The unfinished Unit 2 nuclear reactor pictured Sept. 12, 2024, at VC Summer nuclear site near Fairfield. (Provided by S.C. Nuclear Advisory Council)
COLUMBIA — A nuclear advisory group created by the Legislature is pushing for a study into restarting construction on a pair of nuclear reactors mothballed seven years ago as part of a failed nuclear power plant expansion in South Carolina.
Rick Lee, chairman of the South Carolina Nuclear Advisory Council, during a Oct. 15, 2024, meeting held in the state House office building on the grounds of the Statehouse. (Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)
Members of the governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council discussed the idea Tuesday after two of them made a trip last month to the abandoned reactors and parts left on site at the V.C. Summer nuclear plant in Fairfield County.
The site looked much better than expected, said Rick Lee, the council’s chairman.
“We went with the assumption that what we were going to see was in keeping with the public perception of V.C. Summer, and that is a site with tumbleweeds and coyotes and apocalyptic buildings all falling down,” said Lee, a government contracts consultant
In a report to the council Tuesday, Lee and fellow councilman Jim Little said the site was instead in “excellent condition,” minus “surface rust” on some of the rebar and equipment. They said excess parts stored and inventoried in 14 warehouses on site remain in “pristine” condition.
“There’s not a lot of decay or anything like that. It’s actually in pretty good shape,” said Little, who worked for more than 50 years in the nuclear industry.
While the council was created decades ago to advise the governor about nuclear issues, Gov. Henry McMaster did not ask for a recommendation about the site or encourage the Sept. 12 visit, Lee said.
Nuclear reactor assemblies pictured Sept. 12, 2024, in storage at VC Summer nuclear site near Fairfield. (Provided by S.C. Nuclear Advisory Council)
He said the idea to go came about after he attended a nuclear power summit at the University of South Carolina, where questions about the status of V.C. Summer came up.
State-owned utility Santee Cooper and now defunct South Carolina Electric & Gas were partners on the V.C. Summer expansion, which was a first-of-its-kind design and marked the first new nuclear construction in the country in 40 years. The companies abandoned the effort in 2017, after jointly spending $9 billion.
The debacle left customers of Virginia-based Dominion Energy, which bought out SCANA in the aftermath, on the hook for more than $2 billion for reactors that never generated power. Santee Cooper’s share of the debt was $3.6 billion.
“There’s really a lot of money in the ground,” Lee said. “And my hope is that we don’t wind up with a concrete monolith that sits there for 100 years that really is a symbol of a failure.”
“We should take the last look before we declare this thing a scrap field and sell it off for scrap value,” Little added.
The two councilmen think the site has potential, “if somebody will just ring the bell and get it started,” Lee said.
Here’s how much SC power customers are still paying for a failed nuclear project
It could be the answer, Lee said, to South Carolina’s possible power shortage as the state’s population balloons, industry expands and federal environmental regulations mandate the closure of coal-fired power.
Asked by reporters what he thought of the idea, McMaster said a lot of questions must be answered before a reboot could be considered. However, he’s supportive of “whatever we can do to have enough power to drive our prosperity” in the state, he said following a meeting on Statehouse grounds unrelated to the nuclear council.
Meanwhile, a state Senate panel has been meeting for more than a month as it considers how to address the future of energy in the rapidly growing Palmetto State.
Nuclear, Lee and Little say, is seeing a resurgence.
“We are no longer at the first-of-a-kind situation,” Little said.
The four-unit Vogtle power plant in Georgia, which started construction in unison with V.C. Summer, is now operational, though it came online seven years late at a cost of $35 billion — more than double the initial $14 billion estimate.
Little also pointed to other nuclear plants being restarted around the country, such as Watts Bar in Tennessee, which was fired back up more than 25 years after the project was ceased.
And the remaining unit at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, where a second unit suffered its notorious partial meltdown in 1979, is under consideration for a restart to power a Microsoft data center.
James Little, a member of the South Carolina Nuclear Advisory Council, during a Oct. 15, 2024, meeting held in the state House office building on the grounds of the Statehouse. (Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)
Still, Little said, finishing off even one of the expansion units at V.C. Summer would likely cost billions of dollars and take upwards of eight years. Plus, there is no regulatory protocol for restarting construction of a nuclear plant after its federal license is terminated.
The council provided little detail about how a potential restart might work. Beyond suggesting a study, the council does not plan to say who they think should fund the study, who would own and operate the plant, or how any of those things would be paid for.
One thing council members did say is power customers should not foot the bill.
“They’ve already paid and paid dearly,” Lee said.
There are other ways to get the deal done, Lee and Little claim.
They pointed to the proposed restart of Michigan’s Palisades plant being championed by Holtec International.
Holtec has so far raised $3 billion for the project — with a conditional $1.5 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, $1.3 billion in U.S. Department of Agriculture grants to area electric cooperatives and $300 million in funding from the state of Michigan.
Nuclear reactor vessel pictured Sept. 12, 2024, in storage at VC Summer nuclear site near Fairfield. (Provided by S.C. Nuclear Advisory Council)
Tom Clements, a long-time critic of the V.C. Summer expansion, was the lone person to warn against a potential reboot. He said the inspection of equipment necessary for getting federal regulators to sign off on relicensing would be time-consuming. And he doesn’t see any of South Carolina’s utility companies stepping up to start the process.
“I would think they are very wary of this,” Clements said.
Rhonda O’Banion, a spokeswoman for Dominion, confirmed that while the original unit at V.C. Summer has been running reliably for more than 40 years, the company “has no plans to restart construction of additional units.”
Santee Cooper, for its part, has been working with the failed project’s contractor, Westinghouse, to market and sell off the nuclear-specific equipment left on site, according to spokeswoman Mollie Gore.
More than $75 million in sales have been made and proceeds split between the two.
The state-owned utility, “at this point is not interested in owning or operating those units,” Gore added.