Georgia Governor Brian Kemp called for more new nuclear energy at an event Wednesday celebrating the first new nuclear reactors built in the U.S. in decades, at Plant Vogtle near Augusta, Georgia. The construction of those reactors, known as Vogtle Units 3 and 4, cost more than twice its original budget and ended years behind schedule.
“Today, we celebrate the end of that project,” Kemp told the crowd of state officials and utility executives. “And now, let’s start planning for Vogtle Five.”
That could be a tough sell to Georgians who have seen their bills go up multiple times to pay for the new reactors and for shareholders of the power plant’s largest owner, who had to absorb some of the costs. Originally billed as the dawn of a new nuclear era and priced at $14 billion, the Plant Vogtle project was plagued by repeated delays and ultimately cost an estimated total of more than $31 billion.
When lead contractor Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy in 2017, prompting South Carolina to abandon its own nuclear project, Vogtle became the only new nuclear construction in the country. It still is.
“If building more nuclear were a good idea, other states would be jumping on the bandwagon now,” said Liz Coyle, executive director of the consumer advocacy group Georgia Watch. “The fact that they’re not, I think, speaks volumes.”
For their part, the elected officials and utility executives at Wednesday’s event spoke of Plant Vogtle as a success story.
“Vogtle 3 and 4 don’t just represent an incredible economic development asset for our state and … a milestone for our entire country,” Kemp said. “They also stand as physical examples of something that I remind myself of every day: Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.”
All five members of the Georgia Public Service Commission, or PSC — which oversees Georgia Power’s planning and rates, including the Vogtle project — addressed the crowd.
“I just hope that we keep it up. We really should,” said commissioner Tricia Pridemore. “If we want to continue clean energy for our nation, it’s gonna take more than four.”
In December, the PSC approved a deal that hikes Georgia Power customers’ rates now that Vogtle Unit 4 is online.
After the Wednesday event, commissioner Tim Echols said he supports more nuclear power in Georgia, but said a further Vogtle expansion would need to come with protections against runaway costs and other problems that plagued the last project.
“I really need some protection against a bankruptcy,” he said. “I just can’t do it on the same basis again.”
Echols suggested a federal “backstop” and a mechanism to ensure large customers like factories and data centers would pay for the bulk of nuclear construction.
Under current Georgia law, a further expansion of Plant Vogtle would need to be financed differently than the project that just wrapped up, Coyle said. In 2018, state lawmakers approved a sunset provision for the state law that had allowed Georgia Power to pass Vogtle’s financing costs on to customers during construction.(called “Construction work in Progress“) Barring another change, that would mean Southern Company and its shareholders would shoulder those costs.
Coyle said she’ll be urging lawmakers to keep it that way.
“Georgians are struggling, really, really struggling already to pay their power bills,” she said. “I hope we don’t have to go down this path again.”
The late Greentechmedia described how “Construction Work in Progress” (CWIP) financing works back in 2012:
A sign of the nuclear industry’s difficult situation in the aftermath of Fukushima is a proposal before the Iowa legislature that would allow utility MidAmerican Energy Holdings, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, to build a new nuclear facility in the state using Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) financing (also called advanced cost recovery).
“Investment in nuclear power is the antithesis of the kind of investments you would want to make under the current uncertain conditions,” explained nuclear industry authority Mark Cooper, a senior fellow for economic analysis at Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and the Environment. “They cannot raise the capital to build these plants in normal markets under the normal regulatory structures.”
CWIP would allow the utility to raise the money necessary to build a nuclear power plant by billing ratepayers in advance of and during construction.
“Construction Work in Progress was intended to circumvent the core consumer protection of the regulatory decision-making process,” Cooper explained. “It exposes ratepayers to all the risk.” The nuclear industry’s answer to its post-Fukushima challenges, he said, “is to simply rip out the heart of consumer protection and turn the logic of capital markets on their head.”
The Staff of the Iowa Utilities Board concurred with Cooper. Its recommendations to the legislature followed his arguments in “Nuclear Socialism Comes to the Heartland of America,” his most recent paper on nuclear economics. In it, Cooper found that CWIP could increase average utility bills as much as $70 per month “before any power is generated by the reactors.”
His message to policymakers is simple, Cooper said. “This is an investment you would not make with your own money. Therefore, you should not make it with the ratepayers’ money.”
CWIP exposes ratepayers to all the risks inherent in nuclear energy, Cooper explained. “It gives the utility certain guaranteed returns, which they would never have, and distorts the utility incentives.”
Steps to stop GHG emissions and save the planet and our ‘children’.
FIRST establish what is needed as in MUST have.
Second, proceed to make it happen in the best way possible.
Excuses will fck it up!
Originally natural gas was supposed to be the transitional fuel. We should view wind, solar and battery as the traditional energy to get us off fossil fuels. That will give us the time to development fusion, deep geothermal and economical fission. We will not know where our population centers will be until the changing climate stabilizes. Building energy producing facilities
now with 40 or 50 year mortgages doesn’t make sense.
Dear JT. The concept that it is not Economically Viable to save the exosphere requires re-evaluation.
As often noted, fusion has been 20 years away for the last half century, still is, then has to be built at unknown price ( my bet is shitloads ) and will take some Time. Like a lot of time, just guessing.
Likewise loverly geothermal. I am a geophysicist that spent decades associated with drilling and was a consultant to geothermal drilling to 6 Km deep. Live in hope that next gen geothermal will be significantly helpful. Until, and if, it works, it is also fantasy and not to be counted on.
The climate will keep changing for centuries. Building major infrastructure to allow for three or four metres of sea level rise this century, max, is the best we can do. As bjstwm says, fusion and deep geothermal haven’t produced a watt in the many decades people have been talking about them. Fission was attacked for being too expensive when the last lot was built (but mainly for killing people and turning the place into a radioactive wasteland, neither of which happened.) In most of the eastern US, fission is a close second to gas for generation; in the Tennessee Valley Authority region, and in North Carolina, it’s easily number one, as it is in Ontario, and overall in the European Union. Jigar Shah, who’s the head of the multi-billion dollar federal clean energy fund, says Vogtle Units 5 & 6, would come in ‘below $95/Megawatt hour delivering 24/7 clean, firm power’. New York is currently contracting to pay for offshore wind at about $150/MWh, and has cancelled other deals that would probably have cost more. That’s for generation that provides no certainty of supply whatsoever, and has an expected lifetime of 20-25 years, versus 60 to 80, or more, for nuclear.
New York’s nuclear industry is currently running at 97% of its capacity, wind there is at 18%, solar and batteries are doing nothing. Georgia’s 8GW of nuclear is running at 98%, the 5GW of solar there is producing nothing, and there’s no wind or battery storage. (If there was, the wind is below turbine cut-in speed, and the batteries would have run out by now, long after sundown.)@ElectricityMaps
John O’Neill
Your biased cherry-picking of good numbers for nuclear and bad numbers for renewables is really getting tiresome.
Your biased cherry-picking of bad numbers for nuclear is dangerous. Stop it and noting negatives for renewables can be left to the moronic deniers.
Had another look. New York, nuclear now at 97%, wind at 1.9% of capacity. Georgia, nuclear at 98%, solar at 0%. NY wind got to 11% max of its capacity over the day, mostly below 5%, NY nuclear stayed at 97% for 24 hours. Georgia, nuclear 97-98% all day, solar between 50% and 55% of its capacity for 5 hours, ~45% for 2 hours either side of that, 2 more at mid 30s morning and evening, 2 hours in the teens, 2 in single figures (2% and 5 %). That’s not a high average if you hope to fill batteries for the 11 hours following with no solar.
There are eleven grid districts in the US with nuclear, and at the moment all of them are running between 90 and 100% of their capacity.
John O’Neill