WHEN Bill Coley, chief executive of British Energy, was a high school student in North Carolina in the late 1950s, his plan was to join the space race. At the time the US was losing this epic struggle to the USSR. The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space as Coley turned 18 in 1961. The race intensified as John F Kennedy vowed America would put a man on the moon before the 1960s were out.

"When I was at high school I watched the space programme with great interest. It was what I wanted to do, " says Coley, who was relaxing on Thursday in the hospitality suite at Murrayfield stadium after experiencing his first annual general meeting as British Energy CEO.

However, it was a dream that never quite came true for Coley, now 62, who swapped his non-executive director's position for his current role in April. He was never interviewed by Nasa, which he insists causes him "no regrets".

Instead he has devoted his long career to electricity and, particularly, to nuclear power.

The meeting last week was a much less torrid affair than those between British Energy and its shareholders have been in the past. Those events were dogged with rancour as equity holders, including US hedge funds Polygon and Brandes, lost nearly everything following a GBP410 million government bailout in 2002 and a debt-forequity swap the next year.

The group - formed from the privatisation of Nuclear Electric and Scottish Nuclear in 1996 - had to delist its shares in October 2004. Shareholders were left with just 2.5% of the company, largely to prevent US hedge funds from wrecking the restructuring.

But after five months as CEO, Coley is confident he can see the "green shoots of recovery" sprouting through some pretty barren earth at British Energy.

On the back of soaring oil prices, and the more focused strategy Coley and his relatively new management team have implemented, the firm's current crop of investors are doing rather better than Polygon and Brandes. They have seen their BE shares surge from the 240p at which they were re-listed in January to 473p last week.

Coley also said the company, which only two years ago was on the brink of bankruptcy, is back in the black.

Coley started his career at the North Carolina-based utility Duke Power as a junior engineer at its Marshall Steam Station in 1966, having completed an electrical engineering degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

After 37 years with Duke, where he helped launch a nuclear programme, Coley had been looking forward to retirement at his second home in Pinehurst, North Carolina. He had wanted to spend more time on the course at the US golfing resort where New Zealander Michael Campbell won the 105th US Open this year.

But, again, it was not to be.

Within a week of retirement he was sought out by headhunters Heidrick & Struggles and asked if he would like to join the British Energy board, as a nonexecutive director.

In a masterful understatement given BE's then perilous state, Coley says: "On being contacted I took a look at the company and realised that it was not going to be routine. I like a challenge and I also believe that nuclear power is fundamentally important to the future economic growth of developed nations."

Two years later, when asked if he would relocate to London and replace Mike Alexander as BE's chief executive, Coley overcame fears his Southern drawl might be unintelligible to the company's 5400 staff and accepted.

Alexander left partly because of "unplanned outages" at BE nuclear power stations Heysham 1 and Hartlepool.

Coley is confident he can largely make such shutdowns a thing of the past.

He is committed to improving the reliability of BE's operations, its financial position and to extending the life of its eight nuclear power stations, which are all currently due for decommissioning in 2020. He is determined not to be distracted by "policy issues" such as what to do with nuclear waste or whether the UK should build another generation of nuclear power stations. He leaves these matters to the politicians as he focuses on improving operational performance and seeks to eke out a few extra years from its aging fleet of advanced gas-cooled reactors.

"I want to improve reliability to world-class standards. If we do that it will have a substantial positive impact, driving down marginal costs and driving up shareholder value."

He is planning a GBP250m investment programme this year, with 10% of this going towards staff training. Already the turnaround is on track.

Unplanned reactor "trip rate" is the lowest since BE was created in 1996, and Coley last week announced that the life of its Dungeness plant is to be extended to 2018.

So what is the secret of the American's management success? He says: "The key is to select good people and then be very clear about what it is you are trying to achieve. Then make yourself accessible if they need any input or guidance, but basically let them get on with the job as they see fit."

He believes the fact that more than 9000 people applied for the 450 technical jobs the company advertised last year is testimonythat nuclear has a future.

And Coley is enjoying himself. "Quite frankly, I'm having more fun than I've had in years."

NEED TO KNOW

BILL Coley has been chief executive of British Energy since April 2005.

Career: Worked for North Carolina-based Duke Power for 37 years. Became president of Duke Power following its merger with PanEnergy to create Duke Energy in 1997.

Pastimes: Golf, watching sport, deep-sea fishing

Favourite books: The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (about the collapse of Enron); Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin

Drives: Coley has no car in the UK, but keeps a Mercedes E-class in the US.

Family: Married with one daughter (35), one son (30) and one grandson (2).