Long-Delayed Vogtle Nuclear Plants Want To Delay Reporting How Much Longer They’ll Be Delayed
When centrists insist we need to build more nuclear power plants as part of the decarbonization push to prevent climate change, they ignore two very important things: New nuclear power plants are fiendishly expensive and have a lousy track record of getting built on time. Or even at all. Southern Company’s Georgia Power division started building its new Vogtle nuclear reactors in 2009, with expected completion in 2016. It’s now three years later, the two reactors have been delayed till 2021 and 2022, and now Georgia Power is asking to delay reporting on whether or not those delayed openings will once again be delayed.
Georgia Power is supposed to be reporting every six months, with the next update due later this month. But new reports indicate that Georgia’s Public Service Commission regulators have asked for a six-month delay because the commission has “an extra heavy caseload and plans to increase monitoring”. (If that sounds odd to you … it should.) Georgia Power was happy to agree, but not everyone is on board.
“The company and the project do not deserve this break in scrutiny at this critical time,” Sara Barczak, a director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “The ratepayers do not deserve this extended period of a lack of protection and transparency as their exposure potentially increases by more than a billion dollars.”
