Nuclear Reactors 299 - Problems At VC Summers With The Construction Of Two Westinghouse AP1000 Reactors
I have blogged before about the two new Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear power reactors that were under construction at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Power Station in South Carolina which is owned by SCANA and Santee Copper. The construction began in 2009 with the expectation that the new reactors would be ready to operate in 2018. The initial estimated budget was eleven billion dollars.
By the year 2016, the construction project employed over five thousand workers at the site near Jenkinsville, S.C. This project and the Geogia project to build two more AP1000s were supposed to be the start of a “nuclear renaissance” in the U.S. where no new power reactors had been built for decades. A newly revealed cache of emails and other documents regarding the new V.C. Summer reactors contained suggestions for talking points about how well the project was going and how important it was to South Carolina.
In spite of the positive talk, the upper management of SCANA and Santee Copper were already discussing serious problems with the construction of the reactors. In December of 2016, state regulators were concerned about the lack of a construction schedule. Westinghouse nuclear division was in serious financial difficulty and causing huge problems for its parent company, Toshiba of Japan. The executive director of the South Carolina Office of Regulatory Staff wrote a letter to the CEO of SCANA which said, “It is difficult for ORS to do our job, and for SCE&G to do its due diligence as an owner without timely access to this critical information regarding budget and schedule risks.”
Relations between SCANA and Santee Copper and their prime contractor Westinghouse were deteriorating before reports surfaced that Westinghouse was considering declaring bankruptcy. In March of 2017, Westinghouse admitted that they did not have a full construction schedule. SCANA and Santee Copper executives claimed that Westinghouse had lied to them. Emails reveal multiple charges that both Westinghouse and Toshiba had repeated lied about the project. Bechtel did an audit of the procedures in place at the V.C Summer construction site. They concluded more than a year before the revelation that SCANA and Santee Copper simply did not have the necessary oversight in place at V.C Summer to be aware of serious problems with the construction.
As problems piled up in 2017, SCANA and Santee Copper considered cancelling the whole project. By the end of April, only thirty five percent of the construction was complete. The design had not be finalized but engineers claimed that they only a few percent of the necessary work to accomplish. Ninety percent of the materials necessary to complete the work had been delivered to the site. If the project were cancelled, SCANA and Santee Copper would be saddled with the cost of materials and equipment that would not be used.
In early June, the CEO of SCANA told the board members that completion date had been pushed back four years. The estimated total cost for the project was now twenty four billion dollars, more than double the original estimate of eleven billion dollars. By early July, it was obvious that SCANA and Santee Copper executives were convinced that the project was doomed. They were talking about cancelling a project which had already absorbed nine million dollars. The CEO told the board that the only hope for the project would be if the U.S. government, the State of South Carolina, or another utility company bailed out the project. A plea was made to the Department of Energy and was rejected. SCANA and Santee Copper officially pulled the plug in August.
