With a looming Halloween deadline, at least seven more cities have dropped out of the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) mini reactor project, the latest municipal bail out from the Department of Energy-subsidized venture.
Bountiful, Utah, a town that has been on the fence about the project for months now, opted to leave the project Tuesday, while Heber Water and Light decided to leave on Wednesday. The deadline to drop out, or to increase or decrease subscription funding, is Saturday.
UAMPS spokesman LaVarr Webb said there is no set number of cities that will need to drop out of the project in order for it to be put on hold or abandoned altogether.
“If a handful drop out, but the vast majority want to proceed, then it makes sense to go forward,” he told RadWaste Monitor in an email Thursday.
Some towns, like Idaho Falls, opted to stay in the project, to be located on the Department of Energy’s (DOE) 890-square-mile Idaho National Laboratory, but cut its subscription in half. Murray pulled out last week, while Kaysville dropped out at the end of September. A Murry city councilman said he believed in the safety of the project, but didn’t trust the price of the venture — a $2 million cost to city taxpayers — wouldn’t continue to grow.
Kaysville expressed similar concerns. Logan and Lehi abandoned ship in August, and another Utah town, Beaver, on Tuesday. One utility, Wells Rural Electric Company, has been added to the project since the list of the 30 officially participating cities was announced.
Most cities haven’t expressed concerns over the waste generated by the reactors, but rather the precarious cost of the project.
“This project, like so many other nuclear power projects, could have massive cost overruns and delays,” Rusty Cannon, Vice President of the pro-business nonprofit Utah Taxpayers Association, told RadWaste Monitor on Monday. “And those possible future commitments as well as the current commitments are far too great for these municipally owned power companies to bear, in our mind. They should not be acting as seed investors on a project like this.”
Also known as the Carbon Free Power Project, UAMPS is the first U.S. small-scale nuclear power project. The 12 mini reactors would generate up to 720 megawatts of energy combined.
35 cities signed on to the project initially.
“The number of participants and subscription levels are not particularly relevant at this point in the project,” Webb wrote. “It was always anticipated that UAMPS members would constitute a minority share of the total 720 megawatts available. Subscription will need to reach the full 720MW for the project to be constructed. As the project has been de-risked with the DOE award and other agreements, interest levels have substantially risen among a number of utilities outside of UAMPS that have been watching the project and are supportive.”
Any UAMPS withdrawals on Saturday would come just days after the DOE approved $1.35 billion for the project’s construction over ten years. The UAMPS project is being facilitated by NuScale, a Portland, Oregon-based company that is majority owned by Fluor Corp.
