residents have given Richmond-based Dominion’s proposal to build a coal plant in Virginia City.

One resident and member of the coalition group Wise Energy Alliance, Carmen Cantrell, has called the local efforts against Dominion’s coal plant a “battle.” Today, she’ll show me what coal mining has done to Wise County’s mountains, and the environmental damage it has caused.

More to come.