US electricity utility Georgia Power has announced a further delay and a significant cost increase in its Vogtle nuclear power plant (NPP) expansion project. Vogtle (full name: Alvin W Vogtle Electric Generating site) is located at the town of Waynesboro, in the US State of Georgia. It has two operating nuclear reactors, known as Vogtle 1 and Vogtle 2. Georgia Power, part of the Southern Company group, is the biggest shareholder in the Vogtle expansion project. Georgia Power’s share is 45.7%, with two other power companies together having 52.7% and the Dalton City holding 1.6%.

Two new AP1000 nuclear reactors are currently being built at Vogtle, unsurprisingly designated Vogtle 3 and Vogtle 4. These are the first Generation III+ reactors to be built in the US. Unlike other Generation III+ reactors, the AP1000, designed and developed by US company Westinghouse Nuclear, is partially modular in construction, with major modules constructed off-site and then assembled on-site.

However, problems with developing the design and deploying it in the US drove the then Westinghouse Electric to seek ‘Chapter 11’ bankruptcy protection in 2017. The company successfully emerged from this in 2018 and was then sold by its then owner, Japan’s Toshiba, to Canadian private equity asset managing group Brookfield Business Partners. This crisis led to the termination of a project to build two AP1000s, at a site in the US State of South Carolina, and imposed significant delays on the Vogtle project.

On the other hand, four AP1000s have been successfully built, commissioned and are in operation in China. Two of these are at the Sanmen NPP in Zhejiang and the other two at the Haiyang NPP in Shandong. The Chinese reportedly also bought patent rights to the design and have been developing their own improved version of the AP1000, and it is also reported that future construction will be of the improved Chinese development and not of additional AP1000s.

Regarding Vogtle, last October Georgia Power reported that Vogtle 3 and Vogtle 4 would be delayed (in terms of the revised construction schedule) by three months. But the company has now announced an additional delay of between three and six months before the two new reactors startup. Now, Vogtle 3 is only expected to start operating at the end of this year or during the first quarter of next year. Vogtle 4 is now expected to start functioning during the third or fourth quarters of next year.

“We have discovered incomplete and missing inspection records concerning much of the materials and equipment that have been installed at unit 3,” explained Southern Company CEO Thomas Fanning. These documentation deficiencies had also driven up the cost of the programme for Georgia Power, by about $920-million. Of this total, $480-million was the company’s share of the costs imposed by the schedule changes and $440-million for “incremental costs” that will solely be borne by Georgia Power.