2023-07-31 14:17:12
After several years of delay and a construction cost that has doubled, unit 3 of the Vogtle power station in Georgia has just started to supply electricity. Contrary to the initial objective, it is not certain that this launch will be followed by other nuclear reactors.
The United States is going back to nuclear power… but for how long? Georgia Power announced on Friday that Unit 3 of the Plant Vogtle nuclear power plant has begun supplying commercial electricity to the Georgia state grid. The last nuclear reactor built on American soil was more than three decades old.
With a capacity of 1,100 megawatts, Vogtle 3 was originally due to enter service seven years ago when the project was authorized in 2012. “Along the way, the company has constantly revised upwards cost estimates , pushing back the deadlines little by little”, explains to the Financial Times Bob Sherrier, a lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Center who opposed the project.
“Each time, the costs were increased just enough to keep them within the bounds of justification and make sense to move forward. But each time, they got their estimates badly wrong.”
Originally, the cost of the pair of Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 was estimated at 14 billion dollars: it eventually more than doubled to exceed 30 billion dollars, of which more than half was borne by Georgia Power which holds a 45% share of the project.
The other pair project in South Carolina abandoned in 2017
The Vogtle project was part of a context of renewed interest in the American political sphere for nuclear energy in 2008. The pair of reactors in Georgia were to be the first of a series of a dozen new infrastructures across the country, but this renaissance of the nuclear sector was thwarted by the Fukushima disaster in 2011 and then by the fall in natural gas prices. In the end, four reactors were launched, but the Vogtle pair is the only one that will have been built, the VC Summer project in South Carolina being abandoned after the Westinghouse company went bankrupt in 2017.
“We have shown that even though we have had a lot of bruises and been called names, we will stay the course,” Lauren McDonald, a member of the Georgia Public Utilities Commission, told the British daily. .
Not until Vogtle’s Unit 4 comes into service, scheduled for early 2024, will the commission decide how Georgia Power’s costs will be passed on to state customers. . The consumer association Georgia Watch puts the increase in the bill for local taxpayers at $900 to cover construction costs, but electricity bills are still expected to increase by an average of 3%, or about $3.8, with the entry into service of unit 3. An increase which should even be between 10 and 13% with the finalization of the pair of reactors.
“Investors are not interested”
American proponents of the atom hope that the Vogtle episode will serve as a lesson in the management of subsequent projects when the legislator has already injected several billion dollars in order to maintain the aging nuclear plants of the country but also to develop advanced technologies in this domain. The Vice President of the Nuclear Energy Institute in charge of policy and public affairs John Kotek expressed this wish himself:
“Although Vogtle’s experience turned out differently than originally hoped, it provided many lessons that will benefit many future nuclear projects.”
But this optimism comes up against the harsh reality of the sector: despite the development of micro-reactors and small modular reactors, no other large-scale traditional light-water reactors are being built across the Atlantic. And for good reason, investors are discouraged by the delays and additional costs of the latest projects. “The only reason we are witnessing a nuclear renaissance is that the federal government is spending tens of billions of dollars on it, confirms David Schlissel, of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Investors are not interested.
According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, more than half of Georgia’s electricity will now be produced by carbon-free energy sources, mostly nuclear in nature. With this new pair, Vogtle will indeed become the second largest power plant in the United States in terms of capacity, behind the Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam in Washington State, in the northwest of the country.
“If this project is not completed in the state of Georgia, no other nuclear power plants will be built in the United States for decades,” said Lauren McDonald.
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