Southern Company

After hitting various bumps in the road, the design for the new Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor is approaching approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

But if the schedule slips much further, it seems less likely that the Southern Company could install planned new reactors of this type, Vogtle 3 and 4, on schedule in 2016 and 2017.

Until recently the two reactors had been cast as the leaders of an anticipated “nuclear renaissance.” But an end game of sorts is developing.

Southern has dug two enormous holes in the ground at its site near Augusta, Ga., adjacent to its existing Vogtle 1 and 2 reactors. It has created a tunnel to bring in cooling water from the Savannah River and constructed a building in which it will assemble modules, among other preparatory steps.

But Southern does not want to start safety-related work until the Westinghouse design is approved by the commission.



The reason is that under a licensing reform package approved in the 1990s, the company can get a single license from the commission to both build and operate the plant if it uses a preapproved design. In contrast, reactors built in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s obtained construction permits and then, as their plants approached completion, went back and sought permits to run them.

Sometimes that resulted in long delays and orders for changes in parts that had already been made. The companies that built the 104 reactors now operating in the United States thought they could save time by having the design period overlap with the construction period, but the result was cost overruns.

Sometimes teams of designers were poorly coordinated and tried to put two pieces of equipment in the same spot. Sometimes the builders installed equipment and the commission decided afterward that it would not meet safety requirements.

Southern had anticipated that approval of the design would come this summer or fall but now is hoping that it will happen by the end of the year. The staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has on several occasions asked for more information from Westinghouse about the design. As of this writing, the company has given answers and the commission’s staff is digesting the information; it has not said when it expects to issue an approval.

As time grew shorter, Southern’s law firm, Balch & Bingham, submitted a “white paper” to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in May pressing the agency about the earliest date that a license could be issued.

Approval of the design for the AP-1000 will take the form of a new federal rule, and such rules normally takes effect 30 days after they are approved by the commission. The lawyers are arguing that once the commission has given its approval, there is no need to wait 30 days before allowing Southern to build.

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who might be called a hawk on nuclear safety issues, has sent a letter to the chairman of the commission, Gregory B. Jaczko, urging him “not to divert commission staff or other resources from their responsibilities addressing real safety concerns” so Southern could start work a few weeks earlier. The commission staff may need the time to make final adjustments to the rule, he wrote.

Mr. Markey has been arguing that the commission should pay more attention to a dissenting engineer within the agency who says the containment structure for the AP-1000 is not safe because a crucial structure may be brittle.

Meanwhile, Mr. Jaczko, testifying on Tuesday before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works about the schedule for new rules after the Fukushima accident on March 11 in Japan, gave another reason why Vogtle might be delayed. He wants the commissioners to focus on deciding within 90 days whether to accept recommendations from a task force that studied the accident’s implications for American reactors.

But a majority of the commission’s members say that some of the recommendations need a lot more study.

Without a prompt decision, Mr. Jaczko said, “you delay and create uncertainty and pretty soon people are afraid to invest.”

“In my opinion, it could create delay,” he said.

Southern says it is still confident of its schedule. If it is wrong, the bulldozers will have finished their work, the concrete mixers will be ready to start and the project will still be awaiting regulatory approval.