Georgia Power’s 1,117-MW Vogtle 3 nuclear unit, the first U.S. nuclear reactor ordered since 1974 to reach this far, is now splitting atoms. The Westinghouse AP-1000, one of two new pressurized water reactors under construction at the existing two-unit Vogtle site, went critical on Monday (March 6), beginning a process that should lead up to connection to the grid and the plant in service “during May or June,” according to the Southern Co. subsidiary. Unit 4 is several months behind and could reach full power later this year or early next year.
Getting to this point has been a difficult, slow, and costly slog for its owners, Georgia Power (45.7%), Oglethorpe Power Corp. (30%), Municipal Energy Agency of Georgia (22.7%), and the City of Dalton Utilities (1.6%). When construction began in 2009, the total estimated cost was $14 billion, with a planned start for Unit 3 2016 and Unit 4 in 2017. Today, the total cost is likely in excess of $34 billion.
On the agenda for the unit, according to Southern: “Operators will continue to raise power to support synchronizing the generator to the electric grid and begin producing electricity. Then, operators will continue increasing power through multiple steps, ultimately raising power to 100 percent. These tests are designed to ensure all systems are operating together and to validate operating procedures prior to declaration of commercial operation.”
The Associated Press noted, “Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers are already paying part of the financing cost, and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.”
France’s troubled state-owned utility EDF has discovered more stress corrosion cracks at its 1,382-MW Penly 1 reactor in Normandy, Reuters reported Tuesday (March 7). According to the wire service account, France’s safety regulator ANS discovered a large crack in a weld in an elbow in the primary circuit. Le Monde reported, “ASN describes a crack extending over 155 millimeters (mm), ‘about a quarter of the circumference of the pipes’. The nuclear ‘gendarme’ adds that its maximum depth is 23 mm, for a pipe thickness of 27 mm.
“If the Penly 1 reactor had already been identified as one of the most sensitive to the phenomenon of stress corrosion, this particular portion of the circuit was considered ‘non-sensitive’ by EDF, because of its geometry.”
France’s 56 reactors produce about 70% of the country’s power, as well as export to other European countries. But the aging system has been in trouble for many months, with more than a dozen units shut due to the discovered of stress corrosion cracking, a fairly common problem in PWRs. The latest discovery comes after five months of what Reuters described as “five months of intensive repair works at the site,” and prompted ANS to tell the utility it should “revise its strategy” for repairing its plants. Production in the French electric generating system, once a wonder of the world, is at a 30-year low.
While the problems in France are serious, it’s impossible to avoid the pun that the French nuclear program isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
Texas-based Vistra Corp., a utility holding company and the largest non-regulated power generator in the U.S., has picked up three more nuclear plants, two in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, paying Ohio-based FirstEnergy spinoff Energy Harbor $3.43 billion in cash and assumption of $430 million in debt. The move adds over 4,100-MW of generation to Vistra’s existing 2,400-MW Comanche Peak nuclear plant in Texas. The transaction makes Vistra the second largest U.S. non-regulated U.S. nuclear operator after Constellation, according to Power Engineering.
In an interesting combination of nuclear technologies, Vistra has bought the infamous Davis-Besse 894-MW Babcock & Wilcox pressurized water reactor (similar to the Three Mile Island units), and the 1,256-MW General Electric Perry boiling water reactor, both in northern Ohio, and the two-unit, 1960-MW Westinghouse PWR Beaver Valley plant in western Pennsylvania (not far from the original Shippingport reactor, the first in the U.S.). Vistra will now have a total of about 45 GW of oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and renewable generating and battery storage capacity.
The Energy Harbor purchase did not include two elderly coal-fired plants. Vistra, which has legacy coal capacity from its creation through the merger of Texas investor-owned utilities TXU Energy and Luminant, is shutting down all its coal generation, expected to be completed by 2027.
The two Ohio plants were the focus of a sleazy $61 million bribery scandal in Ohio, as FirstEnergy sought legislative support to subsidize the two nukes in the face of inability to compete in the PJM capacity market. Yesterday (March 9) Larry Householder, the former Republican speaker of the Ohio House, ousted in the aftermath, was convicted of racketeering in a federal court, along with Matthew Borges, a former chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. They face up to 20 years in prison.
The purchase of the nukes reveals an interesting irony, pointed out to the Cleveland Plain Dealer by the Ohio Sierra Club’s Neil Waggoner. Noting that Davis-Besse and Perry needed a political bailout in 2019 as uneconomic but now were desirable because of the war in Ukraine, closure of local coal plants, tax credits in the Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and the need to reduce carbon emissions. “The big thing is just seeing how dramatically the world has changed since 2019,” Waggoner said.
Former SCANA Corp. exec Stephen Byrne was sentenced Thursday (March 8) to 15 months in federal prison for his role in the failure of the former utility’s V.C. Summer nuclear construction project, a mirror of the Vogtle project in nearby Georgia. SCANA Corp. met its demise in the project it undertook with statewide, state-owned public power generation and transmission system Santee-Cooper. SCANA was gobbled up by Dominion Energy when the two-unit, 2,100-MW Westinghouse AP-1000 PWR project collapsed under a mountain of debt in July, 2017.
Byrne, SCANA’s executive vice president, gave consistently rosy pictures of the progress of the project to regulators and investors as the project was headed over the $9 billion cliff. As the Associated Press reported, “Byrne is the second SCANA executive to head to prison for the nuclear debacle. Former CEO Kevin Marsh was sentenced to two years in prison in October 2021 and released earlier in March after serving about 17 months.”
Two Westinghouse executives are also charged. Carl Churchman, the company’s top official at the Fairfield County construction site, pleaded guilty to perjury and is awaiting sentencing. Former Westinghouse senior vice president Jeff Benjamin faces 16 charges, with a trial scheduled for October. AP noted that Byrne’s sentenced is delayed until he testifies in Benjamin’s trial.
–Kennedy Maize
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