Other people at the committee meeting who spoke in favor of nuclear power plants were David Hill, deputy director for science and technology for the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory, and Nils Diaz, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulator Commission. No witnesses were called who opposed generating nuclear power in Utah.

During the meeting, Tilton moved from his committee seat to a witness chair beside Diaz. He said the legislation considered in the committee's two previous meetings concerned possible breaks for regulated utilities, and he could not have benefited from it. He spoke against the bill because it did not have enough consumer protection, he said.

"We're not a regulated utility," Tilton said of Transition Power.

Vanessa Pierce, director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, Salt Lake City, complained after the meeting that Tilton and Noel treated serious questions about conflicts of interest with responses that were like punchlines in jokes.

She said Transition Power is not a regulated utility but it could develop the project and usher it through the federal and state licensing processes and then sell the plant to a regulated utility. If that happened and a law were in place giving the utility special breaks, that could be a conflict of interest, she said.

"I really think it's concerning that there's been a plan in the works for months to develop a nuclear reactor and that not one time has this issue been discussed before the committee that's taken a real hard look at nuclear power the last few months," she said.

People in the business of nuclear power should not be the ones who are crafting policy about nuclear power, she added.

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com