Industry will watch Vogtle engineer's work

WAYNESBORO, Ga. --- A lot of people all over the country will be watching David H. Jones.

Mr. Jones is overseeing construction of the country's first commercial nuclear reactor in a generation -- two of them, actually. He is the engineer in charge of constructing Units 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro.

"It comes along once in a lifetime," he said.

In the 1960s and '70s, energy executives talked of nuclear power being so cheap to produce that it would be almost given away. Then came an accident at a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Middletown, Penn., on March 28, 1979.

In response, regulators began changing the safety specifications every time they concluded there was a better way to engineer nuclear plants. Those frequent changes were imposed on the plants that were under construction, including Vogtle's first two reactors.

The expense of those changes led to delays and budget overruns at every reactor, so the industry simply stopped planning any additional plants.

Mr. Jones was a co-op student at Auburn University in the late 1970s and worked with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

"At the time I thought I'd build nuclear plants up and down the Tennessee River for TVA. That didn't turn out," he said. "I never dreamed after 30 years with Southern Co. I'd get this opportunity. It's an exciting time."

What is different now is a policy that has put Mr. Jones in the limelight.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided that if a plant's blueprints met current safety standards, it wouldn't impose new standards during construction.

It also agreed that if one reactor could be built to those standards, it would become the model for any other reactor. That means if Mr. Jones and the other engineers at Southern Nuclear figure out a way to satisfy federal inspectors, every other utility can do it the same way.

Jim Williams, the site support manager at Vogtle, is ready for the stream of visitors.

"We're probably going to be the first," he said. "Everyone is going to want to learn how this process works, so where are they going to come?"

Southern Nuclear, the subsidiary of Georgia Power's parent company that operates Plant Vogtle for the utilities that own it, is prepared for the added resources required in being the guinea pigs.

There are countless valves, instruments and other engineering decisions that go into a $14 billion construction project, all of which will have to be negotiated with the inspectors.

If Mr. Jones and his team can't satisfy the inspectors quickly, nearly 4,000 construction workers could be stalled while on the clock.

Mr. Jones is confident that Southern Nuclear's experience working with the NRC while operating Vogtle and Southern Co.'s other nuclear plants in Baxley, Ga., and Dothan, Ala., will ease the discussions.

He said he'll apply the lessons accumulated from the earlier plants.

"As you build that, you say, 'Hey, the next one we build ...' or, 'The next technology, we will learn from this and do it this way.' And that's what you're going to see down the road, the benefit of all that operations experience that we've gained as an industry over the last 35 years," he said.

Reach Walter C. Jones at (404) 589-8424 or walter.jones@morris.com.