Construction at the VC Summer plant in South Carolina has begun. The milestone marks the official start of construction of the USA’s first new reactor in 30 years.
The basemat provides a foundation for the containment and auxilary buildings that are within the unit’s nuclear island. Measuring 1.8m thick, the basemat required some 5350m³ of concrete to cover an area about 76m by 49m. The concrete-pouring process took just over 50 hours.
The two new 1117 MWe Westinghouse AP1000s will share a site with an existing pressurised water reactor, VC Summer unit 1, operated by South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G), a subsidiary of Scana Corporation, and co-owned by SCE&G and Santee Cooper.
SCE&G and Santee Cooper signed an engineering and procurement contract with a consortium of reactor vendor Westinghouse and the Shaw Group in May 2008, and by September 2011 site preparation work was advanced. Shaw was acquired by Chicago Bridge & Iron Company (CB&I) in July 2012.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued combined construction and operating licences (COLs) for the two AP1000s at Summer in April 2012. However, the pouring of the first concrete was delayed due to issues with the shear reinforcement for the basemat.