Atlanta-based Southern Co.’s plagued two-unit, 2,000-MW Vogtle nuclear construction project, already vastly over budget and behind schedule, has suffered another setback, one that could put the cost of the project to over $30 billion and take another six months to resolve. The announcement could add $920 million to the project’s cost.
When major Vogtle construction began in 2012, Southern Co. said the project would begin generating power in 2016 at a cost of $14 billion. Georgia Recorder commented that the latest delay is the “latest example of Georgia Power and Southern Co. officials announcing significant delays long after they were criticized by [Georgia Public Service Commission] regulators and independent consultants after years of continuously overestimating milestones and underestimating costs.”
Southern yesterday said subsidiary Georgia Power, which is building the two new units at a site where two nuclear plants are already located, has lost some tens of thousands of quality assurance documents necessary for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to give the company approval to load nuclear fuel. Southern Co. CEO Thomas Fanning in a conference call, World Nuclear News reported, said “We have discovered incomplete and missing inspection records concerning much of the materials and equipment that have been installed at unit 3.”
Fanning noted that over the past year, shortcomings in construction and documentation quality have added to project timelines and cost. Late last year, the company announced another delay in startup for the two units, a five-month’s delay at an additional $1 billion cost. The latest setback pushes the company’s expected startups into 2023 and 2024.
The latest Vogtle bad news came just days after the giant utility company announced 2021 year-end and 4th quarter financial results. The company racked up a 4th quarter loss of $215 million (20 cents/share), compared to earnings of $387 million (37 cents/share) for 2020. The company reported “full-year 2021 earnings of $2.39 billion, or $2.26 per share, compared with earnings of $3.12 billion, or $2.95 per share, in 2020.”
Vogtle and the similar, failed V.C. Summer project in South Carolina that led to the death of Scana Corp. were once touted as the beginning of a U.S. nuclear renaissance. Both featured Westinghouse-designed AP1000 plants, the first new plants to be attempted in the U.S. in decades. E&E News wrote, “While the reactor design was supposed to be a template for dozens of others, it isn’t — and Southern is having to wade through a whole new construction and regulatory process on its own.
‘“This is the first nuclear documentation that [the industry] has had to do in 40 years,”’ Fanning said. ‘“I wish we had found it sooner, but we didn’t.”’
The Vogtle project is owned by Georgia Power (45.7%), and public power systems Oglethorpe Power Corporation (30%), Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (22.7%) and Dalton Utilities (1.6%). The public power systems will have to decide whether to continue their participation by March 8. Their share of the latest cost overrun will come to about $440 million.
E&E News wrote, “Plant Vogtle’s latest move highlights the nuclear industry’s chief troubles with building large, baseload reactors: safety and cost. To be clear, Southern executives have blamed this new hiccup on paperwork, saying that workers were gathering it to send to federal safety regulators and noticed critical inspection records were missing or incomplete.”
–Kennedy Maize