Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Nuclear Industry Dying In US

Looking to buy two half-finished nuclear reactors? It may be your lucky day.

U.S. utility owner Scana Corp. dropped a plan to build two reactors at the V.C. Summer power plant in South Carolina on Monday after the projected total costs exceeded $20 billion. The cancelation of the project is another blow to the much-hyped (and thus far non-existent) nuclear renaissance in the U.S. As cheap natural gas squeezes the margins of nuclear generators, there’s only one company currently building reactors in the country -- Southern Co., at its Vogtle plant in Georgia.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-01/for-sale-two-half-finished-nuclear-reactors-never-used

The Bloomberg report does not mention (I wonder why?) that the Scana reactors are part of the Toshiba/Westinghouse debacle. So are the two under-construction reactors at Vogtle:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-westinghouse-scana-idUSKBN1AC3DN

The demise of the US nuclear industry has more to do with government and corporate incompetence than anything else. And these are the same government and corporations which are going to make America great again? What a joke.

I got a job offer at Vogtle once, and I turned it down. Probably a good choice on my part.

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