POWER May 2013 - 72

NUCLEAR POWER
suffering from delays and cost increases.
In the U.S., Southern Company has announced
that it is pushing back the planned
start for its two-unit Vogtle new build to
the fourth quarter of 2017 and the fourth
quarter of 2018, a year's delay on top of
earlier delays (Figure 3). SCANA Corp.'s
V.C. Summer two-unit expansion has run
into the same problems with the structural
design of the reinforced concrete basemat
that hit Vogtle, and Summer is running behind
schedule. SCANA completed placement
of the nuclear island basemat for
Summer Unit 2 on March 11.
The key to the future for nuclear power
in the U.S. undoubtedly will be economics.
The first go-round for nuclear in the U.S.
was a tragicomedy of cost overruns and
sliding schedules, leading to a new industry
vocabulary that included phrases such
as " imprudence " and " rate shock. " So far,
with Vogtle in the U.S. and France's horrific
experience in Finland, not much seems
to have changed. The cost of the 1,600MW
Olkiluoto unit in Finland, originally
pegged at about $4 billion, has soared to
north of $7 billion (and the project is at
least seven years behind schedule).
SMR skeptics-and they do exist-often
focus on the capital costs of the smaller
machines. The small reactors surrender the
economies of scale that drove the evolution
of the first generations of conventional
nuclear plants to 1,000 MW and above.
On the other hand, SMRs may gain cost
savings by factory fabricating most of the
parts offsite and assembling them on the
site, reducing construction costs.
B&W's goal, Mowry said, is to offer
a reactor that is no more expensive than
conventional new large reactor designs.
He pegs that figure at $5,000/kW, which
may strike some as astonishingly high. But
because of the modular nature of the technology,
the capital hit doesn't come all at
once. For TVA, that would mean bringing
the two 180-MW units in at a capital cost
of under $2 billion. The target date for the
plant going commercial is 2022.
After previously exploring the possibilities
for both Germany and, counterintuitively,
France to get out of nuclear power
entirely, the March-April issue of the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists ponders, in
three separate articles, whether nuclear
power is reaching a dead end in the U.S.
Looking at Dominion's surprise decision
to close the Kewaunee plant, at a point
where it had recently received a 20-year license
extension, the wobbles at Vogtle and
elsewhere, and the economics of nuclear
energy, Editor John Mecklin summarizes:
" In the United States, policy makers, the
press (in general), and the public at large
have yet to focus significantly on the question
of whether the country might be better
or worse off if reliance on nuclear power
were curtailed or eliminated. " Mecklin
adds, " The question deserves a serious,
considered answer in every country with a
commercial nuclear power industry. "
Can the SMR rescue nuclear energy in
the U.S., where the conventional approach
to nuclear power plants has so far failed?
Or is nuclear a dead industry walking?
Next year, no doubt, the old geezers and
the young guns of the nuclear endeavor
will again assemble in Washington to assess
the state of the industry. Stay tuned
for the next installment of the adventures
of the atom. ■
-Kennedy Maize is a POWER contributing
editor and executive editor of
MANAGING POWER.
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