CBO Cost Estimation of Nuclear Modernization Omits Hazardous Cleanuphttps://washingtonspectator.org/alvarez-nuclear-cleanup/ High-level radioactive waste pose threats to environment around nuclear management facilities , By Robert Alvarez, ith its $1.2 trillion price tag for the modernization of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal and production complex, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office has induced “sticker shock” on Capitol Hill. Yet despite this enormous projected cost for rebuilding the U.S. triad of land, submarine, and bomber nuclear forces, the CBO has in fact lowballed its estimate by excluding the costs for environmental restoration and waste management of the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons complex.
Even though the cleanup of nuclear weapons sites comes from the same congressional spending account as DOE nuclear weapons modernization, the CBO chose to exclude an additional $541 billion in legacy costs. If these costs are included, the total price tag goes to $1.74 trillion over three decades.
The largest of these cleanup costs, at $179.5 billion, is attributed to the stabilization and disposal of high-level radioactive wastes generated from the production of plutonium. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) informed Congress in 2013 that these wastes are “considered one of the most hazardous substances on earth.”
About 100 million gallons are stored in 227 underground tanks, many larger than state capitol domes and ranging in age from 43 to 73 years. Over 1 million gallons of these contaminants have leaked at the DOE’s Hanford site in Washington state, threatening the Columbia River.
The removal and stabilization of these wastes at Hanford by mixing them with molten glass, at an estimated cost of as much as $72.3 billion, represents the single largest, most expensive, and potentially riskiest nuclear cleanup project ever undertaken by the United States. It’s roughly comparable to the Apollo moon program in cost and risk, except there’s no moon.
Even without factoring in cleanup, an analysis of the DOE costs for the nuclear warheads program shows that while the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile has shrunk by 56 percent since 2003, the annual per-warhead cost has increased by about 422 percent. This huge cost growth in the nuclear stockpile budget is largely due to ever-growing overhead expenses for abandoned and antiquated structures not formally part of the DOE cleanup program. Many of these facilities contain hazardous materials and have been ignored for several decades.
To keep the lights on, the DOE weapons complex must pay for things like collapses, flooding, fires, and preventing roofs from falling in. In 2015, the DOE Inspector General warned that, “delays in the cleanup and disposition of contaminated excess facilities expose the Department, its employees, and the public to ever-increasing levels of risk [and] lead to escalating disposition costs.”
The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for instance, has a high-risk “footprint” of abandoned contaminated structures, mostly built in the 1940s, that is 2.5 times larger than the Pentagon building. Although Y-12 has not produced weapons for more than 25 years, its annual budgets have increased by nearly 50 percent since 1997, to more than $1 billion a year.
Over the past 20 years, there have been dozens of fires and explosions at Y-12 involving electrical equipment, glove boxes, pumps, waste containers, and nuclear and hazardous chemicals. Several of these incidents resulted in worker injuries and destruction of property.
As late as September of this year, unstable amounts of highly enriched uranium, called “material at risk” have spontaneously combusted. For more than 20 years, Y-12 has not been able to stabilize its backlog of “materials at risk.”
In a December 2016 DOE report to Congress, the unaccounted-for liability of getting rid of 2,349 of the DOE’s abandoned facilities over the next 10 years was roughly estimated at $32 billion. The DOE finds that among those are 203 unattended “high-risk” facilities and estimates a cost of $11.6 billion to close them down safely.
The most recent high-profile examples of aging-infrastructure risks include the collapse, last May, of a section of tunnel at the Plutonium and Uranium Extraction Facility, known as PUREX, a long-idle component of the sprawling Hanford nuclear site, 200 miles east of Seattle. The tunnel holds an enormous amount of radioactive wastes, and hundreds of workers were forced to seek cover.
And in June of this year, during the process of tearing down a building that was known to contain countless respirable plutonium particles, 31 workers inhaled or ingested plutonium during a work shift, after failing to take necessary precautions. It took four months for the DOE’s contractor to inform the public about the mishap and to tell the workers about their doses.
he costs for the disposition of excess plutonium from the nuclear weapons programs is pegged by GAO at $56 billion. In 2012, the U.S. Government determined that it no longer needed 43.4 metric tons of plutonium for military needs.
The majority of that plutonium is stored in facilities at the DOE’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, that were built in the 1940s. The plutonium is densely packed in special containers that are only meant for “interim” storage.
In 2010 and 2017, unexpected 2,000-year rains flooded a major plutonium storage area with several inches of water, which shut down the plant and impacted about 1,000 containers at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in recovery funds.
Because plutonium weapon components can become dangerous if mishandled or improperly stored, a Pantex worker told me, while I was working for the DOE’s Secretary, that it was like “having a zoo full of wild animals.”
Because the plutonium disposition program is way over budget and is stalled without a credible path forward, tens of tons of plutonium are likely to remain in these 70-plus-year-old structures awaiting further floods and additional threats to their safety and integrity.
While an ever-growing amount of plutonium will be stored in antiquated structures at the Pantex plant, another 1,000 abandoned facilities will be added to the list of sites requiring specialized disposition over the coming decade. Costs for the disposal of large amounts of hazardous wastes in the abandoned structures are not included in the DOE’s 2016 estimate and are likely to add several billions of dollars more.
When the DOE cleanup program was created in 1990, Congress made sure that it would be paid for from the same pot of money designated for the U.S. arsenal of nuclear warheads. These legacy costs should not be isolated from estimates of the nation’s nuclear weapons budget.
The need to protect the safety and health of workers and the American public from the mess produced by the current and previous nuclear weapons stockpiles should not be ignored as we proceed to deal with the future of nuclear weapons in the 21st century. As former Senator John Glenn of Ohio, a staunch supporter of the Cold War, would often say, “What good is it to protect our nation with nuclear weapons if we poison our people in the process?”
A senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, Robert Alvarez served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999. During this tenure, he coordinated the Energy Department’s nuclear material strategic planning and established the department’s first asset management program.
Here in South Carolina, Santee Cooper and SCE&G customers could be stuck paying as much as $9 billion over the next six decades for two new nuclear reactors that will never generate electricity unless lawmakers and regulators effectively intervene on their behalf.
All this is thanks to a 2007 bill that, like a comparable one in Florida, allowed utilities to charge customers up front for large capital projects and then recoup costs later, even if projects were never completed.
In South Carolina, that law led to one massive failure. In Florida it contributed to a handful.
The lesson from Florida is that South Carolinians remain vulnerable until the Base Load Review Act is either repealed or significantly modified. Until then, utilities in the state could theoretically use it to advance other major projects while leaving customers on the hook for the cost.
That shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
Interestingly, Florida never actually repealed its law. Instead, lawmakers added two key words in 2013 that set a much higher bar for getting new projects off the ground – “reasonable” and “feasible.” No nuclear projects have been proposed since then.
It’s almost inconceivable that a law should have to state that building a new nuclear reactor on the backs of millions of ratepayers should be “reasonable” and “feasible.” Any business would be incredibly foolish to pursue such a massive investment that didn’t meet such a minimal standard.
But the BLRA and its Florida equivalent allow, and in fact encourage, utilities to go big by removing any economic risk associated with inherently risky investments.
That was deeply misguided in 2007. It seems unfathomably wrongheaded now in the wake of so many high-profile failures across the Southeast.
In South Carolina, utilities must prove that their nuclear costs were “prudently incurred” before passing them on to customers under the BLRA. SCE&G and Santee Cooper did not likely meet even that low bar.
The two nuclear reactors that were abandoned in July have been plagued by delays and cost overruns almost since construction began in 2009. At least one professional report by engineering firm Bechtel in 2015 found serious flaws in design and management and raised questions about the project’s feasibility.
But work proceeded, customers continued to pay higher rates, and utility executives kept telling lawmakers and regulators that construction on the reactors was proceeding appropriately. That’s certainly not “prudent.”
Lawmakers must now make it a priority when they return to session in January to help SCE&G and Santee Cooper customers recover as much money as possible and avoid paying higher electric bills for decades for a failure that was entirely out of their hands.
They must also undo the law that made that failure possible in the first place. Otherwise – as in Florida – South Carolina’s first nuclear disaster might not be its last.
Cheap renewables undercut nuclear power, The technology advances and plunging costs of cheap renewables make base load nuclear power redundant. Climate News Network, by Paul Brown, LONDON, 29 December, 2017 “………Completion doubts
Even the former UK energy secretary Sir Edward Davey, who signed off on the Hinkley Point deal, said “the economics have clearly gone away.” He doubted that the building would ever be completed, he told Greenpeace in an interview.
All the other UK nuclear projects are still at various stages of planning, and how any of them will be paid for is yet to be worked out. It is already clear that none can be financed without government subsidy.
An important political development in 2017 was that for the first time both the US and the UK admitted that their support for the nuclear industry is linked to the need to maintain their military capability in nuclear submarines and personnel. This is key, because both powers have previously claimed that there is no link between civil and military nuclear industries.
Even before their admission it was already clear that the big economies which have no nuclear weapons, like Germany, can see no point in having a civil nuclear industry.
Export drive
That does not stop smaller countries, some without any nuclear power stations at all at present, signing agreements with the Russian state-owned company Rosatom. In what many see as a Russian policy to extend its international influence, Rosatom already says it is building reactors in Belarus, China, India, Bangladesh, Hungary, Turkey, Finland and Iran, and is seeking to expand, with tenders in for 23 other reactors abroad.
Fears of another Fukushima as Tepco plans to restart world’s biggest nuclear plant, Consent given to turn reactors at the massive Kashiwazaki-kariwa plant back on, but Japanese worry over active fault lines and mismanagement, Guardian Justin McCurry , 28 Dec 17, If a single structure can define a community, for the 90,000 residents of Kashiwazaki town and the neighbouring village of Kariwa, it is the sprawling nuclear power plant that has dominated the coastal landscape for more than 40 years.
When all seven of its reactors are in operation, Kashiwazaki-kariwa generates 8.2m kilowatts of electricity – enough to power 16m households. Occupying 4.2 sq km of land along the Japan Sea coast, it is the biggest nuclear power plant in the world.
But today, the reactors at Kashiwazaki-kariwa are idle. The plant in Niigata prefecture, about 140 miles (225km) north-west of the capital, is the nuclear industry’s highest-profile casualty of the nationwide atomic shutdown that followed the March 2011 triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi.
Now, the same utility, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco], is attempting to banish its Fukushima demons with a push to restart two reactors at Kashiwazaki-kariwa, one of its three nuclear plants. Only then, it says, can it generate the profits it needs to fund the decommissioning of Fukushima Daiichi and win back the public trust it lost in the wake of the meltdown.
This week, Japan’s nuclear regulation authority gave its formal approval for Tepco to restart the Kashiwazaki-kariwa’s No. 6 and 7 reactors – the same type of boiling-water reactors that suffered meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi.
After a month of public hearings, the nuclear regulation authority concluded that Tepco was fit to run a nuclear power plant and said the two reactors met the stricter safety standards introduced after the 2011 disaster.
Just before that decision, Tepco gave the Guardian an exclusive tour of what it claims will be the safest nuclear plant in the world…….
‘This is no place for a nuclear power plant’
The public, however, is far from convinced. Last year, the people of Niigata prefecture registered their opposition to the utility’s plans by electing Ryuichi Yoneyama, an anti-nuclear candidate, as governor. Exit polls showed that 73% of voters opposed restarting the plant, with just 27% in favour.
Yoneyama has said that he won’t make a decision on the restarts, scheduled for spring 2019, until a newly formed committee has completed its report into the causes and consequences of the Fukushima disaster – a process that could take at least three years.
For many residents, the plant’s location renders expensive safety improvements irrelevant. “Geologically speaking, this is no place for a nuclear power plant,” says Kazuyuki Takemoto, a retired local councillor and a lifelong anti-nuclear activist.
Takemoto cites instability caused by the presence of underground oil and gas deposits in the area, and evidence that the ground on which Tepco’s seawall stands is prone to liquefaction in the event of a major earthquake.
Local critics have pointed to the chaos that could result from attempting to evacuate the 420,000 people who live within a 30km radius of Kashiwazaki-kariwa. “That’s more people than lived near Fukushima, plus we get very heavy snowfall here, which would make evacuating everyone impossible,” Takemoto adds. “The situation would be far worse than it was in Fukushima.”
Adding to their concerns are the presence of seismic faults in and around the site, which sustained minor damage during a magnitude-6.6 offshore earthquake in 2007. Two active faults – defined by nuclear regulators as one that has moved any time within the last 400,000 years – run beneath reactor No. 1.
South Carolina Spent $9 Billion on Nuclear Reactors That Will Never Run. Now What?The legislature must decide whether residents will keep being charged, possibly for decades, for the failed project. Governing. BY ALAN GREENBLATT| JANUARY 2018 It has to be one of the greatest wastes of money in any state’s history. Last summer, two utility companies halted construction on nuclear reactors in South Carolina. They had already sunk more than $9 billion into the project, which will never be completed or generate a kilowatt of power. The state is now trying to figure out who’s to blame, and who will pay.
The story started a dozen years ago. Back in 2006, South Carolina, along with several other states, passed legislation to try to jumpstart the moribund nuclear construction industry………
Customers have already been billed some $2 billion for the reactors. Under current regulations, the utilities continue to collect $37 million per month. That means the average ratepayer is paying an additional $250 per year, or 18 percent of the bill. This could go on for 60 years. “You will literally have your children and grandchildren pay for this mistake,” says Bursey.
Some legislators have argued that consumers shouldn’t be on the hook for the billions already charged. But it may not be legally possible to recover the money. It may not even be feasible. The utilities don’t have the cash to give back, even if they wanted to. “That would be the fair thing, but it’s not realistic,” Massey says.
Instead, the fight in the legislature this year will be about whether to curtail additional payments going forward. Needless to say, the utilities are opposed to that idea. They insist they must collect the money, or they won’t be able to continue operating or have access to capital. They aren’t sympathetic actors, but Santee Cooper is state-owned so legislators will have to take its concerns seriously…..http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-south-carolina-nuclear-reactors.html
Final negotiations for Areva reprocessing plant in China, Les Echos, Frédéric Schaeffer, Correspondant à Pékin, 26 Dec 17, Areva’s president was in Beijing on Thursday. Paris hopes to sign an agreement during Emmanuel Macron’s visit to China in early January. The contract would be around ten billion euros for Areva……
“There have been comprehensive discussions with many Chinese officials in France and French in Planned over 10 years. This project could be agreed upon during the visit of Emmanuel Macron early January in the Middle Kingdom. “We are accelerating the final negotiations in view of the President’s visit” ….”the visit of Emmanuel Macron will mark a key stage” – French nuclear officials
…. The stakes are crucial for New Areva, the agency resulting from the restructuring of the French nuclear industry and now refocused on the fuel cycle. This could be the key – with a contract of ten billion euros. …. CNNC originally chose the coastal city of Lianyungang to locate the plant. But that announcement had sparked violent protests last year, forcing a halt to preliminary work. Since then, CNNC and the government have examined several coastal sites but have been careful not to make their choice known.https://www.lesechos.fr/industrie-services/energie-environnement/0301060536871-ultimes-negociations-pour-lusine-de-retraitement-dareva-en-chine-2141002.php
Executives from Atlanta-based Southern Company defended their long delayed and way over-budget nuclear construction project, the Vogtle plant, before the Georgia Public Service Commission. But this time, Anthony Quinn won. The Georgia PSC commissioners gave Southern the ok to keep building.
The PSC had a choice: recommend cancellation of the huge project or let it proceed. But cancellation would require still another unpleasant discussion and decision: who foots the bill for the incomplete plant? Not the sort of decisions politicians like to make on their watch.
So the PSC ruled that power-generating alternatives to nuclear, such as combined cycle combustion turbines, would cost more than completing the plant (a conclusion that requires judgment about gas prices). And it made some modifications that will supposedly cut $700 million off what the plant will cost Southern’s consumers (that’s $18 million per year over the projected life of the plant, so no big deal.)
Economists warn decision makers to ignore sunk costs. But those sunk costs apparently did weigh on regulators. Explaining to the governor and to voters that the billions of dollars of plant investment made on their watch is now worthless… well, that’s a decision few regulators would choose to make.
The public reasoning behind today’s Georgia PSC decision involved assumptions about future energy costs, the company’s need for a diverse energy mix, and the desirability of adding low carbon emitting generating resources.
For all the attention this decision received, probably didn’t play a significant role. Nobody we’ve ever met could accurately forecast trends in energy consumption, power technology and costs at the same time over any reasonable planning horizon. To accurately forecast these over the 40-60 year projected life of the Vogtle plant turns an impossible task ridiculous. That is the key to the problem regulators faced today, and the reason why a decision to build a large nuclear plant is so risky.
Two Greentech Media journalists saw today’s PSC decision as an “infusion of hope for large-scale nuclear… and the last chance to prove the viability of the industry” in the U.S. The verdict of the financial community was far more muted. The common shares of Southern Company fell 1 percent.
How will an over-budget, late and marginally economic nuclear power generating facility encourage others to dive into the nuclear new-build game?
Georgia regulators cited other reasons to approve this project, including the need to reduce carbon omissions and to maintain America’s nuclear power generating capability. But the big question is why should the electricity consumers of Georgia, alone, bear the burden of meeting relatively high-cost national energy goals?
Given the size and risks inherent in building new nuclear projects, especially with relatively new designs, shouldn’t the risk be spread throughout the nation? There’s something bizarre about the electricity consumers of Georgia and South Carolina (where an identical project was recently canceled) incurring possibly $25-$50 billion of financial risk for the sake of the nation’s nuclear power generating capability.
Given the size and risks inherent in new nuclear projects, shouldn’t the risk be spread throughout the nation, if—as the regulators imply—the entire nation actually benefits? The electricity consumers in Georgia and South Carolina shouldn’t incur significant financial risk for the sake of the nation’s nuclear capability—especially when no other domestic utility management appears ready to follow suit.
As a supposedly patriotic gesture, we can certainly applaud the sentiment. But the economics remain shaky.
Hinkley Point: the ‘dreadful deal’ behind the world’s most expensive power plant, The Guardian, 21 Dec 17 Building Britain’s first new nuclear reactor since 1995 will cost twice as much as the 2012 Olympics – and by the time it is finished, nuclear power could be a thing of the past. How could the government strike such a bad deal? By Holly Watt Hinkley Point, on the Somerset coast, is the biggest building site in Europe. Here, on 430 acres of muddy fields scattered with towering cranes and bright yellow diggers, the first new nuclear power station in the UK since 1995 is slowly taking shape. When it is finally completed, Hinkley Point C will be the most expensive power station in the world. But to reach that stage, it will need to overcome an extraordinary tangle of financial, political and technical difficulties. The project was first proposed almost four decades ago, and its progress has been glacial, having faced relentless opposition from politicians, academics and economists every step of the way.
Some critics of the project have questioned whether Hinkley Point C’s nuclear reactor will even work. It is a new and controversial design, which has been dogged by construction problems and has yet to start functioning anywhere in the world. Some experts believe it could actually prove impossible to build. “It’s three times over cost and three times over time where it’s been built in Finland and France,” says Paul Dorfman, from the UCL Energy Institute. “This is a failed and failing reactor.”
Others have pointed to the cost. At present, the estimated total bill for Hinkley Point C is £20.3bn, more than twice the London Olympics. To pay for it, the British government has entered into a complex financial agreement with Électricité de France (EDF), the energy giant that is 83% owned by the French government, and China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN), a state-run Chinese energy company. Under this contract, British electricity consumers will pay billions over a 35-year period. According to Gérard Magnin, a former EDF director, the French company sees Hinkley as “a way to make the British fund the renaissance of nuclear in France”. He added: “We cannot be sure that in 2060 or 2065, British pensioners, who are currently at school, will not still be paying for the advancement of the nuclear industry in France.”
Many British observers agree that the deal is ludicrously favourable to EDF – “a dreadful deal, laughable” says Prof Steve Thomas, who works on energy policy at the University of Greenwich. But even insiders at EDF aren’t entirely happy with it. In the months before the EDF board finally signed off the deal in autumn 2016, the finance director resigned, along with Magnin. “The Hinkley Point project remains very risky,” Magnin told me. He is particularly concerned about EDF’s ability to complete the project before the current deadline of 2025. “Why have we reached this point?” asked Magnin. “It is the construction of a house of cards.”
Not everyone has lost faith in the project. When John Hutton was business secretary in 2008, he announced that the government would encourage the “safe and affordable” development of nuclear reactors. Back then, he insisted the plants would be completed “well before 2020”, and wouldn’t receive a penny in subsidies from the British government. Today, despite those earlier promises having been broken, Hutton still lobbies for nuclear: “We’re not just creating power stations,” he told me. “We are making history.”
But the irony of Hinkley Point C is that by the time it eventually starts working, it may have become obsolete. Nuclear power is facing existential problems around the world, as the cost of renewable energies fall and their popularity grows. “The maths doesn’t work,” says Tom Burke, former environmental policy adviser to BP and visiting professor at both Imperial and University Colleges. “Nuclear simply doesn’t make sense any more.”
The story of Hinkley Point C is that of a chain of decisions, taken by dozens of people over almost four decades, which might have made sense in isolation, but today result in an almost unfathomable scramble of policies and ambitions. Promises have been made and broken, policies have been adopted then dropped then adopted again. The one thing that has been consistent is the projected cost, which has rocketed ever upwards. But if so many people have come to believe that Hinkley Point C is fundamentally flawed, the question remains: how did we get to this point, where billions of pounds have been sunk into a project that seems less and less appealing with every year that passes?…..https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant?CMP=twt_gu
French people support energy transition, survey reveals, Energy Transition by Energiewende Team19 Dec 2017“……… It is often said that the French people strongly support nuclear energy as a jewel of the French industry. However, a survey commissioned by the French office of the Heinrich Boell Foundation and the French Think tank La Fabrique écologique, carried out by the research institute Harris Interactive, shows that the French people would rather like to pull up the anchor and set sail for a new model based on renewable energy.
Indeed, 91 % of interviewees consider the energy transition as “priority issue” (47%) or a “major issue” (44%). 63% see the energy transition as an opportunity rather than as a threat (11 %). But what should energy transition look like, according to them?
A clear preference for the development of renewable energy
The trend is very clear: 83 % of French people think France should prioritize investments in renewable energy. Only 12% of the interviewees prefer that investments go towards the modernization and life extension of nuclear power plants. 66 % of respondents come out against the construction of new nuclear power plants. It shows that the advertising and constantly repeated arguments that nuclear energy – often described as “clean energy” – is the only adequate solution when it comes to fighting climate change is not having the intended effect on French public opinion.
Also surprising is the fact that the actor in which the French people have the most confidence to lead the energy transition is neither the state (trusted by 49% of the interviewees) nor the energy producers and providers like the state owned EDF (trusted by only 46%). Rather, people trust citizen energy cooperatives (trusted by 78%), as well as NGOs and associations (trusted by 66 %).
A positive view of the Energiewende
Another salient point of the survey is the opinion of the French people about the German energy transition. Respondents perceived the German Energiewende much more positively than their economic and political elites……..
Over half of them see the Energiewende as “a good example for the energy transition.” Last but not least, the French people think France should work more closely with Europe (54%) and with Germany (51%) on energy issues……
Troubled $25 Billion Nuclear Project Gets OK to Continue US News, By JONATHAN LANDRUM Jr., Associated Press ATLANTA (AP) 21 Dec 17— Georgia‘s utility regulators are allowing construction to continue on two new nuclear reactors, despite massive cost overruns for the multibillion-dollar project.
Thursday’s unanimous decision by the state’s Public Service Commission will shape the future of the nation’s nuclear industry, partly because the reactors at Plant Vogtle were the first new ones to be licensed and to begin construction in the U.S. since 1978.
The project, co-owned by Georgia Power, Oglethorpe Power, MEAG Power and Dalton Utilities, has been plagued by delays and spiraling costs, compounded when the main contractor filed for bankruptcy. Westinghouse Electric Co., the U.S. nuclear unit of Japan’s Toshiba Corp., filed for bankruptcy in March.
Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal praised the PSC’s decision……
The Sierra Club, meanwhile, slammed the vote, calling the project a disaster. Ted Terry, director of the group’s Georgia chapter, said the project should have been halted……
Officials say the PSC vote means Georgia consumers will pay more for power, starting in 2021……
David Schlissel, a utility consultant and analyst who has previously testified against Vogtle, criticized Thursday’s vote, saying regulators were letting Georgia Power and its parent, the Southern Company, off the hook.
“The commission’s own monitors have identified that Southern mismanaged the project,” he said. “Now the commission is giving them unanimous approval to spend even more money.”
He added, “In Georgia, you apparently have commissioners who are fine having ratepayers shovel money into a bottomless pit.”…….
By May 2015, regulators said there was a “high probability” that construction would be delayed even longer than the three years already announced by the owners, according to an analysis obtained by The Associated Press. Estimates from regulators at that time put the utility company’s costs at $8.2 billion.
The rising construction costs hit an industry already under financial pressure, after 2011 a tsunami in Japan triggered meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. Meanwhile, the price of natural gas dropped, lessening the incentive to build new nuclear power.
In South Carolina, Santee Cooper and South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. abandoned the construction of a similar nuclear project in July, blaming the decision primarily on the bankruptcy of lead contractor Westinghouse.
Under state law, Georgia Power’s customers will ultimately reimburse the state-regulated monopoly for the flagship plant as they pay their monthly electricity bills. That law allows Georgia Power to charge its customers now for the interest it pays on the borrowed money needed for the project. Under an older law, the utility had to wait until the plant was operating to collect those interest charges from its customers, a practice that meant the interest owed grew during the construction period.
Cost overruns were also an issue with the original reactors at Vogtle. The cost of building the existing reactors at the site jumped from $660 million to nearly $9 billion by the time they started producing power in the late 1980s.
Kempner: Georgia underdogs confront power, get smacked By Matt Kempner – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 21 Dec 17, “……..the Georgia Public Service Commission was holding days of hearings recently, but there was no question where it ultimately would end up: keeping the troubled nuclear expansion of Plant Vogtle alive and giving the monopoly Georgia Power approval to squeeze captive customers for billions of dollars more in cost overruns and extra company profits.
It approved all of Georgia Power’s newly projected spending on the unfinished project, decided in advance that it is all reasonable (though not yet prudent) and set the stage for the company to pocket billions in additional profits because of the delays. ……..
Georgia Power and its contractors busted budgets in every conceivable way. Yet, the company has cautioned that its latest cost projections could still be off. And the PSC’s own staff highlighted Georgia Power’s “mismanagement” of the project and said the expansion is “uneconomic” for ratepayers under cost and risk parameters the company proposed this year……….
In a recent hearing, Prenovitz [opposing the nuclear development] asked company witnesses about Vogtle-related costs that they said they weren’t sure of. Then he started punching numbers into a calculator to help the witnesses along with other figures.
Wise, the PSC’s chairman, wasn’t happy.
“I don’t know if it is your style or your personality or your obstinance or some other adjective or just basically your lack of understanding or that you just don’t even care about the process ….”
Prenovitz told me he doesn’t know if he’ll continue to ask tough questions about Vogtle. Preparing filings can take days. Hearings last for hours. “It’s grueling.”
Two legislative committees on Wednesday unanimously approved a controversial bill that could raise New Jerseyans’ utility bills $41 a year to subsidize the state’s largest energy company.
Public Service Electric & Gas officials say the $320 million subsidy would stave off the premature closure of nuclear plants in Salem County, which will be in the red within two years……..
Stefanie Brand, director of the state’s Division of Rate Counsel that represents utility consumers, said Wednesday that the utility company has not demonstrated are hurting financially “other than bald assertions and ultimatums issued by the company.”
“The Legislature has a duty to to its constituents to test those assertions and not simply succumb to the company’s threats,” she said, adding that the review of its financials described in the legislation falls short of what is required for a thorough analysis.
Congress moves to aid Georgia’s troubled nuclear project, Politically Georgia, By Tamar Hallerman, WASHINGTON — Senators on Wednesday began laying the groundwork to aid the country’s only remaining new nuclear project under construction, the Augusta-area Plant Vogtle, less than a day before Georgia utility regulators are scheduled to rule on its fate.
The leaders of the tax-writing Finance Committee unveiled legislation that would guarantee the project roughly $800 million in federal tax credits, money Vogtle’s operators have long been counting on for their balance sheets.
The language, which Georgia’s congressional delegation has been lobbying hard for this year, would end the 2021 sunset date for the previously-promised nuclear production tax credits. Vogtle’s operators would receive the credits only after the new units go fully into operation.
The extension was needed since the project is not scheduled to be complete until 2022.
It is still unclear when both chambers of Congress will consider the legislation. Nuclear industry lobbyists have been pushing for lawmakers to consider the language as part of a must-pass government spending agreement later this week, but time on Capitol Hill is in short supply before the holiday break. U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson suggested Tuesday that Congress could wait until January and then make the credits retroactive…..http://politics.blog.myajc.com/2017/12/20/congress-moves-to-aid-georgias-troubled-nuclear-project/
Trump Drops Climate Threats from National Security Strategy, Scientific American, The president claimed yesterday that the true danger to U.S. security is not climate change, but regulations By Jean Chemnick, ClimateWire on December 19, 2017President Trump argued yesterday that the true threat to national security is not climate change but regulations that get in the way of U.S. economic and energy “dominance.”
Trump introduced his first National Security Strategy, in which he broke from the Obama administration in not listing climate change as a chief threat. His remarks at times sounded like an economic address, frequently veering into discussion of tax and trade, industrial deregulation, and a celebration of the stock market. Trump insisted that wealth and national security go hand in hand.
“Economic vitality, growth and prosperity at home is absolutely necessary for American power and influence abroad,” he said in an address that heavily focused on global competition over cooperation……
It was a sentiment that permeated the 56-page security strategy, and in particular the section titled “Embrace Energy Dominance,” which dealt with energy and climate issues…….
A former North Korean soldier told the Japanese daily there have been unconfirmed reports that a director of Bureau 131 was recently removed from his position then executed for allegedly disclosing military secrets.
Bureau 131, or the General Bureau of Atomic Energy, is a subsidiary of the ruling Worker’s party, responsible for construction works on the North’s major nuclear and missile facilities, including the main nuclear test site of Punggye-ri and the Tongchang-ri missile launch pad.
The director is believed to have worked as a specialist at the bureau since its establishment. The Asahi report suggests his sentence may have been delivered due to the delayed timing of the regime’s sixth nuclear test, and the collapse of tunnels following the massive underground blast.
A source told the paper, “It seems he took the blame as the prolonged mining of the nuclear facility pushed back the test date to September when it was initially set for spring.”
North Korea conducted its sixth and largest nuclear test at the Pyunggye-ri nuclear facility on September 3, claiming to have tested a powerful hydrogen bomb.
The artificial explosion reportedly caused buildings and grounds in the vicinity to collapse, and has since triggered a series of landslides and aftershocks.
