Posted on 01/23/2025 7:24:39 AM PST by Red Badger
A South Carolina utility wants to restart construction on a power plant that was mothballed eight years ago after running over budget and pushing an iconic American company into bankruptcy.
Hoping to capitalize on the data center power boom, state-owned utility Santee Cooper is looking for partners to help finance and complete the two reactors at the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station is a single reactor power plant. Santee Cooper was spearheading the construction of two new reactors, an expansion that began in 2008. The unfinished project was halted in 2017 after an audit revealed the project cost had ballooned from $9.8 billion to $25 billion and that completion would take far longer than expected, causing it to miss $2 billion in federal incentives.
The boondoggle contributed to the bankruptcy of Westinghouse, the nuclear power company descended from one of the earliest electric companies in the United States. It also led to securities fraud convictions for two executives at SCANA, Santee Cooper’s partner in the project.
The two reactors that were under construction are sisters of a pair installed at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. The Vogtle expansion was finally commissioned in 2023 after years of delays and billions in overruns, casting a pall over the entire U.S. nuclear power industry.
Despite the troubled history at V.C. Summer, Santee Cooper is optimistic that it’ll find buyers as nuclear power experiences a resurgence of interest fueled by skyrocketing power demand from AI data centers.
The utility has some tailwinds: Microsoft recently inked a deal with Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island, and Meta is looking for developers to propose 1 to 4 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity. Santee Cooper is reportedly hoping to sell to a consortium that would include a tech company interested in securing power.
Any deal Santee puts together will still face some potentially thorny politics. A portion of the costs for the V.C. Summer expansion was foisted onto ratepayers as a result of a state law that allowed utilities to offload the cost of new nuclear reactors. Completing the expansion and finding a buyer for the power could help relieve the burden. Since it’s a state-owned utility, politicians will undoubtedly take an interest in any deal, for better or worse.
We should be able to build these smaller safe reactors all around the country. Energy costs should decline over time, not rise.
I don’t know. Is this really a good idea? How much retraining are these zombies going to need?
$500 Billion for new AI Data Centers. Each new center should have it’s own modular reactor for power generation. Any excess power can be sold off to the local utility companies
Nuclear powered AI is how all the science fiction “End of Humanity” movies begin.
Standardized designs would solve a lot of the cost overrun issues since all of these reactors were built with one-off designs.
When I worked as a pipefitter back in the 80’s on several nukes under construction, the twin designs, or multiples thereof, were the most efficient in terms of time to complete and cost savings.
This was due to finding and fixing all of the original design flaws in the first unit and applying those fixes to the twin.
It is all part of the new AI program called “Colossus”, or “The Forbin Project”.
Yep, makes sense
The NRC needs to enforce standardized design, which would reduce regulatory interference.
Also, the Feds (EPA and DOE) need to enact a regulation to limit the NIMBY lawsuits by making those groups, including the State and local agencies, post bonds to pay for delays for all of their BS lawsuits.
Aaahhh VC Summer. We started building a Volvo Assembly Plant near Charleston right when that was mouth-balled. I was told that if you wanted a great paying job and only had to work 2 hours a day, that’s where you go... The Quality Control was so extreme that you could only work 2 hours a day and stop so that a Quality Control guy could come by a check for the correct torque on the screws for a receptacle!!
We had several Electricians come work with us and they quit after a couple of days. They were appalled that we wanted them to actually work.
Nuscale has an approved design, ready for someone to finance the construction. Oklo’s safety design has been approved, ready to build a proof of concept reactor in Utah, iirc. Hopefully SMRs will obviate the wasteful investments in unreliable wind and solar, and stop the spoliation of the environment in the process.
+1 good points
The Congress could make the Nuclear Power plants immune from lawsuits................
Kevin O’Leary was on Fox Business this morning, referring to MIcrosoft wanting to re-start 3 Mile Island Reactor, he told the host “You’ll be dead before that produces a single kilowatt of power”. I almost spit my coffee all over the floor!
Yes!
Zombies!! That’s what we need!!!
Yep.
They could pass a law that all new reactors are built on federal land and that any facilities built on that land are exempt from state and local regulations and lawsuits, and any lawsuits brought by private entities, except taxation. This also includes any water withdrawals that may be necessary for construction and operation of facility.
Here’s how that could work: Company A purchases a piece of land and as part of the purchase, then donates that land to the feds. All of this must be done prior to any announcement of intent to build a reactor.
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