Industry generates 28,000 jobs

GREENVILLE -- The nuclear industry is responsible for more than 28,000 jobs in South Carolina, a bigger impact than BMW, according to a new study by Clemson University researchers.

Economists Mark Henry and David Barkley and other researchers prepared the estimates for the Carolinas Nuclear Cluster, a group of companies organized through the S.C. Council on Competitiveness, an economic development group.

The researchers found the nuclear industry directly responsible for 14,986 jobs in South Carolina and indirectly for another 13,088 jobs. The 28,074 total is slightly more than the 23,050 direct and indirect jobs attributed to BMW and its supplier network in a previously released study by researchers at the University of South Carolina.

The nuclear industry is "a big part of the state economy," said Henry, professor emeritus of applied economics at Clemson.

The job total includes employment at South Carolina's four commercial nuclear plants, including Duke Energy's three-reactor plant in Oconee County, as well as the Department of Energy's huge Savannah River Site, a former nuclear bomb plant near Aiken.

It doesn't include, however, jobs at engineering and construction companies such as Fluor Corp. and its Greenville campus that are supported by nuclear work outside the Carolinas, Henry said.

Also, he said, the calculations were made before the federal government allotted $1.6 billion in economic stimulus money to create temporary jobs at SRS.

In North Carolina, the nuclear industry is directly responsible for 3,822 jobs and indirectly for another 5,434 jobs, the researchers estimated using software modeling.

South Carolina would get another 12,400 permanent jobs if nuclear plants on the drawing board were to be built, the researchers said, citing an earlier study by Oxford Economics.

Power companies plan four more reactors -- two in Cherokee County and two in Fairfield County -- on top of the seven they already operate in South Carolina. Two other reactors are planned just over the state line in the Augusta area.

Sara Barczak, program director for the anti-nuclear Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said the study doesn't take into account one cost of the nuclear industry for average people: special charges that South Carolinians pay on their electricity bills to cover the financing costs of planned nuclear plants.