Douglas Pardoe has lived here all his life.

    In a quaint home just off Maryland Route 4, 74-year-old Pardoe has seen plenty of changes in Calvert County during his lifetime — not the least of which is the twin-reactor nuclear power plant that hums along just a few thousand feet from his home, built on land his family once owned.

    The plant doesn’t bother him or his wife, Barbara, one bit — but its planned expansion is another story.

    “I have no fear of living here by the power plant,” she said. “But I don’t think they need another reactor.”

    Constellation Energy and the state of Maryland are moving forward on plans to add a third reactor to the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant, which Constellation hopes will be on line by 2015. The state of Maryland needs that power desperately: a report by the Public Service Commission late last year predicted a state energy shortage and rolling blackouts as early as 2011.

    Slipped into a settlement of Constellation Energy’s recent legal battle with Maryland is an affirmation that the company will add a reactor to Calvert Cliffs.

    The state hopes that adding more capacity to its section of the electrical grid that powers the Mid-Atlantic region will alleviate its expected shortages.

    But such an alignment of need, permission and desire has not always been the case where the new reactor is concerned.

    Just as the state was beginning its review of Constellation’s application for a certificate of public convenience and necessity — essentially a state permit for the new reactor — things were complicated by a volley of lawsuits between the parties.

    Constellation and the state both claimed they’d gotten a raw deal when Maryland’s electricity market was deregulated in 1999 — a process that allowed multiple companies to bid on power created at the state’s power plants and consumers to choose their power supplier.

    Constellation — as part of its joint venture with French firm EDF, UniStar Nuclear Energy — had said it wanted to build the nation’s first new reactor since 1996 at Calvert Cliffs, a site near Constellation’s corporate headquarters in Baltimore, and where there was an outpouring of local government support.

    “With the Calvert Cliffs plant, there’s adequate property, it’s well located, transmission access is good, the need for power is good, and it happens to be on a plant site,” said Mike Wallace, president and chief executive officer of Constellation Energy Nuclear.

    But the legal issues led UniStar to consider expanding a plant at Nine Mile Point near Oswego, N.Y., before Calvert Cliffs.

    “There are so many issues that are there that, moving forward, we can’t have all our eggs in one basket at Calvert Cliffs,” Wallace said at a nuclear energy conference in early February, in the midst of the deregulation debacle. “If there’s a problem, we’re fast-tracking our New York alternative — it’s right there.”

    Constellation spokesman Robert Gould agreed at the time.

    “We’re contemplating billions of dollars of capital expenditures in this state, and certainly we’re hearing from