Westinghouse Electric Co., the U.S. nuclear unit of Japan's Toshiba Corp., filed for bankruptcy protection Wednesday, calling into question the future of more than $20 billion of nuclear projects under construction in Georgia and South Carolina and some of the maintenance and training activities at other U.S. reactors, including both of Tennessee's nuclear plants.
Westinghouse said the Chapter 11 petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York will help the company continue operations while it reorganizes its finances. Westinghouse has been hurt by construction delays and problems for its next-generation AP1000 reactors being built for the Southern Co. at Plant Vogtle in Georgia and for SCANA at VC Summer plant in South Carolina.
Toshiba acquired Westinghouse in 2006 with much fanfare, making nuclear power an important part of its business strategy. Instead, Westinghouse has saddled the Japanese company with mounting losses. Toshiba said Westinghouse had racked up debt of $9.8 billion.
The Westinghouse nuclear division operates a boiling water reactor training facility in Chattanooga, which had 88 local employees at the end of 2016. Westinghouse has invested nearly $30 million in the 70,000-square-foot facility in the Center South Industrial Park, which provides training for nuclear operators of nuclear reactors around the globe.
Westinghouse got property tax breaks through 2019 from the city and the county for its Chattanooga facility.
Both of Tennessee's nuclear power plants also are Westinghouse-designed pressurized water reactors. TVA began power generation of its Sequoyah nuclear plant near Soddy-Daisy in 1981 and its Watts Bar plant near Spring City in 1996.
TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said Thursday the federal utility is monitoring Westinghouse's bankruptcy.
"We work with all of our vendors to ensure that the contractual services they provide in support of that objective are delivered at the best possible cost and quality for TVA and the people of the Valley," Hopson said in a statement. "Ultimately, safety and reliability are TVA's responsibility to our customers, and we will continue to do everything in our power to ensure those goals are met."
But the troubles at Westinghouse add to the industry's problems. Nuclear power is cleaner than generating electricity with coal or natural gas, but building a nuclear reactor is much more complex and prohibitively costly. After the March 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, public sentiment turned against nuclear power in countries such as Japan and Germany.
TVA, which once planned to build 17 reactors, ended up finishing only seven units. The unfinished Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Alabama where TVA spent more than $5 billion over the past four decades was sold last year to former Chattanooga developer Franklin L. Haney for $111 million, or only about 2 cents on the dollar of TVA's investment in the twin-reactor complex.
In the U.S., nuclear power still generates about one-fifth of the nation's electricity and more than a third of TVA's power. But some older nuclear plants are being shuttered and the four nuclear reactors Westinghouse is helping to build in South Carolina and Georgia are behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
Westinghouse said in a statement Wednesday that it obtained financing to maintain its operations and made arrangements to continue work on the projects in South Carolina and Georgia while it assesses their viability. Westinghouse also said it will continue projects in China, and that its operations in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa aren't affected by the bankruptcy filing.
Wednesday, Toshiba said it could post a loss as big as $9 billion for the fiscal year ending March 31. It previously said Westinghouse lost $6.2 billion from April to December of last year.
In South Carolina, Westinghouse is a partner with state-owned utility Santee Cooper and publicly-traded SCANA Corp. on the construction of two reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station near Jenkinsville. SCANA said in September that the cost of building the reactors had increased nearly $3 billion from the original $11 billion estimate in 2009. The first reactor was supposed to open in 2017, but has been delayed at least two years.
SCANA officials told investors on a conference call Wednesday that all options remain on the table, from finishing both reactors, to finishing one reactor and delaying completion of the other or abandoning the project altogether. The company said it will spend at least the next 30 days reviewing its options.
The Plant Vogtle project in eastern Georgia was more than three years behind schedule and more than $3 billion over its original budget as of the end of 2016. Oglethorpe Power, one of the partners in the project, said in a regulatory filing this week that "the revised in-service dates of December 2019 and September 2020" for the two reactors it's building "do not appear to be achievable."
Georgia Power, a subsidiary of Southern Co. and holder of a 46-percent stake in the Vogtle project, said in a statement that it "will continue to take every action available to us to hold Westinghouse and Toshiba accountable for their financial responsibilities." Southern Co. and the other partners have a $920 million letter of credit from Westinghouse obtained in 2015.
Dalton Utilities also owns a 1.6 percent stake in the new Plant Vogtle reactors being built by Westinghouse.
Toshiba reiterated its view that at the root of the problem was the acquisition of U.S. nuclear construction company CB&I Stone and Webster. It declined comment on possible future partners in the rehabilitation of Westinghouse.
Auditors questioned Toshiba's latest reporting on the acquisition of CB&I Stone & Webster after a whistleblower, an employee at Westinghouse, wrote a letter to the Westinghouse president.
The company's reputation has also been tarnished in recent years by a scandal over the doctoring of accounting books to meet unrealistic profit targets.
Satoshi Ogasawara, who has written a book about Toshiba's systematically falsifying financial results, says executives knew of the problems for years but kept procrastinating, hoping against hope that things would get better and they would be able to avoid blame. But things just got worse.
Toshiba has said it will no longer take on new reactor construction projects and will focus on maintaining the reactors it already has. But it is also involved in the decommissioning of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, which suffered multiple meltdowns after the March 2011 tsunami.