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Engineer building nuclear plant is in the national spotlight
by Walter C. Jones, Morris News Service
July 1, 2009
WAYNESBORO, Ga. – A lot of people all over the country will be watching David H. Jones.
He's not a rising professional athlete or emerging Hollywood star. It's not his boyish looks
or his folksy speaking style.
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-company executives used to talk of nuclear power being so cheap
to produce that it would be almost given away. But the industry hit a brick wall following an
accident at a reactor at Three Mile Island nuclear power 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
commercial plants that were then under construction, including Vogtle's first two reactors.
The expense of those changes led to delays and budget overruns at every reactor under
construction, prompting the industry to simply stop planning any additional plants.
Jones recalls being a co-op student at Auburn University in the late 1970s and working 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 Company I'd get this opportunity. It's an exciting time."
What is different now is a policy that has put Jones in the limelight. The U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission decided if a plant's blueprints met current safety standards, it would not to
impose new standards during construction.
Plus, 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 Jones and the other engineers at Southern Nuclear
figure out a way to satisfy NRC inspectors, every other utility can do it the same way.
Jim Williams, 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 NRC inspectors.
If Jones and his team can't satisfy the inspectors quickly, the nearly 4,000 construction
workers could be stalled while on the clock.
He's 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.
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