Appellate Court Denies Plant Vogtle Stay

BRADENTON, Fla. - An appellate court has denied a motion by environmental groups to stay the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's approval of the construction and operating licenses for two new nuclear units at Plant Vogtle in Georgia.

The stay, rejected Wednesday, was an interim action being sought in the underlying case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, according to Diane Curran, attorney with Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg LLP, which is representing Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League and eight other organizations.

If the stay had been granted, work on the new nuclear units would have been stopped.

However, appellate judges said that the environmental groups did not satisfy the "stringent standards" required for a stay pending court review of the underlying case.

Curran said final briefs are expected to be filed this week.

Environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit in February just a week after Southern Co. received a joint license to build and operate two, 1,100-megawatt reactors at the Georgia plant where two existing reactors are in operation.

The NRC licensing was for the first new reactors permitted in three decades.

Georgia Power, whose parent company is investor-owned Southern, owns 45.7% of the project while Oglethorpe Power Corp. owns 30%, Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia owns 22.7%, and Dalton Utilities owns 1.6%.

MEAG, a public generation and transmission organization, secured most of its financing in March 2010 through the sale of $2.62 billion of bonds. The authority also has a $1.8 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.

Southern Co. officials could not be reached for comment about the appellate court ruling. However, company spokesman Jeff Wilson told the Augusta Chronicle that a stay would have increased project costs and put thousands of jobs at risk.

In previous court filings, the groups opposing the licensing have said that the NRC failed to address the environmental implications of the two new units at Vogtle after adopting safety improvements recommended by an agency task force following an investigation of the earthquake and flooding at the Fukushima plant in Japan last year.

Attorneys representing the plant's owners have said that the environmental groups "mischaracterized" the NRC's action, and that the regulatory agency "merely adopted a process" to consider safety recommendations, which were implemented after the issuance of the Vogtle licenses.

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