Earth Matters: Two humongously over-budget Georgia nukes, seven years late, delay startup yet again – By Meteor Blades (Daily Kos) / Feb 24, 2023
Four new advanced power reactors were originally slated to come online in the United States in 2016 and 2017. When completed, they would join two 1980s models at the Alvin T. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Waynesboro, Georgia, and one 1980s model at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in Fairfield County, South Carolina. Together, they would add 4.4 gigawatts of electricity-generating capacity to the nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants. That’s enough, depending on how you count, to provide 2.3-3 million average homes with electricity generated without greenhouse gas emissions once the emissions from making cement and steel are eliminated.
The four machines were AP1000s, advanced pressurized water reactors designed by Westinghouse, a company with a strong reputation and long experience in the nuclear field. The design, rooted in designs from the 1990s, was hyped as simpler, cheaper, safer, quicker to build, and would use less steel and concrete than older power reactors. A key selling factor was the modularity of the design, allowing many parts to be factory manufactured and dropped into the facility like Lego blocks. Another factor was price: $9.8 billion for the pair of reactors at Summer and $14 billion for those at Vogtle.
The projects were touted as the beginning of a nuclear renaissance, being the first new reactors built from scratch in the United States in 30 years. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.
Seven years past the promised startup of the reactors, not only has neither plant generated a single nanowatt of electricity, Summer never will, and just last week the owner of Vogtle announced yet another delay in switching on the first of these reactors, Unit 3, until May. Or June. Probably. Startup of the second reactor, Unit 4, has been delayed to between November and March of 2024. Every month of further delay adds $201 million to the final cost of the project, which has soared to more than 250% of the original cost, to $35.7 billion.
