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.
I have, at this late age, finally realized that access to energy is literally the controlling factor for human advancement.
Make energy plentiful and cheap, and humans will advance themselves with invention.
Wow. I guess I’m late to the party.
But what that always means is that governments and power providing industries should always aim for
MORE!
FASTER!
France gets most of their electric from nuclear; we might learn from France.
“The NRC needs to enforce standardized design”
Government control of a critical and innovative industry?
When and where has that ever worked?
The Congress could make the Nuclear Power plants immune from lawsuits................
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Yes, and blanket pardons for the developers of small nukes!
My original post was not meant to stymie new designs, it was meant to require standardize the design for multiple reactors on a site.
For instance, WPPSS was building 5 reactors in the 80’s, Those 5 were based on 3 different designs. Only 1 got completed, the other 4 were mothballed
1 unit was a boiling water reactor and the other 4 were pressurized reactors. The 4 pressurized reactors used to different building designs to hose the various systems.
That’s what I was trying to get at
In essence it already has. New plants are licensed under the Combined Operating License (COL) process which requires an approved Design Basis Document (DBD) for a standardized design. While it is still possible to license a one-off plant no one in their right mind would do that. The AP1000 plants in South Carolina are indeed a standardized design. I'm not going to go into the reasons for the overruns at the Cooper Station here except to say that Westinghouse and the constructor over promised and under performed.
Full disclosure: I had a small part in the design of the non-nuclear side of the AP1000.
Or, they can move in next door to the nuke reactors that are being started-up and restarted.
The cost is primarily in the people. The first nuclear plant were ran by 500-600 people and now its MINIMUM 2,000 and that doesn’t include specialized contractors. Its more efficient if there are 2-3 plants to manage as they can share a lot of the same staff as they stagger outages during the year.
A lot of utilities are hoping for the smaller, self contained unit as its less people cost and they already have the security in place for it and storage facilities for material.
True. Almost every nuclear reaction in our country is a different design. Other countries mostly used a standard design for all theirs which greatly lowered costs.
Vogtle design is a good one. Uhh, Summer not so much — operates a bit hot in the reactor. That leads to fuel problems.
There is nothing safer about smaller. Get real.
Nuclear is dead in the US until some real cleaning house at EPA and DoEnergy takes place. Too many lying treehuggers there.
Nuke was killed by commie trash politics. Only that. Can’t have baseload (or load following for that matter) nuclear as that shows that “renewable” is a load of horsepucky.
Some of smaller, is safer. The precision of manufacturing the plumbing, is better.
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