ALBANY — As the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster approaches and the cost of oil and gas continues to escalate, the idea of building a new nuclear plant in New York has resurfaced.

Although there are no immediate plans to start construction, officials in Oswego County have said they would welcome a new plant, and energy planners are wondering if a technology once thought dead is the best answer to meet the state's growing appetite for electricity.
 
However, despite what looks like potential shortages of power downstate within a few years, the idea of nuclear power, at least downstate, is still radioactive to many people, including the front-runner in the gubernatorial election.
 
On April 25 and 26, 1986, a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union (now the Ukraine) exploded, killing 30 people and injuring hundreds. It was the worst nuclear-power-plant accident in history.
 
Even by then, however, planning new nukes, once seen as the ideal way to generate clean, cheap power, had ceased in the United States. The key event was a malfunction of the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979, when a small amount of radiation was released into the atmosphere.
 
In New York, the darkest period for the technology was in December 1986, when Gov. Mario Cuomo decided not to allow a newly built, $5.3 billion nuclear plant in Shoreham, Suffolk County, to open because there seemed to be no safe way to evacuate the bottle of Long Island with the cork of New York City blocking the only land exit.
 
Now New York is still home to the oldest operating nuclear plant in the country, Nine Mile Point 1, which opened in 1969 in Scriba, along Lake Ontario in Oswego County. The Ginna plant in the town of Ontario, Wayne County, opened the next year. There are four other nuclear plants in New York — two more along Lake Ontario in Oswego County and two in Buchanan, Westchester County.
 
Together, the plants provide about 30 percent of the electricity New Yorkers use — far above the national average of 20 percent.
 
There is little disagreement that the state is going to need more electricity as soon as 2008. But the fuel future plants might use, where they will be located and how the power they produce will be transmitted to customers are all issues of sharp contention.
 
Oswego County is more than willing to be home to a fourth nuclear plant.
 
"We would welcome the development of another nuclear plant in the county," County Administrator Stephen Lyman said, pointing to the jobs and tax revenue that the existing plants provide. When asked about safety, he said "The plants we have now are operated safely, and have been for 30 years."
 
Indian Point pessimism
 
The view isn't so sanguine 250 miles away in Westchester County, where some people feel strongly the two plants in Buchanan should close because of safety concerns.
 
"I cannot address energy without describing another environmental imperative — the need to close the Indian Point power plant," Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said in a speech last month. Spitzer is the front-runner in this year's gubernatorial election.
 
The plants have been plagued by safety problems, most recently the leakage of some radiation into ground water.
 
But then Spitzer hit on the conundrum that foes of the plants now operating find themselves: what to replace them with.
 
"Of course this can only happen when we are certain that there is adequate replacement power, since we cannot simply take 2,000 megawatts out of the grid," he said, referring to the amount of power it takes to run 2 million homes. His answer: make it easier to build new plants and step up efficiency and conservation measures.
 
But what fuel should such new plants use? The answer for the last decade or so in New York has been natural gas - clean and relatively cheap. But now supplies are getting tight, prices are rising and pipelines difficult to build.
 
"It's extremely difficult if not impossible to site new facilities to bring more natural gas into New York," said Pat Curran, president of the state Energy Association, a utility-trade group.
 
Wind farms have opened and more are proposed, but they can't generate power in nearly the volume needed.
 
Is the time ripe for nuclear power again? Possibly, industry officials say.
 
"When you look at both the safety and economic performance of the existing plants (there are 103 operating in the country now), a heightened concern with the environment and the need for fuel diversity," nuclear power looks attractive, said Marilyn Kray, president of NuStart, a utility-industry consortium that plans to submit applications to build new nuclear plants in Alabama and Mississippi to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2007.
 
The firm caused a stir in Oswego last year when it announced that the county was one of the sites it was considering. But it backed out after one of the firms that makes up the consortium, Constellation Energy, decided to reserve the site for itself for a potential new plant.
 
A Constellation spokeswoman said that the company joined a different consortium that may try to build a plant with a different nuclear technology than the one NuStart is interested in.
 
Kray said the new nuclear plants are smaller, cheaper, safer and easier to maintain than the ones built in the '60s and '70s.
 
Still, the core issues that have blocked new nuclear plants in the past remain.
 
"How to dispose of spent fuel remains a very large obstacle to new plants," she said. The problem is the fuel stays radioactive indefinitely, and there is no central place yet for it to be stored. So most is on the grounds of the plants.
 
Industry officials consider a federal plan to store it inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada technically sound, but opposition from people who live there so far have blocked the idea.