Fretwell reported in October 2024 that seven years after two power companies abandoned a failing nuclear construction project, a report has concluded that the equipment and existing buildings on the site are in “excellent’’ condition — and it would be worth a look at restarting construction.
Santee Cooper, sparked dozens of legal actions, lawsuits and a handful of civil
and criminal fraud charges. The project was abandoned in 2017.
A Sep. 16 report by two members of the Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council said partially completed buildings show “no degradation, corrosion’’ or chipped concrete at the V.C. Summer site northwest of Columbia. The report, discussed Tuesday at the council’s quarterly meeting, said nuclear parts that had already been installed showed some surface rust, but that was not unexpected or a substantial problem.
The V.C. Summer nuclear expansion project marked what many consider the biggest construction failure in South Carolina history. The project to build two reactors to complement an existing one cost $9 billion, soaked ratepayers with higher utility bills and left thousands of employees out of work. Utilities walked away from the project in 2017 because of excessive costs and delays. But there has been renewed talk of restarting the effort to meet growing energy needs, and the Advisory Council report examined what kind of shape the buildings and equipment were in.
“Both the installed components and those in storage are in excellent condition,’’ the report by Advisory Council members Rick Lee and Jim Little said. “There is an extensive inventory of materials, assemblies and electrical and instrumentation systems that is well-maintained and inventoried in a series of warehouses.’’
All told, 14 warehouses are full of equipment, Little told the council Tuesday. The report, written after Lee and Little toured the site Sept. 12, said South Carolina should at least ‘’take a last look at whether the plant offers an an opportunity to jump start the solution to our power needs.’’ Lee and Little’s report said they did not expect the site to be in such solid shape and that there were no “obvious’’ technical conditions precluding completing the project.
“My hope is that we don’t wind up with a concrete monolith that sits there for 100 years that is really a symbol of a failure to cooperate,’’ Lee said Tuesday referring to problems that caused utilities to walk away from it in July 2017.
One of two reactors that was being built at V.C. Summer is more than 40 percent complete, while the other is about 20 percent finished, according to Santee Cooper, one of two partners in the failed nuclear expansion project. The two unfinished reactors would have complemented an existing reactor on the site in Fairfield County.
The reality of restarting the project is unknown without more study and finding a way to pay for it. Doing so would make for an additional cost, beyond the more than the $9 billion Santee Cooper and SCE&G spent on the V.C. Summer project before it was shelved seven years ago. Lee and Little’s report recommended a more extensive study of the equipment, buildings and possibility of finishing the project.
Considering the costs to customers — many are still paying for the failed project as part of their monthly energy bills — beginning work on the abandoned reactors could be unpopular with the public, said Tom Clements, a nuclear safety watchdog and critic of the V.C. Summer expansion. As of late last year, ratepayers were still being charged more than 5 percent on their Dominion energy bills for the failed project.
At the same time, SCE&G, which was acquired by Dominion Energy, terminated the federal license to build the plant. Getting a new one for the work could be an extensive process, taking possibly years to complete, he said.
“It would take a tremendous amount of effort and financial resources that would make restart of the project highly impractical,’’ Clements said.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Lee and Little acknowledged it could take eight years to complete the project, but Lee said it could work if “somebody will just ring the bell and get it started.’’
Toward the end of Tuesday’s meeting, Little and Lee suggested the project could be funded privately, meaning ratepayers would not be affected. They did not elaborate. Their comments followed Sen. Tom Young’s concerns about the impact on ratepayers of restarting the project.
“You must know something more than what I know,’’ Young, R-Aiken, said.
Meanwhile, Santee Cooper is not interested in owning or operating nuclear reactors at V.C. Summer, if they were completed, a spokeswoman said. A Dominion spokesman offered similar comments.
The Virginia-headquartered power company “has no plans to restart construction of additional units at V.C. Summer,’’ spokeswoman Rhonda O’Banion said in an email. The email said, however, that the company is committed to the existing nuclear reactor at V.C. Summer.
Even so, the Advisory Council report said it found buildings and remaining equipment in good enough shape to justify “a serious discussion and further investigation as to the feasibility of completion.’’ Lee and Little looked at six buildings and 13 pieces of equipment, some of which had been partially installed on one of the reactors.
Among the buildings they looked at were cooling towers, a turbine hall and a containment building. Equipment they saw included a generator dome, reactor vessels, reactor cooling pumps, steam generators and diesel generators. The report said equipment warehouses were well maintained.
The report said at least one of the two partially built reactors should be considered for completion. That one is known as Unit 2.
It wasn’t clear from the report what percentage of equipment remains on the site, but Santee Cooper spokeswoman Mollie Gore said the state-owned company is actively marketing the equipment for sale. The company already has sold $100 million worth of equipment, she said in an email.
Cranking up an abandoned nuclear site is not unprecedented. The report said that, in 2015, the Watts Bar Unit 2 project in Tennessee was restarted, more than 25 years after the project had been stopped.
Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, also has mentioned that the infamous Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania was under consideration for restart of a nuclear reactor. Davis suggested Lee and Little put together the report discussed Tuesday at the council meeting. Efforts are underway to crank up a unit that shut down in 2019 so that the plant can accommodate a Microsoft data center, Reuters reported. Data centers are tremendous users of energy. The Three-Mile Island site is home to what’s considered the nation’s worst nuclear accident, a meltdown in the 1970s [But, no one was injured or irradiated]. The reactor to be restarted is not the one in which the 1979 accident occurred.
Last month’s report followed recent questions by Davis, R-Beaufort, about the need for more energy in South Carolina. In a legislative meeting last month, Davis asked whether the Summer project could be booted back up and some of the cost paid by large energy users, such as data centers that use tremendous amounts of power.
While Santee Cooper said it was not interested in operating nuclear reactors, its chief executive said last month that he favors the idea of using more nuclear power to help provide energy for data centers.
“It’s nice to see nuclear energy is being viewed, quite frankly, as green energy,’’ Santee Cooper’s Jimmy Staton said during the legislative hearing on the state’s energy future. “In my view, it should be, it’s got to be a part of the future.’’
Dominion Energy and Santee Cooper jointly own the V.C. Summer property, but Santee and Westinghouse own the equipment.
When the V.C. Summer expansion project shut down, SCE&G ratepayers had been charged more than $1 billion for the construction, prompting a public and political outcry. Top utility executives were accused of withholding information about the project’s problems, charged criminally for their actions and sentenced to prison.
It’s unclear whether the Legislature would include help to restart the site in a new energy bill it is working on for next year. The last energy bill bogged down and failed last year, in part because it included a wide array of ideas that drew criticism from solar power advocates, anti-nuclear activists and others.
The V.C. Summer nuclear site is in the small community of Jenkinsville in Fairfield County, about 25 miles northwest of Columbia. The existing reactor began production of energy in the 1980s.
Nuclear energy already is a major source of power in South Carolina, but critics say expansion would create more atomic waste and include risks of accidents. Boosters say nuclear is the best way to provide energy that doesn’t release greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
The doomed V.C. Summer nuclear plant, a joint failed venture of SCE&G and Santee Cooper, sparked dozens of legal actions, lawsuits and a handful of civil and criminal fraud charges. The project was abandoned in 2017.
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