Southern Company's Nuclear Unit 3, due to come online this month near Waynesboro, Georgia, fails in pre-operational testing for the third time in 2023

Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle

 

A nuclear-power unit, which is scheduled to go online this month, has failed in pre-operational testing for the third time this year. News of the most recent failure was made public earlier today -- and it comes on the heels of previous failures in June and January of 2023. The earlier failures prompted longtime Alabama attorney, entrepreneur, and civil-rights advocate Donald Watkins to label Vogtle Units 3 and 4, both scheduled to come online in November 2023 or March 2024, as "flawed radiation deathtraps." The news certainly did not get any better with today's announcement, leading Watkins to write under the headline "Southern Company Testing at Vogtle 3 Fails, Once Again":

Yesterday, Southern Nuclear Power Company operators tried to resume power-ascension testing at the Southern Company’s Vogtle Unit 3 nuclear reactor near Waynesboro, Georgia. However, the reactor scrammed when 45 percent power was reached due to a problem with the reactor pumps that caused low coolant flow. A "scram" is an emergency shutdown of the unit. The unit is still at zero power.

This important update was posted today by Edwin Lyman, the Director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC. This organization works to make nuclear power safer and more secure.

As we have reported previously, Unit 3 is fatally flawed from a design, engineering, construction, and quality-control standpoint. What is more, test  results at Vogtle 3 have been falsified.

This is not the kind of testing record you want to see at a nuclear-power facility, which if it becomes operational, is set to be the first carbon-free nuclear unit built in the United States in more than three decades. That gap formed in the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania. After years of caution toward construction of nuclear-power plants, Watkins says a similar disaster now is looming in Georgia. He writes:

The independent nuclear experts we have consulted expect Unit 3 to experience a Level 7 nuclear event within 90 days after it becomes fully operational. When this catastrophic event occurs, an estimated 4,000 to 60,000 people within a 40-mile radius of Vogtle will die from radiation poisoning.

A Level 7 nuclear event is on the scale of the worst nuclear disasters at Chernobyl in the old Soviet Union in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011.

The Southern Company’s political influence peddling at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, U.S. Department of Energy, and Georgia Public Service Commission is too great to prevent this catastrophic event from happening. Politics and the flow of "dark money" contributions have trumped public safety at Vogtle Unit 3.

President Joe Biden and his White House have been too preoccupied with Hunter Biden’s acknowledged crack-cocaine addiction and related-criminal problems to pay any attention to the imminent nuclear dangers lurking at Vogtle 3.