Southern Wants to Speed Reactor Building After NRC Approval
Southern Co. (SO), the biggest U.S. utility by market value, wants to speed construction of new reactors in Georgia as soon as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission certifies the design, a company executive said.
“We will be in a position to implement the rule-making as soon as it is affirmed,” Joseph “Buzz” Miller, executive vice president for nuclear development of Southern Nuclear Operating Co., said today at a meeting at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Maryland.
The NRC must issue final approval of the AP1000 reactor, designed by Toshiba Corp. (6502)’s Westinghouse Electric unit, before it can issue the first license in more than 30 years to build and operate the reactors. Atlanta-based Southern wants the NRC to issue the license for building two units at its Vogtle plant near Augusta, Georgia, after the commission votes on the designs, rather than wait 30 days after the rule is published in the Federal Register.
The agency has already given Southern permission to perform limited construction, including digging a hole for the foundation and preparing it for later work, Burnell said in August. The company wants to stay on schedule to begin producing electricity with the reactors in 2016 and 2017, spokesman Steve Higginbottom said in August.
“The staff would expect we could publish that final rule very early next year,” NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said in a Sept. 16 phone interview.
’Historic Day’
“This is an important and historic day,” NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko said at today’s meeting, the first such hearing on a new reactor-license application since the 1970s.
Scana Corp. (SCG) of Cayce, South Carolina, is scheduled next. Scana has proposed adding two AP1000 reactors at its Virgil C. Summer plant about 26 miles (42 kilometers) northwest of Columbia, the state capital. The NRC has scheduled an Oct. 12 hearing for that project.
Westinghouse changed the design of the AP1000’s containment shield to accommodate U.S. rules, drafted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, mandating that such structures be able to withstand aircraft strikes. Southern and Scana have said they plan to build the modified reactors.
China is building the world’s first two AP1000 reactors, relying on an earlier design.
No Fukushima Lessons
The NRC’s staff conducting an environmental review of the AP1000 concluded that Japan’s nuclear disaster in March didn’t offer any new information to consider in the agency study, Gregory Hatchett, environmental-branch chief in the agency’s new reactor office, said at today’s meeting. An earthquake and tsunami caused radiation leaks and meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant.
“I’m not understanding why this wasn’t significant information,” Jaczko said. The NRC chairman has urged colleagues to quickly adopt a task-force’s recommendations for improving safety at the 104 commercial U.S. reactors in response to the catastrophe.
Changes in the review weren’t warranted because the disaster hasn’t called into question the NRC staff’s analysis of the AP1000’s ability to handle severe accidents, Hatchett said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Brian Wingfield in Rockville, Maryland at bwingfield3@bloomberg.net
Julie Johnsson in Chicago at jjohnsson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net
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