Progress Energy nuclear plant delayed by at least 20 months

[bananas]

Source: St. Petersburg Times

Progress Energy’s $17 billion nuclear project has been delayed by 20 months, but its customers will continue to pay for it in their monthly electric bills.

The utility wants to start charging customers nearly twice as much next year for the Levy County project even though it won’t start producing power until March 2018 at the earliest, the St. Petersburg utility announced Friday morning. The delay may also increase the price of the project, but the utility won’t know the details until later this year.

Jeff Lyash, president and chief executive of Progress Energy Florida, defended the utility’s decision to continue to charge customers for the plant. The investment will save customers money in the long run, he said. Without it, the project will likely fail.

<snip>

Read more: http://blogs.tampabay.com/energy/2009/05/progress-energy-nuclear-plant-delayed-by-at-least-20-months.html

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Got news for you Jeff, the project is likely to fail anyway.
The Congressional Budget Office said the risk of default on these projects is "very high - well above 50 percent".

[Dr.Phool]

1. Fight Progress Energy's Unconstitutional Rate Hike!

My good friend Suzan Franks asked me to post this. Suzan ran for the State Senate last year against Charlie Dean. She's putting together a non-partisan coalition to fight this. There is a bill to stop this right now, but the republicans won't give it a committee hearing, so it's dead.

Suzan is a former NH school board member, who founded kindergarten in the state. She's also a former Nashua Alderman and NH State Legislator.

Get involved!


April 30, 2009

Dear Editor,
I agree that our need for electric power must be assured, but I object to the plan to finance the plant(s) in Levy County in Florida because it holds Florida’s 1.7M rate payers hostage to pay for the preconstruction costs, enabled by law s366.93. The proposed Nuclear Power Plant to be built by Progress Energy, a privately owned, operated, and stock holder supported electric corporation. It has been given what is referred to as a “Special Privilege” which is in violation of our State Constitution. Our legislators have not corrected this situation, and to add insult to injury, didn’t even hold a hearing on the bills filed, SB 1830 or companion HB 1101. There was no political will in our legislature to represent the people of Florida and strike down this unbearable law. It now appears, Tallahassee is broken.

The Florida State Constitution; Article III, Section 11 (which addresses Special Prohibited Laws; subsection (12) “There shall be no special law or general law of local application pertaining to: (a) … grant of privilege to a private corporation.” This speaks volumes, but unless we speak up to protect our Constitutional rights, and our rights as Floridians, do you think our elected representatives in Tallahassee will do it for us? I ask you; “Have they done it so far?” You know the answer to that one.

By their own admission, members of the legislature either didn’t read or understand the 193 page bill that gave Progress Energy that huge increase in our electric rates in January, including the extra 11+% we, the rate payers, were required to pay for the pre-construction costs for the plant in Levy County that may, or may not, ever be built in the first place! Many rate payers will be deceased before the plant would go online. And now Progress Energy is asking that we pay those unconstitutional costs as well as their new rationalizations20for more costs to be passed on to the rate payers…us, before the Public Service Commission.

Where is the outrage from our elected representatives? Why didn’t they try to repeal this huge boondoggle? Do we have to appeal this law to the Supreme Court for someone to pay attention?
Since Jan. 1, 2009, Progress Energy has collected from the 1.7M ratepayers, including all those on fixed income, the unemployed, and those retirees that will never have the opportunity to benefit from the new power plant generation of power in 20 years, a total in excess of $44 Million through the end of March. The money is going into the pockets of the greedy CEO (who receives $5M salary/year and lives in North Carolina plus the salary of the local CEO, Mr. Lyash, who seems obsessed with the stock holders reasonable rate of return), including the general stockholders of Progress Energy, in one of the worst economic times in our state history. The score thus far: Progress Energy Corporation 1…Rate Payers 0.

It is time to take action. We Floridians are being held hostage by this wrongfully enacted state law that has us paying for a nuclear plant in Levy County that we don’t know will ever be built. We must not sit by and abrogate our rights without making our voices heard.
This is our last best chance to stop the new, outrageous rate hike being proposed by Progress Energy.
The plan of attack is two-pronged.
The first is to call our local Commissioner on the Public Service Commission. Her name is Nancy Argenziano, and she lives in Dunnellon, was formerly our State Senator, but now she can be reached at her State Commissioner’s office at [phone]. She needs to hear from all of us to help her make the right decision, and stop the newly requested Progress Energy rate hike!

The second is to sign a petition sponsored by “Florida’s We The People” to block the rate hike as requested by Progress Energy because it is UNCONSTITUTIONAL. To sign the petition, please contact: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/a-protest-of-the-unconstitutional-rate-hike-for-electricity. The petitions will be delivered to the Governor, with the demand that he take action to uphold the Constitution and protect rate payers rights!
Let’s make our voices heard loud and clear!

Suzan Franks
Spokesperson for Florida’s We The People
652 E. Dakota Ct., Hernando, FL 34442
Tel: [phone]

[Divine Discontent]

4. I have signed. I am tired of the BS! I hope MANY more will take the minute to sign! KICK eom

[AnOhioan]

2. If I was a customer I would be screaming to every media outlet...

in the area. What complete bullshit.

[Dr.Phool]

3. We already are.

Suzan's piece is meant to be an op-ed piece for the Citrus Chronicle, but was also sent to our entire media list.

[Massacure]

5. From the look of it, it is not Progress Energy's fault.

It looks like government is holding the project up while it is reviewing Westinghouse's AP-1000 reactor design.

[mbperrin]

6. And the government FORCED PE to start charging for the project

long before it could ever generate any electricity?

Seems to me the greed and avarice are all PE's fault.

This is the way all nuclear bullshit goes - heavy subsidization, lousy safety, no way to eliminate horrible end products, contamination, and then more government money to clean it all up.

There's a reason the largest nuclear reactor in the solar system is 93 million miles away.

[bananas]

8. Republicans favorite excuse: "Too much government regulation!!!"

Sorry, you can't blame this on the NRC.
If anything, the NRC has a very pro-nuclear-industry bias.
The nuclear industry got everything it asked for in EPACT 2005, pushed through by the pro-nuclear Republican Bush administration and the pro-nuclear Republican congress.
They got the streamlined licensing process they asked for,
they got the loan guarantees they asked for,
they got the liability limitations they asked for.
Progress Energy went beyond that and lobbied for and got the CWIP ban overturned and PSC oversight restricted.
The reason CWIP was banned was because of situations like this, there was no good reason to overturn it.
So let's not fall for this "too much government regulation" excuse.

Progress Energy and other utilities are causing the delays by submitting design changes during the review process:

http://triangle.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2008/10/27/story10.html

Friday, October 24, 2008 | Modified: Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Standardized nuclear plant design eluding utility firms
Triangle Business Journal - by Frank Vinluan

RALEIGH – The nuclear plant design favored for new plants by Progress Energy, Duke Energy and three other utilities is the subject of multiple design changes that energy industry watchdogs say undermine the concept of a pre-certified design and could delay the construction of new reactors while adding billions to the cost.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified the plant design of Westinghouse Electric Co.’s AP1000 at the end of 2005. Pre-certification was intended to help streamline an approvals process that takes years before plant construction even begins.

<snip>

Thomas Bergman, deputy director of the NRC division that oversees new reactor licensing, writes in the letter that “there remains uncertainty about the schedule outlined in the February 15, 2008 letter in light of changes. This uncertainty is created as a result of changes in the scope of work of the review requested by Westinghouse since developing that schedule, and delayed submittals.”

<snip>

Ed Lyman, a senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists who has tracked the process, says utilities are requesting the design changes to suit individual sites. For example, he says TVA sought modifications for its Bellefonte, Ala., plant’s seismic design to fit the soil type of the site.

Lyman says that if each applicant seeks reactor modifications for its site, the result could be many more changes, each of them requiring regulatory review. Lyman says design changes add time to the review process and likely would add cost to the plants. He says the outcome of the AP1000 review could affect how other utilities move forward with their plans for new nuclear generation.

“It is a blow to NRC’s concept of standardizing designs,” he says.

<snip>

[Massacure]

9. I didn't realize that Peoples Energy submitted changes to the design.

The original article posted mentioned that the NRC was going to take 15 months longer to review the AP-1000 design and that they also were preventing some prep work until the utility actually had the license. It didn't say anything about PE changing the plans.

If People's Energy changed the already approved design, they have no one to blame but themselves.

As a side note, I don't think there is anything wrong with streamlining the licensing process. Approving standardized reactor designs and construction methods is an improvement over the old case-by-case process before. Hopefully we can replicate the French success.

[jpak]

7. A rate hike brought to you by the Flori-duh GOP

idiots