BALTIMORE (Map, News) - About a dozen anti-nuclear demonstrators Friday took to the streets of downtown Baltimore City to counteract Gov. Martin O’Malley’s endorsement of the construction of a third nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland.

“There are cheaper, safer alternatives,” said Stephen Soifer, spokesman for the Chesapeake Safe Energy Coalition, which includes the Sierra Club and seven other environmental and anti-nuclear groups.

Soifer, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, said, “It’s not a moral imperative” as O’Malley said Thursday when he toured Constellation Energy’s Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant, a major source of Maryland’s electricity.

Radioactive waste from the spent nuclear pellets that fuel the Calvert County plant last 10,000 years, Soifer said.

“It the only power source” that leaves behind such a toxic residue, he said.

Soifer and other demonstrators scoffed at the supposed $4 billion price tag on the new plant that will take about seven years to build.

He and other demonstrators said it would be at least double that amount — if not three and four times that amount based on new plants being built in Europe.

That money could be better spent on wind, solar or ocean sources, Soifer said.

Constellation has not updated its 2005 estimate of $4 billion to $6 billion to build the new reactor because “it’s considered a sensitive number,” said Maureen Brown, company spokesman.

But the final number will be nowhere near as high as the activists project, she said.

Even if the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is finally approved for nuclear waste disposal, “we need a second and possibly third site,” Soifer said because of the waste accumulated at nuclear plants during the past five decades.

“There isn’t a solution to the nuclear waste issue,” said Dr. Gwen Dubois, a demonstrator and physician at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore City.

In addition to the financial issues, “there’s a problem with safety at the plants,” she said.

The growing stockpile of nuclear waste is a potential source of material for nuclear bombs, Dubois said.

“It’s the same technology” used to enrich uranium, she said.

“We’re making nuclear material ubiquitous.”

TIMELINE

• July 2007: Constellation Energy filed a permit application with Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
• November 2007: Permit application filed with Maryland Public Service Commission.
• Summer-fall 2008: Obtains federal loan guarantees from U.S. Department of Energy.
• December 2008: Approval from Constellation Board; groundbreaking.
• Late 2015-early 2016: Plant begins generating electricity.

Source: Constellation Energy

llazarick@baltimoreexaminer.com