Vogtle

Georgia Power Co. announced today that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has completed testing.  The first new U.S. nuclear reactor to be built in decades is now in commercial operation and reliably sending electricity to the grid. At its full output of 1,100 megawatts, Unit 3 can power a half million homes and businesses. In addition to the 2.7 million customers of Georgia Power, a number of other utilities in Georgia, Florida and Alabama are also receiving the electricity.

Full disclosure: the computer on which this blog is composed gets its electricity from Georgia Power.

A fourth reactor is also nearing completion at the Vogtle site. The NRC said fuel could be loaded into Unit 4 before the end of September and is scheduled to enter commercial operation by March. This would bring the additional output at Plant Vogtle up to 2,200 megawatts.

Plant Vogtle is important because nuclear power is one option to alleviate climate change by generating electricity without burning natural gas, coal, or oil. 

But construction of Units 3 and 4 is seven years past schedule and $17 billion over budget. The total cost to build the expansion is nearly $35 billion, including 3.7 billion that Japan’s Toshiba Corp., which then owned Westinghouse, paid in 2017 just to walk away from a guarantee to build the reactors at a fixed price after overruns forced Westinghouse into bankruptcy.

In Georgia, almost every electric customer (including your humble narrator) will pay for Vogtle. We customers are expected to pay more than $926 apiece as part of an ongoing finance charge, and public service commissioners have approved a monthly rate increase of more than $4 a month for residential customers as soon as Unit 3 began generating power. That could hit bills in August, two months after residential customers saw a $16-a-month increase to pay for higher fuel costs.

Longtime opponents of the plant note that power generated from solar and wind would have been cheaper. For 35 billion dollars, we got 2.2 gW of nuclear power. For that same price today, we could get around 12 gW of solar energy, plus battery storage. To be fair, that wasn't apparent back in the 2000s when building the new reactors was first planned, and frankly the sharp drop in solar prices has surprised everyone. Opponents also say letting Georgia Power charge customers to pay for their mistakes and mismanagement will unfairly bolster the utility’s profits.  

Any reduction in fossil fuel dependence is good news and makes for a better world. Unfortunately, this project's mismanagement and cost overruns probably means large nuclear plants won't be attempted again in the United States anytime soon.