If you're tracking the nuclear power revival in America, last Tuesday, September 25, was a milestone. For the first time since 1973, a new application for building a reactor was placed before the federal government.

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The proposal submitted Tuesday is to build two new reactors with a total capacity of 2,700 megawatts at the South Texas Project site in Matagorda County, where two nuclear units have already operated for 25 years. The size of the reactors is unprecedented — the biggest American plants generally produce about 1,200 MW.

In 1997 the Clinton Administration's Department of Energy zeroed out nuclear research for the first time since World War II. The Federal Energy Information Administration confidently predicted that existing plants would phase out over the next three decades.

Whereas power plants traditionally ran at a "capacity factor" of 60 percent — meaning they are up and running 60 percent of the time — the nation's 104 reactors now run at a previously unimaginable capacity of 90 percent. (In South Korea, where nuclear provides half the electricity, the figure is 95 percent.) The average nuclear plant now runs uninterrupted for nearly two years before shutting down for refueling. Safety improvements have been spectacular. While there were 26 shutdowns of more than a year for safety reasons from 1987 to 1997 and 21 in the decade before, there has only been one over the past decade.

And so the question becomes, will the anti-nuclear forces — Greenpeace, Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and so forth — be able to mount one last-ditch campaign against the nuclear revival?