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WASHINGTON — Roughly 35 years after construction began on the last nuclear power plant built in America, at least 16 utilities are making tentative plans to build new plants and the industry hopes a nuclear power resurgence is about to begin.

"We really do believe … it's going to be a renaissance of nuclear power," said Mitch Singer, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying group for nuclear power interests.

In Arizona, the operator of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, the nation's largest nuclear power plant, is considering adding two new reactors to meet the region's skyrocketing power needs.

But some energy experts remain cautious over whether the most important ingredient in the renaissance, Wall Street financing, will fall into place.

"For the past few decades the most potent opponent of nuclear power wasn't some guy with Greenpeace," said Bob Simon, Democratic staff director of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "It was some guy with green eyeshades."

So far a dozen companies, including Georgia Power, Florida Power and Light, and the principal owners of the South Texas Project, have announced that they are considering building nuclear plants or have formally begun the paperwork involved in obtaining licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Four more have only told the commission of their plans. NRC Chairman Nils Diaz told the Senate energy committee in May that a total of 16 companies had formally notified authorities that they are considering building new plants.

Arizona Public Service Co. told investors in May that it is looking at expanding Palo Verde, along with other options, to meet the state's long-term energy needs.

Energy experts say three factors are chiefly responsible for the first serious interest in nuclear power since 1971, when the Tennessee Valley Authority began work on its Watts Bar Plant in east Tennessee:

● Billions of dollars in federal subsidies that became available with the passage of the national Energy Policy Act of 2005.

● Energy Department projections of a 50 percent increase in U.S. demand for electricity over the next two decades. The greatest need is expected in Florida and the Deep South states served by the Southeast Electric Reliability Council grid.

● The increasingly obvious threat that global warming will cause worldwide climate havoc, and the corresponding need to find a source of electricity that does not increase atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

"Global warming is the elephant in the room," said Philip Sharp, president of Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research center.

"It is the problem we have to solve, and many of us believe that nuclear power is the only realistic, near-term means available to us," added Sharp, a former congressman from Indiana.

The idea of a nuclear power "renaissance" appears to have been voiced for the first time at a lecture to Resources for the Future by Richard Meserve, a Washington lawyer who served as chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under President Bill Clinton.

Meserve was co-chair of a Nuclear Energy Task Force created in 2004 to make recommendations for ways the government could encourage industry interest in nuclear power.

Most recommendations of the Meserve task force found their way into last year's energy bill, though sometimes with slight modifications.

One involved dealing with the regulatory and legal uncertainties that power companies say were behind mind-boggling cost overruns involved in nearly every one of the 104 nuclear plants now operating in America.

Energy economist David Schlissel cited the overruns in testimony opposing Georgia Power's request to charge ratepayers for permitting and licensing costs associated with possible expansion of its nuclear power capacity.

"The actual cost of the (Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant in Burke County, Ga.) was $8.87 billion, or more than 13 times as high as the initial $600 million estimated cost," said Schlissel, who works for the Cambridge, Mass., consulting group Synapse Energy Economics Inc. He appeared at a Georgia Public Service Commission hearing as a consultant for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.