Vogtle Nuclear Plant in Georgia Faces More Construction Delays
June 08 2021 - 1:33PM
Dow Jones News
By Russell Gold
The only nuclear-power plant under construction in the U.S. is
facing delays and additional costs. Again.
Earlier this week, an engineering expert working for the Georgia
Public Service Commission testified that the startup of the Alvin
W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant would likely be delayed until
the summer of 2022 and cost $2 billion more than expected.
Southern Co., the Atlanta-based utility building the
nuclear-power plant, didn't immediately comment on the testimony.
Chairman and Chief Executive Thomas A. Fanning recently pushed back
the plant's scheduled start of generating electricity from November
2021 until early 2022. Last month, he said at the company's annual
shareholder meeting that testing of the equipment to ensure the
plant was safe "may take a few weeks longer than our original
plan."
Vogtle has been beset by numerous delays and cost overruns. It
was originally scheduled to open in 2016, and the total cost of the
two planned Vogtle reactors tops $27 billion -- more than double
the initial estimates approved by state regulators in 2008.
The problems finishing Vogtle have damped enthusiasm for what
was hailed a decade ago as a possible nuclear renaissance in the
U.S. Today, the facility located near Augusta, Ga., highlights the
financial and industrial difficulty of building a new nuclear-power
plant in a country that hasn't completed a new one in three
decades.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 08, 2021 13:27 ET (17:27 GMT)
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