Members of the governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council discussed the idea after two of them made a trip to the abandoned reactors and parts left on site at the Summer nuclear station 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,” Lee said.
In a report to the council, 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.
The two legislators think the site has potential, “if somebody will just ring the bell and get it started”, Lee said.
It could be the answer, Lee said, to South Carolina’s possible power shortage as the state’s population grows, industry expands and federal environmental regulations mandate the closure of coal-fired power.
The project to build two new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Summer had cost nearly $10bn (€9.3bn) before it was shut down in 2017, sparking multiple lawsuits involving investors and ratepayers.
Mounting delays and losses had led Westinghouse, then a unit of Japan’s Toshiba Corp, to file for bankruptcy.
Scana and Santee Cooper, the owners of the Summer station, then announced they were abandoning the project after Santee Cooper voted to cease all construction.
In January 2018 Dominion Energy, the largest utility in the US state of Virginia, announced it would buy Scana, a subsidiary of South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G), in a $14.6bn deal that would include $1.3bn in refunds to SCE&G utility customers.
In July 2018, Scana shareholders voted to merge the company with Dominion Energy and SCE&G was rebranded under the name Dominion Energy South Carolina.
Dominion operates seven large-scale reactors at four sites: Millstone in Connecticut, North Anna and Surry in Virginia and Summer in South Carolina.
