The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Charleston District, have completed the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the Combined Licenses (COL) for the proposed Summer Units 2 and 3 reactors. The NRC concludes in the FEIS that there are no environmental impacts that would preclude issuing the COLs for construction and operation of the proposed reactors at the site, near Jenkinsville, S.C. USACE will use the information in the FEIS in making its federal permit decision in accordance with the Clean Water Act and Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899.
The NRC staff, in cooperation with USACE, began its environmental review with a scoping process that included public meetings near the site in January 2009. The staff issued a draft EIS for the proposed COLs in April 2010 and held public meetings in May 2010 to gather comments on the draft EIS.
The FEIS, with the NRC’s conclusions, is also available via the NRC’s electronic document database, ADAMS. The NRC’s publication of the FEIS is only part of the overall Summer COL review. The agency staff continues to compile its final safety evaluation report (SER), which will include recommendations from the NRC’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, an independent group of nuclear safety experts. The NRC’s final licensing decision will be based on the FEIS and SER findings, along with a ruling from the five-member Commission that heads the agency.
The applicants, South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G) and Santee Cooper, are applying for licenses to build and operate two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors adjacent to the existing Summer nuclear power plant, approximately 26 miles northwest of Columbia, S.C. The companies submitted the application March 27, 2008, and supplemented the application’s environmental report to support their request on Feb. 13, 2009, and July 2, 2010. The AP1000 is a 1100 MWe pressurized-water reactor design the NRC certified in 2006.
