First New U.S. Nuclear Reactor in 40 Years is Up and Running
But throughout its decade of construction, the project has also been plagued by cascading delays and climbing costs. The first reactor was scheduled to come online in 2016; it’s hitting that milestone seven years later. The total price tag has more than doubled — to more than $30 billion.
Now, utilities are looking for nuclear projects that would have a more reliable cost and schedule, said John Kotek of the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C. They’re focusing on smaller reactors that would generate hundreds of megawatts, instead of thousands like the Vogtle reactors.
The Tennessee Valley Authority, the corporation created by New Deal legislation that manages the Tennessee River and provides electricity to Tennessee and surrounding states, has announced plans to build several of these small modular reactors, he said, while Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, Rocky Mountain Power, and PacifiCor, have included new nuclear energy in their future plans.
“Part of the motivation for the small modular reactors here in the US is that they come with a lower price tag,” Kotek said. “They’re just physically smaller machines that cost less to build. They’ll take less time to get into operation.”
But critics say that was the promise of Vogtle, too: that it would be a new kind of reactor that’s cheaper and faster to build. Ramana said there’s no reason to think small modular reactors will be different.
“The lesson I think we should learn from this is: What works on the computer doesn’t work in the real world,” he said.
The Plant Vogtle reactors are a design called AP1000, which developer Westinghouse said could be built cheaper and faster thanks in part to modular construction, relying on factory-made components instead of building from scratch on site. But the cost estimate jumped immediately when it came time to actually build, Ramana said, and only climbed from there. All of this was predictable, he said, because similar issues have plagued most other nuclear projects.
In fact, it was predicted at the time. The Public Interest Advocacy staff of the Georgia Public Service Commission warned back in 2008 that the costs could skyrocket. They advocated for a risk-sharing mechanism to incentivize Georgia Power to keep the construction costs down and opposed plans to bill customers for the Vogtle construction while it was underway.
Both proposals failed. Thanks to a 2009 state law, Georgia Power ratepayers are billed a monthly Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery fee. They will begin paying an additional monthly charge when each of the new Plant Vogtle units come online.
“It’s absolutely nonsensical that they are going to have to bear the burden of this gamble with this kind of technology,” said Jennifer Whitfield, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Instead of the risk-sharing idea, the Public Service Commission has the ability to review Plant Vogtle costs and exclude any it deems imprudent. Advocates are gearing up for a fight over whether Plant Vogtle’s ever-rising price tag is prudent, once both new reactors are online.
Going forward, Whitfield said there are more cost-effective ways to decarbonize, such as energy efficiency improvements and solar, which is now cheaper than gas, coal, and nuclear.
Proponents see nuclear as a necessary complement to those other renewables, providing what’s known as baseload power all the time — instead of only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. But that’s old-fashioned thinking, Ramana said.
“They just want to have coal plants without coal,” he said. “We’ll never solve the climate problem that way.”
Instead, Ramana said, it will require rethinking how we manage the energy grid.
“There’s not going to be a silver-bullet solution,” he said.
Emily Jones covers climate change and climate solutions as part of a partnership between WABE and Grist.This story, which wasmade possible through a partnership with Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station, was first published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.
