It’s the nuclear news story that won’t go away. More delays look in store for the Southern Company’s troubled two-unit, 2,000-MW Vogtle 3-4 construction project. The Georgia Power project to build new, 1,000-MW Westinghouse reactors at an existing site, which began construction in 2009, with a project startup in 2014, could now be pushed back to 2023, The Augusta Chronicle reported.
An independent expert filed testimony with the Georgia Public Service Commission that “construction quality” issues, which have plagued the project from the start continue to crop up. As a result, reports The Center Square, Don Grace, head engineer of the Vogtle Monitoring Group, said Unit 3 is unlikely to be ready for service until late 2022 and Unit 4 more not be ready until early 2024. That’s at least a four-month slide from the delays announced last October, the fourth schedule shift in six months.
The filing, according to Bloomberg, said “These new forecasts represent another five months of schedule slip, and another $1 billion cost increase.”
The Center Square is a national, non-profit news organization covering state and local government around the US. The PSC staff hired the Vogtle Monitoring Group to evaluate the ability of Southern Nuclear to build the project.
So far, the estimated cost of the two-unit project had ballooned from $14 billion to around $27 billion. Georgia Power customers will have to eat half of those costs, under rules approved by the PSC. The remaining costs will burden a group of public power transmission and distribution utilities, who undoubtedly will also pass those costs on.
The Vogtle project is the first new nuclear construction attempt in the U.S. in more than 30 years. It had a sister project at South Carolina’s V.C. Summer site, also a two-unit, 2,000-MW Westinghouse advanced design. That $10 billion project collapsed in 2017. The failure led to the demise of the parent utility, SCANA, and criminal indictments of two Westinghouse executives.
As a result of the Vogtle and Summer experiences, many independent analysts say it is highly unlikely that any electric company in US will try to build a conventional nuclear power plant in the future.
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)