It’s official: Georgia will be the site of the nation’s first new nuclear reactors in more than 30 years.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s on Thursday approved Southern Co.’s plan to build two reactors at Plant Vogtle, south of Augusta -- though the decision was not without dissent.
Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the five-member NRC, cast a lone vote against issuing a license for the project. He said he wanted but had not gotten a binding commitment from Southern that it would incorporate changes stemming from last year’s nuclear disaster in Japan.
“Significant safety enhancements have already been recommended as a result of learning the lessons from Fukushima,” Jaczko said, referring to the plant on Japan’s coast that was devastated by an earthquake and tidal wave, “and there is still more work ahead of us. Knowing this, I cannot support issuing these licenses as if Fukushima never happened.”
The Vogtle project will be built with a new reactor design, the AP1000 from Westinghouse, approved in December. An NRC report said the AP1000 design has “many of the design features and attributes necessary to address” new safety recommendations since the disaster.
“The events of Fukushima are taken into account every day and will be taken into account for years to come,” said Southern Co. Chief Executive Tom Fanning, asked about Jaczko’s comments.
The NRC’s 4-1 vote directs the agency staff to prepare the construction and operating license needed to start major work on the two reactors, which are expected to start producing electricity in 2016 and 2017.
The Vogtle expansion is considered the vanguard of a possible revival of nuclear power construction in the United States, though projections of as many as 30 new reactors have been scaled back. It is also a test of whether the industry can smoothly build and bring online new reactors without major cost and technical problems.
“Southern Co. has consistently promoted for about a year a national energy policy that is grounded in energy security,” Fanning said in a news conference. “We believe that . . . nuclear energy is a dominant solution, and today, we take a major step.”
The last new reactors were approved in 1978, the year before a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. After that, increased regulatory scrutiny and skyrocketing costs halted expansion. Plant Vogtle’s two existing nuclear reactors, Units 1 and 2, ran over budget by $8 billion and took 16 years to build.
When Southern and its main utility, Georgia Power, began publicly talking about adding nuclear capacity in 2005, executives met with the construction managers of Units 1 and 2 to make sure that did not happen again.
“What we heard over and over is that you have to have one person in charge of construction, and that person has to be able to call the shots at that site,” Georgia Power Chief Executive Officer Paul Bowers told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an interview. The project also is using a standard reactor design and is being built with contracts vetted by state utility regulators and an independent construction monitor.
The idea of boosting U.S. nuclear capacity came as looming environmental regulations pushed coal-fired energy out of favor. The next project up for review by the NRC is likely to be just one state away. South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. is seeking approval for two reactors at an existing plant in Jenkinsville, northwest of Columbia.
But some other utilities have curbed nuclear plans because of the lack of financing, decreased demand for electricity since the recession and lower prices for natural gas.
“We’ve never wavered,” Bowers said. “When you look at the scale of our company and the financial integrity, we’re the only ones who can really go forward with it.”
Georgia Power is part of a group of municipal and cooperative electric companies building the new reactors at Vogtle. The utility is responsible for $6.1 billion of the estimated $14 billion project. Georgia Power customers are already footing the bill for the project, paying down the reactor’s financing costs with a monthly fee on their bills. The project also received $8.3 billion in taxpayer-backed federal loan guarantees.
It will bring a major economic kick to east Georgia, with more than 4,000 jobs tied to construction during the peak years of 2013-15.
The U.S. remains without a long-term plan to store nuclear waste. Utilities including Southern store the fuel rods in large pools of water or in dry casks. The utility will use those methods at the new reactors as well.
Concerns over waste as well as safety have prompted environmental and consumer groups to consider suing to stop Plant Vogtle’s expansion.
“The U.S. is approving new reactors before the full suite of lessons from Japan has been learned and before new safety regulations that were recommended by a task force established after the meltdown crisis at Fukushima have been implemented,” said Allison Fisher, Outreach Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program.
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