"The Vogtle project has a huge burden on its back to show we can do this on time," said Edward Kee, vice president of NERA Economic Consulting, a unit of Marsh & McLennan. "That's the next hurdle for them."
The two new advanced AP1000 reactors, manufactured by Toshiba Corp unit Westinghouse Electric, will cost Southern and its partners $14 billion and enter service as soon as 2016 and 2017. Twelve public interest groups on Thursday are expected to file suit challenging the Vogtle permit on grounds that the NRC has not heeded lessons from Japan's Fukushima accident last year, the worst since the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986. Any delay caused by legal challenges could result in cost overruns totaling millions or even billions of dollars. Southern and partners have already spent more than $4 billion on major components at the Vogtle site and await final approval of an $8.3B. |