The decision this week by SCE&G and Santee Cooper to abandon construction of two partially built, multi-billion-dollar reactors in Fairfield County continues to raise questions throughout South Carolina and across the country. SCE&G and junior-partner Santee Cooper quit the project at the V.C. Summer nuclear station because of higher-than-expected costs and less-than-expected demand for energy, as well as troubles with Westinghouse, its chief contractor. Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy in March, which effectively torpedoed the project. Here are some of the questions being asked about the decision.
The State 3rd Aug 2017 read more »
Two of the last four commercial nuclear power plants under construction in the United States—both of them at the V.C. Summer site in South Carolina—have been cancelled. A decision on the remaining two, which are in Georgia, will be made in August. “DING DONG, Summer is dead,” says Glenn Carroll, one of a core group of safe energy activists who have labored for decades to rid the southeast of these last four reactor projects. “This project has been a multi-billion-dollar disaster,” adds Stephen A. Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “We also call on Georgia Power and their utility partners to protect their customers from the similarly risky, mismanaged project” at the Vogtle site in Georgia. Should those two plants in Georgia also be cancelled, as seems increasingly likely, the United States would be free of all new commercial reactor construction for the first time since the 1950s. It would mark the definitive death of the dream of “too cheap to meter” radioactive energy, and end an era marked by massive cost overruns, soaring operating and maintenance expenses, a string of bankruptcies, two major meltdowns, an unsolved radioactive waste burden.
Reader Supported News 2nd Aug 2017 read more »
