There's lots of lessons learned here. First off, at the time of licensing ... the plans were not in final form. There were revisions that were made during the construction — A) to finalize, but also B) to adjust for different types of construction methods, etc. All these types of things could be assumed in a first build within the United States.

 

 

There are many things that were in play that just weren't in control. I will tell you that, within big engineering projects like this, overruns of both cost and schedule are not uncommon. That's not an excuse, but it is something that we recognize within engineering that does happen with such things.

 

 

I do think that we're looking at on the order of one and a half to two more years to complete the project, and, at that point, hopefully we'll have the first unit up and operating. About a year later, the second unit would follow. From that we would start with initial operation, and hopefully up to 60 years’ worth of power production from those facilities.

 

 

Study after study has shown that nuclear power is the safest electrical production method that we currently have. There's no question about that. In addition, in a world where we're concerned with the carbon economy, nuclear power also is our biggest producer of carbon-free electricity.

 

 

I think largely what you're referring to would be more what is called the small modular reactors and where we're basically building things at one-tenth of the scale of particularly what Vogtle would be. I think a lot of the experts are heading in that direction

 

 

I do see expansion coming through much more advanced reactor designs. Currently, what's in place across the United States are reactor designs based on 50-year-old technology. We've come significantly [far] in the last half a century to understand safety of nuclear power plants.