The expansion of Vogtle beyond its two existing reactors promises decades of additional electricity generation without carbon dioxide emissions, which have been tied to climate change. It’s just the facts of where we are at.” He said that more details will be revealed as part of a later PSC review of costs closer to the project’s completion.Ĭredit: Curtis Compton / Curtis Compton / Carbon-free power but at a heavy cost Still, he said, the project’s major players “are all doing terrific work at the site.”Īsked why quality issues have been worse than expected, he said, “It’s not about why. Georgia Power had not expected the level of quality issues experienced so far, he said. “We knew building new nuclear units would be challenging,” he wrote, “and, when we get new information or identify new challenges we have to work through, we always factor that into our estimates.”Ībramovitz also said in an interview it would be unreasonable for him to predict that there will be no additional cost overruns or delays on the project. Georgia Power chief financial officer Aaron Abramovitz said in an email to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “We always submit our best estimates regarding cost and schedule to the Georgia PSC - under oath” and the company “would disagree with any claim to the contrary.” Roetger, the PSC analyst, responded: “I can’t really answer that question. The strategy has left a backup of 25,000 unfinished company inspection reports, an “almost unimaginable” amount, Grace testified in December.Ĭredit: Curtis Compton / Curtis Compton / We always submit our best estimate”įor years, Georgia Power set and stuck with projections that monitors and PSC staff warned were wrong.ĭuring a December hearing, Glenn Carroll, a representative of Nuclear Watch South, a frequent critic of the project, cited the consistently incorrect estimates by company executives and asked, “When does that become fraud or concealment? They are not dumb, right?” They said it actually increased delays by deprioritizing quality and pushing back testing and review steps. PSC staff and monitors had long been critical of Georgia Power’s strategy to speed up the project to meet unrealistic deadlines. “And you still don’t get it,” he said, apparently referring to project leadership. Testifying in a December PSC hearing, he said, “I can look back through the history of this project and point out six different times when it happened.” Mistakes made earlier in the project were later repeated, such as not having a corrective action program that worked, Roetger said. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials launched a review, then increased federal safety oversight on the project.Ĭompleting fixes has been “grindingly slow,” in part because many problems were caught after other equipment was installed, blocking easy access in tight spaces, according to Steven Roetger, the lead analyst on the project for the elected Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates Georgia Power. Sweeping problems have been uncovered, including 600 incorrectly placed cables, potential safety issues that weren’t prevented despite being first noticed more than a year earlier. Estimates vary, but it appears the construction and financing cost of the project has essentially doubled, perhaps to more than $28 billion for all the project’s owners, including Georgia Power and affiliates of electric membership corporations and city utilities. State monitors say the company is still off, potentially by another $1 billion for the total project. Georgia Power announced hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs in 2021, on a project that was already billions of dollars over budget. Grace compared it to trying to drive up a snowy hill - ‘‘The wheels are turning, money is being spent,” but progress is slow and sometimes “you are actually slipping backwards.” Independent monitors say the company is still underestimating how long it will take. They now say the first reactor may not be done until late September 2022. Construction on that first new unit at Plant Vogtle, located south of Augusta, was more than 94% complete, the company said.īut within months, company leaders had pushed back the projected completion date of the reactors four times. Leaders of the Atlanta-based utility confidently predicted that, by November, Georgians finally would get electricity from the first of Vogtle’s two new reactors, nearly 11 years after customers began paying for it and more than five years after initially planned. Credit: Curtis Compton / Curtis Compton / “You still don’t get it”Īt the beginning of 2021, Georgia Power officials expressed high hopes.
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