Cost overruns halt building of 2 nuke power plants in US

At that time, Georgia Power said it had spent $3.9 billion of a projected $5.4 billion as its 45.7 percent share of the project with a total price tag of roughly $11 billion.

The decisions follow a commitment last week from Toshiba to contribute .2 billion toward the plant’s completion.

Santee Cooper and majority partner South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. gave Westinghouse full notice to proceed with construction in April 2012. Since 2008, the two electrical providers have been partnered in the effort to build the nuclear energy generators.

SCE&G later announce that it, too, would cease work on the power plant.

“With the failure of Westinghouse and the collapse of the other project and the fact that this risk continues to go up, it screams for a pause and a new evaluation going forward”, he said.

The proposed plan would stretch the course over 60 years to limit the increase of costs on your bill. “It is critical that we keep our fuel mix diversified, especially considering the exodus from coal and the growing reliance on natural gas, the prices of which have fluctuated in extremes during my tenure”.

After the Santee Cooper board meeting, Tom Clements, a critic of the nuclear project with the organization Friends of the Earth, said he wasn’t celebrating.

Nuclear power plants around the country are struggling to compete with power from cheap natural gas. That marked a shift from the end of March when Scana Chief Executive Officer Kevin Marsh said that scrapping the project would be the “least preferred option”.

The decision comes just days after Westinghouse’s parent company Toshiba agreed to pay the two project owners almost $2.2 billion to cap its liabilities from the unfinished nuclear project.

The companies said higher than expected construction costs, delays and the bankruptcy of the lead contractor on the project, Westinghouse, have contributed to the ballooning costs, The Hill reported.

SCE&G and Santee Cooper were unwilling or unable to assume that the extension would eventually be passed by a government that can not seem to get any legislation through the full process of becoming law. The Georgia project also got a much more favorable guaranteed payment for future cost overruns from Westinghouse’s parent company, Toshiba, than the SC project, Wise said.

“We simply can not ask our customers to pay for a project that has become uneconomical”, Lonnie Carter, Santee Cooper chief executive said in a statement.

The decision deals a major blow to the American nuclear industry.

The reactors were proposed a decade ago when USA policymakers expected more than a dozen new nuclear power plants to provide carbon-free electricity.

“It is my hope that we do not retreat from nuclear power”, Wise wrote. The House approved a bill extending the deadline, but the measure stalled in the Senate.

Instead, Westinghouse in China serves in the role that the Cranberry company would prefer to have in the US projects and everywhere going forward – as a technology partner. “Certainly project delays impacted those calculations, but no one ever factored this into their equations”. Gov. Henry McMaster called for legislators to hold hearings to get customers’ questions answered.

The decision leaves Southern Company’s similarly troubled twin-reactor project at Plant Vogtle, near Augusta, Ga., as the last nuclear plant still under construction.

A 2007 state law allows electric utilities to collect money from customers to finance a project before it generates power. That unit came online in 1983 and today provides the lowest cost electricity of all Santee Cooper’s base load generating stations.

“We, the government, have granted you a monopoly”, Fanning said, “We have granted you the right to increase the amount that you charge customers far beyond what they deserve, to pay for the power that they receive. We’re not going to ask our customers to do that because it’s not in their best interest”.