AP1000 Nuclear Reactor at Vogtle Power Plant: 7-year Delay and Doubled Budget, What’s Next for the US Nuclear Industry?

Like the Flamanville EPR in France, the first AP1000 nuclear reactor at the American Vogtle power plant will have experienced a significant delay, of 7 years, before its commercial commissioning at the end of June.

The French nuclear sector is not the only one to have progressed slowly in recent years. On the other side of the Atlantic, the first “third generation” AP1000 reactor is just about to enter commercial service on the site of the Georgian Vogtle power station. The installation designed by Westinghouse must produce more than 1100 megawatts and make it possible to supply half a million homes with electricity.

The pair will be completed with the commissioning of a second AP1000 before the end of the year. If the last reactor start-up in the United States dates back to 2016 with the end of the Watts Bar 2 construction site, the country had not started up any nuclear reactors for three decades. It now has 93 for a production capacity of 96 GW, making it the largest nuclear fleet in the world ahead of China and France.

But the path to this new pair from the Vogtle powerhouse has been strewn with challenges. In the end, the project accumulated seven years of delay on its delivery while the total cost of the installations doubled compared to the budget initially planned, exceeding 30 billion euros. “We started building without finishing the design and that was a mistake,” says to Echoes David Durham, vice president of Energy Systems at Westinghouse.

“We had issues building a first copy, we changed builders twice and Westinghouse ended up having to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.”

No new AP1000 orders for a few years

And these difficulties are not likely to favor other similar projects across the Atlantic. Especially since Vogtle 3 and 4 have at least had the merit of succeeding, which was not the case for the two AP1000s planned for the VC Summer plant in South Carolina and which were finally abandoned in 2017. The file had turned into a scandal, the former CEO of the electrician being accused of having deceived his customers by hiding the difficulties. The scandal finally earned him a two-year prison sentence in 2021, while a fifteen-month sentence was handed down to another leader last March.

It is therefore not surprising that no other AP1000 order is in the pipeline in the United States and the situation should not change for two to five years according to David Durham’s outlook: “American electricians have all decided to wait for Vogtle to start, and I don’t expect them to make up their mind tomorrow, but I’m sure we’ll see more AP1000s in the US.”

The IRA as a lever of action

In the absence of a development plan for the nuclear sector, the Biden administration intends at least to maintain its 20% threshold in national electricity production while many reactors have been forced to close for economic reasons in recent years. years: the closure of the Californian Diablo Canyon power plant is thus delayed.

Known for its generous subsidies to companies manufacturing electric cars or their batteries, the famous Inflation Reduction Act also provides production aid and tax credits for new investments in the nuclear industry. On the other hand, these seem for the moment oriented towards small reactors of the SMR type which could replace certain coal-fired power stations. As such, Westinghouse has just announced a reduced version of the AP1000, the AP300 project, which is added to the Nuscale project (VOYAGR).

“The overall investment is obviously lower for a small reactor, and this is an argument for customers, underlines David Durham. But whoever says that the full cost of the energy produced by an SMR will be lower than that of a great unity veils its face.”

Despite raising 340 million dollars in 2021, Nuscale does not anticipate commissioning its first module before the end of 2029. Also affected by inflation and the rise in interest rates, its CEO deplores an increase of 50 % of the megawatt hour price in less than two years to reach nearly 90 dollars per megawatt hour: the overall cost of a 462 MW reactor would therefore amount to 9.3 billion dollars. In a more advanced phase, the TerraPower project will not be completed before 2030 after having been postponed for at least two years.