USC, Westinghouse sign agreement for nuclear workforce training center

COLUMBIA — The University of South Carolina inked a deal with Westinghouse related to the school’s plans for a nuclear workforce training center within its engineering school.

The agreement signed Tuesday at the South Carolina Nuclear Summit in Columbia kickstarts talks between USC and the nuclear giant. It does not commit Westinghouse to any investment in the training center.

“While South Carolina is already a strong nuclear state, this strategic partnership between USC and Westinghouse will position the state as a national leader,” Luca Oriani, president of new plant delivery at Westinghouse, said in a statement.

“This collaboration will support high-paying jobs and economic growth across South Carolina while strengthening and further developing the workforce needed to deliver the next generation of nuclear power plants and meet the rising demand for electricity,” he continued.

USC plans to ask state legislators for $100 million in the next fiscal year, starting July 1, 2027, and is seeking private investors willing to match that amount.

The center on the college’s campus in Columbia will be part of the school’s larger plans to renovate and expand its college of engineering and computing. It will train technicians, engineers, specialized construction professionals and operators for both large- and small-scale nuclear reactors.

USC envisions a building containing simulators to train plant operators and university students in a replica nuclear control room, as well as hands-on construction labs and virtual reality stations for nuclear construction and maintenance training.

“Anybody that wants to be building or operating these reactors somehow will have to come through us because we are going to have a unique facility,” Hossein Haj-Hariri, dean of USC’s Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing, told reporters at the summit.

The agreement with USC comes amid efforts by Westinghouse’s own parent company, Brookfield Asset Management, to restart construction of a pair of partially built Westinghouse-designed nuclear reactors in the Palmetto State.

Work continues on a $2.7 billion deal between South Carolina’s state-owned utility company, Santee Cooper, and the New York investment firm for the purchase of the abandoned reactors at the V.C. Summer nuclear plant in Fairfield County.

Brookfield has until the end of March 2028 to make a final decision on whether or not to go forward with the purchase and reboot.

In June, the U.S. Energy Department also announced $17.5 billion in loans to speed the construction of 10 other Westinghouse nuclear reactors, to be built in pairs at five undisclosed sites across the U.S. by 2030.

The loans will finance the purchase of big-ticket reactor components that typically take a long time to manufacture. Westinghouse and a utility or ​energy company will each invest $500 million to jointly own each project.

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“Each of these reactors, as you know, requires thousands of people to build, and then a couple thousand or so to run and operate. All of these need to start to get trained,” Haj-Hariri said.

“The challenge is incredible. Before you start building, you need the workforce, which means we have to start yesterday,” he added.

However, serial production of nuclear reactors remains ​unproven as 10 reactors of the same model have never been built over such a short period.

A pair of nuclear reactors at Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia, which started under construction about the same time as South Carolina’s mothballed reactors, are the only new-built nuclear reactors to come online over the past three decades in the U.S.

That project came in seven years behind schedule and $17 billion over budget.