15 ms·

First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

265 points by CharlesW 3y ago

gottorf 3y ago
About time! > "This hadn’t been done in this country from start to finish in some 30-plus years," Chris Womack, CEO of Atlanta-based Southern Co. said Monday in a telephone interview. IIRC, scientists are working on Gen 4 reactors, and there are a number of Gen 3 reactors operating in commercial capacities around the world; but the US is still stuck on Gen 2 due to regulation.
- gh02t 3y ago
  That's a major oversimplification. The reason the US is mostly (entirely) running Gen 2 reactors is because we simply lost interest in building new reactors for a long time. There were regulatory hurdles that caused this, but there were tons and tons of other factors that were (IMO) more important. Especially economic factors related to the cost and mismanagement of large nuclear projects, public opinions shifting over nuclear power, and alternatives like natural gas being super cheap. The NRC has been approving Gen 3 designs for a while now but nobody wanted to follow through on building them.
  - tmn 3y ago
    Are costs and mismanagement directly related to regulations? Genuine question. This is impression I get from nuclear advocates like Mark Nelson and doomberg.
    - gh02t 3y ago
      Yeah that's the complicated part. The regs are responsible for some of the mess, but far from all. It's a complicated subject, probably too much to get into here but you can look at the history of Vogtle as a start. Blaming the NRC is justified at parts, but it really only tells part of the story.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> seven years late and $17 billion over budget. When does this become a national security issue? Zoinks!
Retric 3y ago
“seven years late and $17 billion over budget. At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity” Ignoring interest for those 7 years and all other costs just the overage is insane. 17 billion / ( 1,100,000 kW * 90% capacity factor * 24 hour * 365 days * 50 years) = 4 cents per kWh. Add interest etc and someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  > someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project. All roads lead to Ratepayers (electrical customers). > Georgia Power’s residential customers are projected to pay more than $926 apiece as part of an ongoing finance charge and elected public service commissioners have approved a rate increase. Residential customers will pay $4 more per month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. That could hit bills in August, two months after residential customers saw a $16-a-month increase to pay for higher fuel costs. > The high construction costs have wiped out any future benefit from low nuclear fuel costs in the future, experts have repeatedly testified before commissioners. > “The cost increases and schedule delays have completely eliminated any benefit on a life-cycle cost basis,” Tom Newsome, director of utility finance for the commission, testified Thursday in a Georgia Public Service Commission hearing examining spending. > The utility will face a fight from longtime opponents of the plant, many of whom note that power generated from solar and wind would be cheaper. They say letting Georgia Power make ratepayers pay for mistakes will unfairly bolster the utility’s profits. > “While capital-intensive and expensive projects may benefit Georgia Power’s shareholders who have enjoyed record profits throughout Vogtle’s beleaguered construction, they are not the least-cost option for Georgians who are feeling the sting of repeated bill increases,” Southern Environmental Law Center staff attorney Bob Sherrier said in a statement. This will likely be the last commercial nuclear generator ever reaching criticality for the first time on US soil. Consider the current interest rate environment and the appetite for backstopping a multi decade construction project. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... [pdf, start at page 4]
  - runako 3y ago
coldpie 3y ago
Awesome! Nuclear is a fantastic and needed addition to the grid. The cost was high, but still quite cheap relative to the cost of continuing to build & run fossil fuel plants. It's a real shame we let 30+ years slip by, letting our ability to build projects like this wither. I hope there's lessons learned from this experience that will help get costs down for future plants. This should spur discussions on streamlining the regulatory side of things, and there's a lot of exciting stuff going on in modular reactors. (In case it needs saying, which it shouldn't: yes, we should be building out wind & solar, too! We need all hands on deck, wind, solar, and nuclear, right now, to kill coal. We already blew our chance to do it cheaply, so now we have to pay the price.)
- tracker1 3y ago
  Mostly agree... though I think Solar tech still needs to improve a bit. Nuclear power is definitely needed for the grid, though preferably more inland in places less likely to be affected by natural disaster. I get why the NY plant was closed. I also hope that the build and cost timelines can be shortened. I think the push for electric cars is a bit of a miss in this, only because the grid needs to improve dramatically before such efforts can be effective and are barely keeping pace with current demands.
  - Retric 3y ago
    EV’s have a fairly trivial impact on the grid. Cars last 25+ years so even if everyone all new cars where EV’s we are talking less than 1% increase in total electricity demand per year. The grid has expanded dramatically faster at several points. Even more importantly we can shift most of that demand to cheaper times of the day or even day of the week.
    - bigbillheck 3y ago
      > Cars last 25+ years This is not a truth universally acknowledged.
      - 3y ago
mikece 3y ago
> ...seven years late and $17 billion over budget... And how much of that was a result of red tape from the NRC, DOE, and EPA?
- pavlov 3y ago
  I don’t know, but new nuclear projects in the West tend to be extremely late and over budget even with friendly regulators. Olkiluoto 3 in Finland is a Gen 3 reactor that just came online earlier this year. Its original target date was 2010. The original budget was 3 billion euros, but the final cost was over 11 billion. The project was of great national importance because this single unit provides around 14% of power to the country, and the Finnish nuclear power regulator was extremely motivated to make it happen. So the delays and cost overruns were not due to red tape.
- epistasis 3y ago
  It's easy to find detailed retrospectives of the multitude of failures here. I haven't found a single one that said excess regulation was a problem, but I have found a huge number that showed project management, bad design, bad communication between engineers and EPC, etc. were all to blame. Here's one I was reading recently from 2017, about the welding issues. Every other aspect, such as concrete, exhibited similar failures. https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of-a-huge-nuclear-construction-flop https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of... But if you have an idea of which regulations to change, or how to fix project management, you can pick up a half-completed pair of reactors in South Carolina on the cheap. That boondoggle often gets forgotten when examining Vogtle.
ryan93 3y ago
So to power every home in the USA would roughly cost 3 trillion at these prices. if they reused the same teams and designs maybe they could get it somewhat cheaper. plus we have increasing renewable plus existing hydro and nuclear. for the price of a year or two of national debt we could go full renewable in this country.
- justrealist 3y ago
  So we could decarbonize the entire US power grid for what we spent on COVID relief/stimulus? That seems like a good deal, even without economies of scale...
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    Not just decarbonize, but become a major fossil fuel exporter and be all smug about like a certain Nordic country…
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > become a major fossil fuel exporter Wouldn't doing that undo a lot of the gains from this? If we export fossil fuels instead of burning them, we aren't really decarbonizing. We're just having the carbonization take place somewhere else.
      - justrealist 3y ago
        It offsets significant carbon production elsewhere (especially if we only export natgas), and defunds from some of the worst governments on earth.
        JohnFen 3y ago
        > It offsets significant carbon production elsewhere Does it? Or does it simply increase the amount of fossil fuels being used elsewhere? > defunds from some of the worst governments on earth. That has nothing to do with decarbonization, though.
glimshe 3y ago
One project in 30 years doesn't benefit from economies of scale. Nuclear is the only hope we have to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Solar and Wind should be used whenever possible, but they are not 100% of our solution mix, even if they are the majority. If we want to mitigate the impact of climate change, we need to invest in decreasing Nuclear costs and building many more plants in the US.
- jakewins 3y ago
  Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain’t our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the same time. Eg hydro, overprovisioning solar or wind, transmission to remove local weather variations, coupling wind and solar, demand flexibility. Fervo just started its first full-scale new-gen geothermal plant, for instance; 24/7 firm power. You might like David Roberts interview with Tim Latimer about it: https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally...
  - forrestthewoods 3y ago
    Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.
    - switchbak 3y ago
      Canada's energy mix is roughly 60% hydro, and some provinces are well past 90%. You ought to check your numbers.
      - forrestthewoods 3y ago
        No offense, but Canada isn’t relevant on the global scale. Hydro use is growing, especially in developing countries. However it’s a shrinking percentage of total energy generation. There is an absolute cap on theoretical hydro energy production, and it isn’t enough. Hydro is low carbon and renewable. But it isn’t green, and it’s not enough.
arghandugh 3y ago
What this article is missing is that if you don’t consider refueling, defouling, valve refitting, coolant issues, cooling tower furloughs, transmission plant failures, early retirement, funding issues, staffing issues, or pressure vessel refurbishment the uptime is 100%! Beat that, renewables.
yellowapple 3y ago
Good. More, please.
chroma 3y ago
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Since then, no plant license that was initially submitted to the NRC has started operations. Plant Vogtle was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor to the NRC). Their license was grandfathered in. Building this reactor required a new reactor license (not plant license). Shortly after the reactor design was approved and construction started, the federal government added new rules about containment vessels being resilient to passenger aircraft impact. The NRC applied these rules retroactively, causing the containment vessel to be redesigned and construction to be halted.[1] The companies working with the NRC are reluctant to criticize regulators, as they fear retaliation from the NRC. The NRC supervises and approves each step of nuclear reactor construction, making it very difficult to schedule work with contractors and suppliers. Honestly, it's amazing this plant was built at all. 1. https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-and-vc-summer-delays/ https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The NRC was established just about when the first nuclear buildout collapsed under the weight of its own foolishness. Massive cost overruns did nuclear no favors whatsoever, clearly inadequate safety (especially on those first generation BWRs; hello Fukushima), and (most devastatingly) the deregulation of the US electricity grid, with PURPA (in 1978) and later steps opening grids to non-utility providers. Nuclear projects that would make sense for a monopoly utility (hey, let's boost the capital spending to increase our regulated earnings) no longer made any sense in a competitive market.
  - chroma 3y ago
    Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every year from the air pollution it spews out. And don't forget that the cause of the meltdown was an earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people! If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity.
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
epistasis 3y ago
This project is what killed nuclear in the US. Not regulations, not the NRC, just plain old incompetence, bad planning, bad EPC, bad design. The AP1000 was supposed to be a "modular" design, where most of the difficult welding could be done off site and delivered complete, with paperwork. And failure in this modularity is what caused the project to be such a flop, and essentially kill all new large nuclear in the US (people are trying "small" modular, but their target costs are still far too high to be economically feasible). See, for example, this 2017 report on just one aspect of what went wrong: https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of-a-huge-nuclear-construction-flop https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of... > To build the first new nuclear reactors in the U.S. in three decades—South Carolina’s V.C. Summer Units 2 and 3 and Georgia’s Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4—the design and construction team would face a steep learning curve. However, says Hartz, learning wasn’t much of a priority in the rush to start work at Lake Charles. “They were clueless” about the complex geometry of nuclear welds, the nuclear supply chain and the need for a nuclear safety culture, he notes, adding, “I wasn’t a whistle-blower. I was just a senior procurement manager who was concerned.” > Westinghouse would issue drawings to Shaw Nuclear in Charlotte. When Shaw reviewed the drawings and asked Westinghouse to correct a detail, problems ensued. The work processes were unnecessarily complicated by the separation of the team members. Giving an example of how the process got out of hand, Hartz says that, if a design called for a 3⁄8-in.-wide, 12-in.-long fillet weld, the welder might make it 14 in. long. “Instead of having Westinghouse right there saying, ‘That’s no problem,’ ” recalls Hartz, “we had to write a nonconformance report that was processed and reviewed by Shaw and then sent to Westinghouse for disposition. It was insane. From Lake Charles to Pittsburgh to Charlotte then back to Shaw Modular before the red nonconformance tag could be taken off, saying it’s OK now.” He adds, “Each change went through the same tortuous path, taking months and months.”
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  In regards to the story about the weld length, that is the process working as intended. As a constructor you don't just decide that something can be a different dimension. And as a engineer you don't just stand "right there" saying "That's no problem". That is how people get killed.
llsf 3y ago
That reactor could last until 2100. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-reactor-much-longer-you-might-think https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...
10g1k 3y ago
My 2c: Why nuclear power is a dumb idea. Countries with nuclear reactors: 32. Countries which have had nuclear leaks or meltdowns: 15. Number of nuclear leaks and meltdowns since 1952 (only those which resulted in loss of human life or >US$50K property damage): ~100. About 60% of those have been in the USA, allegedly the most advanced country in the world with the bestest regulation of such things. Note that the USA requirements for nuclear reactor waste (yes, they produce toxic waste; they are not clean), last time I checked, required the canisters to be able to survive for 300 years. The waste lasts longer than 300 years. So all you can do with the waste, at best, is leave it for someone else to handle later. Two years ago the USA had a leak which spilled ~400,000 gallons of radioactive water into a major river system, and it was covered up for two years. You can not trust governments or nuclear power companies about this stuff. The entire ecosystem is getting poisoned by all that waste water Japan is dumping. Almost 50% of countries with nuclear reactors have had significant leaks and meltdowns, and it only takes one significant event to screw up the entire natural environment. Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The 300 years comes from the length of time the waste remains self-protecting against amateur diversion of plutonium. After that time, the fission products have decayed so much that the gamma rays are, conservatively, too weak to inhibit such diversion. It's not that waste canisters can't last more than 300 years, it's that something has to be done with the waste by that time so there's no point requiring they be certified to last longer than that.
  - 10g1k 3y ago
    The 300 years came from a specification I read, produced by the US government, for the design and construction of the canisters used to contain the waste. This was many years ago, and may have been updated.
HackOfAllTrades 3y ago
I live in Georgia, and the only thing this plant will do is raise our rates. It's late (of course) and HUGELY over budget (also of course). The planners always knew it would be way late and way over budget. None of that mattered, because the 'regulatory' system guarantees they get it all back (and more) from the rate payers. It was also painfully obvious WHEN THIS WAS PLANNED that building Solar and/or Wind would get done sooner and far less expensively.

265 points by CharlesW 3y ago

About time! > "This hadn’t been done in this country from start to finish in some 30-plus years," Chris Womack, CEO of Atlanta-based Southern Co. said Monday in a telephone interview. IIRC, scientists are working on Gen 4 reactors, and there are a number of Gen 3 reactors operating in commercial capacities around the world; but the US is still stuck on Gen 2 due to regulation.

gh02t 3y ago
That's a major oversimplification. The reason the US is mostly (entirely) running Gen 2 reactors is because we simply lost interest in building new reactors for a long time. There were regulatory hurdles that caused this, but there were tons and tons of other factors that were (IMO) more important. Especially economic factors related to the cost and mismanagement of large nuclear projects, public opinions shifting over nuclear power, and alternatives like natural gas being super cheap. The NRC has been approving Gen 3 designs for a while now but nobody wanted to follow through on building them.
- tmn 3y ago
  Are costs and mismanagement directly related to regulations? Genuine question. This is impression I get from nuclear advocates like Mark Nelson and doomberg.
  - gh02t 3y ago
    Yeah that's the complicated part. The regs are responsible for some of the mess, but far from all. It's a complicated subject, probably too much to get into here but you can look at the history of Vogtle as a start. Blaming the NRC is justified at parts, but it really only tells part of the story.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

> seven years late and $17 billion over budget. When does this become a national security issue? Zoinks!

Retric 3y ago

“seven years late and $17 billion over budget. At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity” Ignoring interest for those 7 years and all other costs just the overage is insane. 17 billion / ( 1,100,000 kW * 90% capacity factor * 24 hour * 365 days * 50 years) = 4 cents per kWh. Add interest etc and someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
> someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project. All roads lead to Ratepayers (electrical customers). > Georgia Power’s residential customers are projected to pay more than $926 apiece as part of an ongoing finance charge and elected public service commissioners have approved a rate increase. Residential customers will pay $4 more per month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. That could hit bills in August, two months after residential customers saw a $16-a-month increase to pay for higher fuel costs. > The high construction costs have wiped out any future benefit from low nuclear fuel costs in the future, experts have repeatedly testified before commissioners. > “The cost increases and schedule delays have completely eliminated any benefit on a life-cycle cost basis,” Tom Newsome, director of utility finance for the commission, testified Thursday in a Georgia Public Service Commission hearing examining spending. > The utility will face a fight from longtime opponents of the plant, many of whom note that power generated from solar and wind would be cheaper. They say letting Georgia Power make ratepayers pay for mistakes will unfairly bolster the utility’s profits. > “While capital-intensive and expensive projects may benefit Georgia Power’s shareholders who have enjoyed record profits throughout Vogtle’s beleaguered construction, they are not the least-cost option for Georgians who are feeling the sting of repeated bill increases,” Southern Environmental Law Center staff attorney Bob Sherrier said in a statement. This will likely be the last commercial nuclear generator ever reaching criticality for the first time on US soil. Consider the current interest rate environment and the appetite for backstopping a multi decade construction project. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... [pdf, start at page 4]
- runako 3y ago

coldpie 3y ago

Awesome! Nuclear is a fantastic and needed addition to the grid. The cost was high, but still quite cheap relative to the cost of continuing to build & run fossil fuel plants. It's a real shame we let 30+ years slip by, letting our ability to build projects like this wither. I hope there's lessons learned from this experience that will help get costs down for future plants. This should spur discussions on streamlining the regulatory side of things, and there's a lot of exciting stuff going on in modular reactors. (In case it needs saying, which it shouldn't: yes, we should be building out wind & solar, too! We need all hands on deck, wind, solar, and nuclear, right now, to kill coal. We already blew our chance to do it cheaply, so now we have to pay the price.)

tracker1 3y ago
Mostly agree... though I think Solar tech still needs to improve a bit. Nuclear power is definitely needed for the grid, though preferably more inland in places less likely to be affected by natural disaster. I get why the NY plant was closed. I also hope that the build and cost timelines can be shortened. I think the push for electric cars is a bit of a miss in this, only because the grid needs to improve dramatically before such efforts can be effective and are barely keeping pace with current demands.
- Retric 3y ago
  EV’s have a fairly trivial impact on the grid. Cars last 25+ years so even if everyone all new cars where EV’s we are talking less than 1% increase in total electricity demand per year. The grid has expanded dramatically faster at several points. Even more importantly we can shift most of that demand to cheaper times of the day or even day of the week.
  - bigbillheck 3y ago
    > Cars last 25+ years This is not a truth universally acknowledged.
    - 3y ago

mikece 3y ago

> ...seven years late and $17 billion over budget... And how much of that was a result of red tape from the NRC, DOE, and EPA?

pavlov 3y ago
I don’t know, but new nuclear projects in the West tend to be extremely late and over budget even with friendly regulators. Olkiluoto 3 in Finland is a Gen 3 reactor that just came online earlier this year. Its original target date was 2010. The original budget was 3 billion euros, but the final cost was over 11 billion. The project was of great national importance because this single unit provides around 14% of power to the country, and the Finnish nuclear power regulator was extremely motivated to make it happen. So the delays and cost overruns were not due to red tape.
epistasis 3y ago
It's easy to find detailed retrospectives of the multitude of failures here. I haven't found a single one that said excess regulation was a problem, but I have found a huge number that showed project management, bad design, bad communication between engineers and EPC, etc. were all to blame. Here's one I was reading recently from 2017, about the welding issues. Every other aspect, such as concrete, exhibited similar failures. https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of-a-huge-nuclear-construction-flop https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of... But if you have an idea of which regulations to change, or how to fix project management, you can pick up a half-completed pair of reactors in South Carolina on the cheap. That boondoggle often gets forgotten when examining Vogtle.

ryan93 3y ago

So to power every home in the USA would roughly cost 3 trillion at these prices. if they reused the same teams and designs maybe they could get it somewhat cheaper. plus we have increasing renewable plus existing hydro and nuclear. for the price of a year or two of national debt we could go full renewable in this country.

justrealist 3y ago
So we could decarbonize the entire US power grid for what we spent on COVID relief/stimulus? That seems like a good deal, even without economies of scale...
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  Not just decarbonize, but become a major fossil fuel exporter and be all smug about like a certain Nordic country…
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > become a major fossil fuel exporter Wouldn't doing that undo a lot of the gains from this? If we export fossil fuels instead of burning them, we aren't really decarbonizing. We're just having the carbonization take place somewhere else.
    - justrealist 3y ago
      It offsets significant carbon production elsewhere (especially if we only export natgas), and defunds from some of the worst governments on earth.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > It offsets significant carbon production elsewhere Does it? Or does it simply increase the amount of fossil fuels being used elsewhere? > defunds from some of the worst governments on earth. That has nothing to do with decarbonization, though.

glimshe 3y ago

One project in 30 years doesn't benefit from economies of scale. Nuclear is the only hope we have to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Solar and Wind should be used whenever possible, but they are not 100% of our solution mix, even if they are the majority. If we want to mitigate the impact of climate change, we need to invest in decreasing Nuclear costs and building many more plants in the US.

jakewins 3y ago
Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain’t our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the same time. Eg hydro, overprovisioning solar or wind, transmission to remove local weather variations, coupling wind and solar, demand flexibility. Fervo just started its first full-scale new-gen geothermal plant, for instance; 24/7 firm power. You might like David Roberts interview with Tim Latimer about it: https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally...
- forrestthewoods 3y ago
  Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.
  - switchbak 3y ago
    Canada's energy mix is roughly 60% hydro, and some provinces are well past 90%. You ought to check your numbers.
    - forrestthewoods 3y ago
      No offense, but Canada isn’t relevant on the global scale. Hydro use is growing, especially in developing countries. However it’s a shrinking percentage of total energy generation. There is an absolute cap on theoretical hydro energy production, and it isn’t enough. Hydro is low carbon and renewable. But it isn’t green, and it’s not enough.

arghandugh 3y ago

What this article is missing is that if you don’t consider refueling, defouling, valve refitting, coolant issues, cooling tower furloughs, transmission plant failures, early retirement, funding issues, staffing issues, or pressure vessel refurbishment the uptime is 100%! Beat that, renewables.

yellowapple 3y ago

Good. More, please.

chroma 3y ago

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Since then, no plant license that was initially submitted to the NRC has started operations. Plant Vogtle was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor to the NRC). Their license was grandfathered in. Building this reactor required a new reactor license (not plant license). Shortly after the reactor design was approved and construction started, the federal government added new rules about containment vessels being resilient to passenger aircraft impact. The NRC applied these rules retroactively, causing the containment vessel to be redesigned and construction to be halted.[1] The companies working with the NRC are reluctant to criticize regulators, as they fear retaliation from the NRC. The NRC supervises and approves each step of nuclear reactor construction, making it very difficult to schedule work with contractors and suppliers. Honestly, it's amazing this plant was built at all. 1. https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-and-vc-summer-delays/ https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...

pfdietz 3y ago
The NRC was established just about when the first nuclear buildout collapsed under the weight of its own foolishness. Massive cost overruns did nuclear no favors whatsoever, clearly inadequate safety (especially on those first generation BWRs; hello Fukushima), and (most devastatingly) the deregulation of the US electricity grid, with PURPA (in 1978) and later steps opening grids to non-utility providers. Nuclear projects that would make sense for a monopoly utility (hey, let's boost the capital spending to increase our regulated earnings) no longer made any sense in a competitive market.
- chroma 3y ago
  Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every year from the air pollution it spews out. And don't forget that the cause of the meltdown was an earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people! If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

[dead]

epistasis 3y ago

This project is what killed nuclear in the US. Not regulations, not the NRC, just plain old incompetence, bad planning, bad EPC, bad design. The AP1000 was supposed to be a "modular" design, where most of the difficult welding could be done off site and delivered complete, with paperwork. And failure in this modularity is what caused the project to be such a flop, and essentially kill all new large nuclear in the US (people are trying "small" modular, but their target costs are still far too high to be economically feasible). See, for example, this 2017 report on just one aspect of what went wrong: https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of-a-huge-nuclear-construction-flop https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of... > To build the first new nuclear reactors in the U.S. in three decades—South Carolina’s V.C. Summer Units 2 and 3 and Georgia’s Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4—the design and construction team would face a steep learning curve. However, says Hartz, learning wasn’t much of a priority in the rush to start work at Lake Charles. “They were clueless” about the complex geometry of nuclear welds, the nuclear supply chain and the need for a nuclear safety culture, he notes, adding, “I wasn’t a whistle-blower. I was just a senior procurement manager who was concerned.” > Westinghouse would issue drawings to Shaw Nuclear in Charlotte. When Shaw reviewed the drawings and asked Westinghouse to correct a detail, problems ensued. The work processes were unnecessarily complicated by the separation of the team members. Giving an example of how the process got out of hand, Hartz says that, if a design called for a 3⁄8-in.-wide, 12-in.-long fillet weld, the welder might make it 14 in. long. “Instead of having Westinghouse right there saying, ‘That’s no problem,’ ” recalls Hartz, “we had to write a nonconformance report that was processed and reviewed by Shaw and then sent to Westinghouse for disposition. It was insane. From Lake Charles to Pittsburgh to Charlotte then back to Shaw Modular before the red nonconformance tag could be taken off, saying it’s OK now.” He adds, “Each change went through the same tortuous path, taking months and months.”

sidewndr46 3y ago
In regards to the story about the weld length, that is the process working as intended. As a constructor you don't just decide that something can be a different dimension. And as a engineer you don't just stand "right there" saying "That's no problem". That is how people get killed.

llsf 3y ago

That reactor could last until 2100. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-reactor-much-longer-you-might-think https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...

10g1k 3y ago

My 2c: Why nuclear power is a dumb idea. Countries with nuclear reactors: 32. Countries which have had nuclear leaks or meltdowns: 15. Number of nuclear leaks and meltdowns since 1952 (only those which resulted in loss of human life or >US$50K property damage): ~100. About 60% of those have been in the USA, allegedly the most advanced country in the world with the bestest regulation of such things. Note that the USA requirements for nuclear reactor waste (yes, they produce toxic waste; they are not clean), last time I checked, required the canisters to be able to survive for 300 years. The waste lasts longer than 300 years. So all you can do with the waste, at best, is leave it for someone else to handle later. Two years ago the USA had a leak which spilled ~400,000 gallons of radioactive water into a major river system, and it was covered up for two years. You can not trust governments or nuclear power companies about this stuff. The entire ecosystem is getting poisoned by all that waste water Japan is dumping. Almost 50% of countries with nuclear reactors have had significant leaks and meltdowns, and it only takes one significant event to screw up the entire natural environment. Finally: If you are not willing to have a nuclear reactor right beside your house, but are willing to have one beside someone else's house, you are a coward and are not really in favour of nuclear power.

pfdietz 3y ago
The 300 years comes from the length of time the waste remains self-protecting against amateur diversion of plutonium. After that time, the fission products have decayed so much that the gamma rays are, conservatively, too weak to inhibit such diversion. It's not that waste canisters can't last more than 300 years, it's that something has to be done with the waste by that time so there's no point requiring they be certified to last longer than that.
- 10g1k 3y ago
  The 300 years came from a specification I read, produced by the US government, for the design and construction of the canisters used to contain the waste. This was many years ago, and may have been updated.

HackOfAllTrades 3y ago

I live in Georgia, and the only thing this plant will do is raise our rates. It's late (of course) and HUGELY over budget (also of course). The planners always knew it would be way late and way over budget. None of that mattered, because the 'regulatory' system guarantees they get it all back (and more) from the rate payers. It was also painfully obvious WHEN THIS WAS PLANNED that building Solar and/or Wind would get done sooner and far less expensively.