Although TVA’s Bellefonte nuke will never come up, others are still being built, including TVA’s own Watts Bar, plus 19 more.
Document-forging Doosan-supplied Vogtle 2 and 3 in Georgia and Summer 2 and 3 in South Carolina are the only four actually already issued combined licences (COL) to build and operate.
But 15 other proposed new reactors are “Under Review”, and all the ones in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina are within 500 miles of here: Continue reading
Economics stopped another reactor, this time in Alabama, less than a week after San Onofre. But more are still in the works.
Brian Wingfield wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek yesterday,
TVA Shelves Work at Alabama Nuclear Plant Amid Industry Struggle,
“Over the past few months, TVA has been looking across the company, including at our nuclear construction projects, to determine the work that is most important to perform,” Mike Skaggs, the TVA senior vice president for nuclear construction, said in the statement. “Hard decisions are necessary.”
The U.S. nuclear industry is wrestling with competition from a glut of natural gas, which has lowered its price and made the fuel more attractive for electric utilities. At the same time, U.S. regulators are writing safety rules following a triple meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant in 2011.
The fracking backlash is building against natural gas. And guess what’s even cheaper? Continue reading
Korea’s Doosan supplied that
that train-wrecked Plant Vogtle reactor vessel later
left unprotected sitting at Savannah port,
as well as parts for more than a dozen U.S. reactors.
And Doosan, according to the Korean government,
forged documentation that just shut down “a host of nuclear reactors”
in Korea, whose Prime Minister said,
“Those found to be involved in wrongdoing or corruption must be sternly punished by the law, regardless of their rank and status.”
According to World Nuclear News 5 June 2008, Doosan awarded further contract by Westinghouse, Continue reading
So if Southern Company expected cost overruns at Plant Vogtle, 
why didn’t they make a better estimate in the first place? What incentive do they have not to continue running up the cost and delaying completion, since they get to keep charging Georgia Power customers for construction, including for cost overruns, while floating $8.3 billion in federally guaranteed loans? Where is the financial integrity in all that?
AP reported yesterday, and even Fox News carried it, Building costs increase at US nuclear sites. They’re not talking about housing prices near the sites, either.
America’s first new nuclear plants in more than a decade are costing billions more to build and sometimes taking longer to deliver than planned, problems that could chill the industry’s hopes for a jumpstart to the nation’s new nuclear age.
Licensing delay charges, soaring construction expenses and installation glitches as mundane as misshapen metal bars have driven up the costs of three plants in Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina, from hundreds of millions to as much as $2 billion, according to an Associated Press analysis of public records and regulatory filings.
Those problems, along with jangled nerves from last year’s meltdown in Japan and the lure of cheap natural gas, could discourage utilities from sinking cash into new reactors, experts said. The building slowdown would be another blow to the so-called nuclear renaissance, a drive over the past decade to build 30 new reactors to meet the country’s growing power needs. Industry watchers now say that only a handful will be built this decade.
“People are looking at these things very carefully,” said Richard Lester, head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Inexpensive gas alone, he said, “is casting a pretty long shadow over the prospects” for construction of new nuclear plants.
AP continues with a list of late and over-budget nuke projects, including Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle $800 million over and seven months late, TVA’s Watts Bar plant $2 billion over and 3 years late, Duke’s Plant Summer
SCANA and Santee Cooper’s Summer Station
$670 million over and a year late.
Southern Co. and others in the nuclear business say cost overruns are expected in projects this complex…
So why are they wasting our money on nukes when they could be deploying a lot more solar and wind on time and on budget?
…and that they are balanced out by other savings over the life of the plant. Southern Co. expects Plant Vogtle will cost $2 billion less to operate over its 60-year lifetime than initially projected because of anticipated tax breaks and historically low interest rates.
Get that? “anticipated tax breaks” that leave we the taxpayers Continue reading