Last year, the N.C. Utilities Commission asked Duke Energy to update its plans for construction of large nuclear reactors.
They haven’t been much of a factor for a long time. For decades, adding nuclear power hasn’t been popular because of safety and liability concerns and immense financial costs.
But surging demand for power and the desire for alternatives to fossil fuels is gradually making nuclear power more appealing. Much of the excitement involves small modular reactor projects, which produce a third of the energy but come at a much lower price.
So Duke recently responded to the commission directive with a report saying that the best place to build a large new reactor is at the William S. Lee III site in Cherokee County, South Carolina. The company already has a federal license to build two Westinghouse AP 1000 reactors at the site near Gaffney, located near the North Carolina state line.
Duke also considered the Shearon Harris plant in Wake County and the Belews Creek coal plant in Stokes County near the Triad. The latter site has room for two large reactors, but Duke already has plans to apply to add a small modular reactor project there.
In 2013, the utility shelved a license request by its predecessor company, Progress Energy, to add two reactors at the Shearon Harris plant. That decision came a year after Duke bought Progress and occurred in Duke CEO Lynn Good’s first year in that job. (Good retired effective Tuesday, April 1, and was succeeded by Harry Sideris.)
Building a nuke plant at the Gaffney location would be ironic for Duke, which abandoned two projects there, first in the early 1980s at the very end of the U.S. nuclear power construction surge. Movie fans will remember the incomplete containment building at the site was used in the 1989 flick, “The Abyss,” directed by James Cameron and starring Ed Harris.
In 2017, another early stage plan for a reactor there was abandoned because of cost overruns and delays at Georgia Power’s Vogtle plant, where two reactors went into operation in 2023-24. That plant took about a decade to build and cost $35 billion, up from an initial estimate of about $15 billion.
Duke estimates it would take 10 to 13 years to get a reactor up and running in South Carolina.
The company adds that the viability of large-scale nuclear depends on federal tax credits that are part of the Inflation Reduction Act and protection from cost overruns. N.C. lawmakers appear poised to help out with Senate Bill 261, which would authorize the Utilities Commission to OK rate increases for “construction work in progress” outside the usual way that rates are boosted.
To avoid a “heads we win, tails we win” approach, the company would need to assure overall cost savings for customers over the life of the generating plant, legislative staffers say.
