“I think this license needed something that ensured that the changes as a result of Fukushima would be implemented,” Jaczko said in an interview after the vote. “It’s like when you go to buy a house and the home inspector identifies things that should be fixed. You don’t go to closing before those things are fixed.”
Jaczko said he did not believe that those changes would be onerous or time consuming or that they would delay construction. He said they involved issues such as how the reactors would deal with an extended blackout and the use of better instrumentation for measuring the amount of water in spent fuel pools in the event of an accident. “To me, it’s just common sense,” he said.
Southern, which filed its license application in March 2008, said it expects the project to cost about $14 billion. It will use Toshiba’s AP1000 reactors, the design of which the NRC certified in December, and it hopes to bring them online in 2016 and 2017.
The new reactors, however, are no longer seen as the start of what the industry once predicted would be a nuclear renaissance. Virtually all of the 31 plants that had been proposed by 2009 have been shelved as a result of cheap natural gas, high construction costs, weak electricity demand and safety concerns following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan.
Ten anti-nuclear groups have vowed to file suit against the NRC if it approves the license as expected. The groups said they would argue that the agency broke the law by failing to consider the full lessons of the Fukushima disaster, in which a string of four reactors were badly damaged in an earthquake and tsunami.
Southern, whose Georgia Power subsidiary owns 45.7 percent of the project, has already spent $4 billion preparing the site and doing preliminary construction 26 miles southeast of Augusta.
It has been able to keep pushing ahead in part because the Energy Department in February 2010 approved $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for the new reactors, saving Southern and its partners hundreds of millions of dollars in financing costs, one of the biggest expenses of building nuclear power plants. Critics say that the Obama administration underestimated the risk of default, cost overruns and delays.
Moreover, in Georgia, utilities can pass along costs to ratepayers while construction is still in progress. In most states, utilities can only start charging ratepayers for a power plant once the plant is operating. Georgia ratepayers paid $233 million in 2011 and this year will pay $258 million to cover part of Southern’s costs. Additional amounts will be passed along in later years, averaging $8.74 a month for a typical customer, according to Southern spokesman Mark Williams.
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