On Vogtle: Reaction and News Coverage

The importance of the license granted (or virtually so, as the Commission technically authorized issuance of the license, but did not issue the license itself) to Southern Co. to build two reactors on its  Plant Vogtle site in Georgia is quite real – I noticed that the New York Times and Washington Post put on their first pages that it might happen today.

That’s anticipation for you.

Well, it did happen today – well, the NRC authorized it to happen. A little confusing, but as we’ll see, it’s largely treated as the big event.

Here is NEI’s President and CEO Marv Fertel:

This is a historic day. Today’s licensing action sounds a clarion call to the world that the United States recognizes the importance of expanding nuclear energy as a key component of a low-carbon energy future that is central to job creation, diversity of electricity supply and energy security. The Nuclear Energy Institute congratulates Southern Company, the Shaw Group, Westinghouse Electric and other project participants on this exciting achievement.

Read more here.

From Southern Co.’s President and CEO Tom Fanning – he’s on video in the post below this one:

“This is a monumental accomplishment for Southern Company, Georgia Power, our partners and the nuclear industry,” said Southern Company Chairman, President and CEO Thomas A. Fanning. “We are committed to bringing these units online to deliver clean, safe and reliable energy to our customers. The project is on track, and our targets related to cost and schedule are achievable.”

The company expects to deliver to customers more than $1 billion in benefits from the Department of Energy loan guarantees, production tax credits and recovering financing costs during construction.

Georgia Power expects Unit 3 to begin operating in 2016 and Unit 4 in 2017.”

More here.

From Shaw Group’s Chairman, President and CEO J.M. Bernhard:

“Shaw congratulates Southern on this major milestone for the Vogtle project, the first new U.S. nuclear construction commercial power project in more than 30 years,” said J.M. Bernhard Jr., Shaw’s chairman, president and chief executive officer.

“Shaw is proud to be part of such a historic project. Not only is this milestone another step forward in continuing to provide safe, clean and reliable energy for the future, but the project also will create thousands of jobs and provide numerous long-term benefits for the Georgia community. Shaw anticipates hiring approximately 3,500 employees during construction of the new units at Vogtle, with thousands of more jobs created as a result of construction and operation of the reactors,” said Mr. Bernhard.

More here.

From Westinghouse’s President and CEO Aris Candris:

"Westinghouse congratulates Southern Nuclear on the approval of its combined construction and operating license (COL) for Plant Vogtle by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"The granting of this COL is yet another important step in constructing the next generation of new nuclear plants in the United States.  The thorough and rigorous COL review, combined with the recent AP1000® design certification help to ensure Southern and its stakeholders of receiving greater levels of safety, increased project certainty and years of reliable electricity generation.  Additionally, these plants will contribute significantly to the local, regional and national economies by creating and sustaining thousands of jobs.”

More here.

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Let’s look at some news coverage.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Commissioners voted 4-1 to approve the project. NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who has supported the project throughout the process, dissented, saying he was concerned that the reactors would not meet certain safety requirements put in place since Japan's Fukushima Daiichi accident.

"Significant safety enhancements have already been recommended as a result of learning the lessons from Fukushima, and there is still more work ahead of us. Knowing this, I cannot support issuing these licenses as if Fukushima never happened," Jaczko said.

The Augusta Chronicle. Augusta is the largest town near the Vogtle facility – I reckon a fair number of its workers live in Augusta:

Fellow commissioners expressed confidence that safety recommendations made since the Japan crisis will be properly implemented.

“There is no amnesia, individually or collectively,” commissioner Kristine L. Svinicki said of the NRC’s attention to lessons learned from Fukushima.

Newshounds. Always after conflict. The Chronicle gets a detail right that most other papers missed:

The license, which could be issued within 10 days, according to NRC staffers, will lead to the construction of the first AP1000 modular reactors in the U.S., creating a workforce expected to peak at about 3,500 during the next three years, with total job creation estimated at 5,000.

Symbolically, today’s the day, but practically, the license will be prepared by the NRC staff and issued inside a couple of weeks. Southern Co. cannot proceed without it, but now they know it’s coming. Good for writer Rob Pavey for picking that up.

The Chronicle has a page with stories about Vogtle. My favorite one was:

Twin brothers Abner and Allen DeLaigle can remember the flood of workers and money that inundated Burke County when Plant Vogtle first rose from the ground decades ago.

“We had a store, and a restaurant, just down from the front gate,” said Allen DeLaigle, “We also had a camper park with 380 spaces — and we stayed full for 10 years.”

During that era [meaning the 70s], the mammoth project lured 14,000 workers to the remote banks of the Savannah River, where the demand for housing, food and other commodities was so intense that their restaurant bustled seven days a week.

Sounds like a gold rush town. Wonder if they had a dance hall and a Marshal.

I looked at the Waynesboro paper, the True Citizen, (Waynesboro is the town nearest to Vogtle likely to have a paper), but it puts its content behind a pay wall. We may never know how they report it in Waynesboro, except that the headline is: High Expectations.

The Washington Post Story is here and the New York Times story is here. Both relegate it to the business pages. Better to stay local on this one, because this is really big news in that part of Georgia. I come from Georgia myself, so perhaps there’s a personal angle too and a bit of home state pride.

Plant Vogtle clears land.

Gifts for the Winter Solstice

2012 promises to be an extremely consequential year for American nuclear energy. In the grand tradition of sneak previews, the first news to hit made 2011:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Thursday approved the amended design for the Westinghouse AP1000, a reactor that several power companies intend to use for building the first new U.S. nuclear plants in decades.

“The design provides enhanced safety margins through use of simplified, inherent, passive, or other innovative safety and security functions, and also has been assessed to ensure it could withstand damage from an aircraft impact without significant release of radioactive materials,” NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko said in a statement.

And that means this in – we hope – the early part of next year:

The certification brings Southern Company subsidiary Southern Nuclear one step closer to receiving the first Combined Construction and Operating License (COL) for a U.S. nuclear plant.

"This is another key milestone for the Vogtle project and the nation's nuclear renaissance," said Southern Company Chairman, President and CEO Thomas A. Fanning. "The NRC's action confirms the AP1000 design is safe and meets all regulatory requirements. The commission now has all of the technical information needed to issue the Vogtle COL.

Rapidly followed by this:

Once the AP1000 certification is complete, we expect the COL to be issued in short order for the … Summer project [in South Carolina]. Once the COL are issued, we'll begin a significant ramp-up in work ….

This is from the Shaw Group’s earnings call on December 21, so they were a day early. I captured the Summer part, but Shaw is working on Vogtle, too.

It’s like a gift, isn’t it?

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And now a completely different kind of gift, from our friends at Russia’s Rosatom (click for larger):

Yes, they’ve taken some of their more athletic and beauteous workers – from the Siberian Chemical Combine, a used fuel reprocessing plant - and posed them after statues of Greek gods and goddesses for a calendar – at least, I think they’re workers. World Nuclear News doesn’t make this clear and neither does the Rosatom blog.

But – it’s fun to imagine that’s who they are – and why not? Russian nuclear facilities often tout the athletic achievements of their workers and this tilts that interest in another direction – toward beef- and cheesecake, true, but Rosatom also does a beauty pageant. It’s a cultural thing.

The statues – in the lower left of the photos - are mostly naked but the workers are at least as clothed as Poseidon there, so decide for yourself how safe-for-work this is before clicking through.

I wonder if this sort of thing is common throughout Russian industrial spheres.

The AP1000.

In Attack on AP-1000, Anti-Nuke Gundersen Hits a New Low

Late last week, anti-nuclear gadfly Arne Gundersen took to the Web to attack the safety of Westinghouse's AP-1000 nuclear reactor. It's all part of a larger effort by anti-nuclear activists to delay the certification of the reactor design by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

NEI's Tom Kauffman shot me a note that has asked me to share with our blog audience:

Arnie Gundersen’s claim there was an inadvertent criticality in the one Fukushima reactor is totally unfounded. A criticality is a sustained chain reaction within the nuclear fuel. There is no evidence a criticality occurred in any of the damaged reactors since the accident. Spontaneous fission of uranium atoms naturally occurs, but conditions to support criticality do not exist. The control rods are in fact in the damaged fuel. And boron, a highly effective fission control element, is mixed in the cooling water in all three reactors and all the used fuel pools thereby virtually eliminating the possibility of criticality. Gundersen knows this and is deliberately misleading people.

Gundersen’s claim that loss of the cooling water at the top of the AP1000 containment structure would be the loss of the plant’s ultimate heat sink also is false. Just like the nuclear plants at Fukushima, the ultimate heat sink of the AP1000 reactor is the cooling water source for the plant. If that is lost, multiple emergency cooling water supplies would be used to cool the reactor. If they too are lost, the water at the top of the containment could provide cooling for three days even in the event of a total loss of all electrical power. He also failed to mention that no U.S. nuclear facility faces the sudden flooding that stopped the ultimate heat sink in Japan.

His claim the fuel pool at the #4 reactor at Fukushima “blew up” is absolutely false and is fear-mongering at its worst. Video of the #4 pool and the used fuel in it along with samples of the water in the pool, are irrefutable proof there was no explosion in the fuel pool and fuel is intact. In fact, there were no explosions in any of the fuel pools. NRC Chairman Jaczko publicly confirmed this weeks ago. Likewise, Gundersen’s recent claim that molten fuel is moving into the ground beneath one plant and causing groundwater to change into steam is totally unsupported and irresponsible.

Mr. Gundersen also failed to mention that the AP1000 reactor, designed to be at least 100 times safer than existing plants due to exceptionally large safety margins, is based on 50 years of operational lessons-learned and more than 20 years of research and development. Probably the most highly engineered and analyzed nuclear plant design in the history of the U.S. (if not the world), the Westinghouse advanced passive reactor design underwent the most thorough pre-construction licensing review ever conducted by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Because of the AP1000 design’s huge safety margins, any changes needed in response to the lessons learned from the accident in Japan are expected to be manageable during plant construction.

Mr. Gundersen does not speak for the people of Georgia or South Carolina, nor their governors or public service commissions who support new nuclear facilities. He should respect their right to decide for themselves how to manage their energy supplies.

This isn't the first time Gundersen and his allies have attacked the AP-1000. Last April, a group of 12 regional anti-nuclear energy organizations called on the NRC to investigate their claims. Click here for NEI's response to that request.

An artist's conception of the AP-1000 reactor, courtesy of Westinghouse.

SCANA’s Analyst Day - “New nuclear continues to be the low cost alternative for customers”

Yesterday, SCANA held an Analyst Day that mostly talked about the construction of the two nuclear units at their Summer station. Here’s the link to the 164 page slide deck (18 mega-byte pdf). Below are a few noteworthy slides.

The first slide to mention is “Why Nuclear?” If you look at the chart at the top right of the slide below, SCANA provided their all-in cost estimates for nuclear ($76/MWh), natural gas ($81/MWh), coal ($117/MWh), offshore wind ($292/MWh) and solar ($437/MWh). For them, “new nuclear continues to be the low cost alternative for customers.”

Here are two slides, of many, showing construction at the site.

Also worth mentioning is the slide showing where SCANA is purchasing the supplies around the world to construct the units.

And, below is a picture of one of the AP1000s being built in China that is 2.5 years ahead of SCANA’s construction schedule. They are, of course, sharing lessons between each other.

There is definitely much more to peruse in the fat document so be sure to check it out.