Vogtle Electric Generating Plant

Based on Wikipedia: Vogtle Electric Generating Plant

America's Most Expensive Power Plant

In the spring of 2024, a nuclear reactor in rural Georgia achieved something that hadn't happened in the United States for nearly four decades: it became the fourth unit at a single power station to go online. Plant Vogtle, tucked away in Burke County near the small town of Waynesboro, is now the largest nuclear power plant in America. It's also a monument to one of the most spectacular cost overruns in the history of energy infrastructure.

The numbers are staggering. When Georgia Power and its partners announced plans to build two new reactors at Vogtle in the mid-2000s, they estimated the project would cost around fourteen billion dollars. By the time Unit 4 began commercial operation on April 29, 2024, the actual price tag had ballooned to somewhere north of thirty-four billion dollars—more than double the original estimate.

To put that in perspective, you could build roughly seventeen billion dollars worth of solar farms for what the cost overruns alone added to this project.

The Original Vogtle

The story of Plant Vogtle actually begins in the 1970s, when the United States was still building nuclear reactors with some regularity. The plant is named after Alvin Vogtle, a former chairman of both Alabama Power and the Southern Company, the utility holding company that would come to own the facility. The pronunciation trips people up—it's VOH-gəl, rhyming with "ogle."

Units 1 and 2 came online in 1987 and 1989, respectively. They're Westinghouse pressurized water reactors, a design that dates back to the early days of commercial nuclear power. In a pressurized water reactor, the nuclear fuel heats water under such intense pressure that it can't boil despite reaching temperatures far above the normal boiling point. This superheated water then transfers its heat to a separate water system that does boil, producing steam that spins turbines to generate electricity.

Even these first two units weren't cheap. Initial estimates pegged the cost at six hundred sixty million dollars. The final bill? Eight point eight seven billion—more than thirteen times the original projection. Adjusted for inflation, that's nearly twenty billion in today's money.

If this sounds like a pattern, you're paying attention.

The Cooling Towers You Can See from Space

One of the most distinctive features of Plant Vogtle is its cooling towers. The original pair stand five hundred forty-eight feet tall—roughly the height of a fifty-story building. They're natural-draft cooling towers, which means they use no fans or mechanical equipment. Instead, they work on a beautifully simple principle: hot air rises.

Water heated by the power plant's condensers is pumped to the top of the tower and allowed to fall through a lattice of material that breaks it into droplets. As the water falls, it transfers heat to the air around it. The heated air, being less dense than the cooler air outside, rises naturally through the tower's enormous hyperbolic chimney. Fresh cool air is drawn in at the base to replace it, and the cycle continues indefinitely without any moving parts.

The newer Units 3 and 4 have their own cooling towers, and these are even taller—nearly six hundred feet each. From overhead, the plant looks like a small city of concrete hyperboloids rising from the Georgia pine forest.

A Truck Backs Into History

Before we get to the dramatic saga of building the new units, there's a lesser-known incident from 1990 that reveals just how precarious the operation of a nuclear plant can be.

On March 20 of that year, at 9:20 in the morning, a truck carrying fuel and lubricants was maneuvering through the plant's electrical switchyard. The driver backed into a support column for a power line. Not just any power line—this one fed the transformer supplying emergency power to Unit 1.

The timing could hardly have been worse. Unit 1 was in the middle of a refueling outage, which meant the reactor wasn't generating its own electricity. One of the backup emergency diesel generators was offline for maintenance. And through a chain of electrical failures, the accident knocked out power to the "vital circuits"—the safety systems that remove decay heat from the reactor core.

Even when a nuclear reactor is shut down, it still produces heat. The radioactive fuel continues to decay, generating what's called residual heat. Without cooling, this heat can build up dangerously. It's the same phenomenon that caused the meltdowns at Fukushima in 2011.

For thirty-six minutes, Plant Vogtle had no way to cool its reactor core. The temperature of the coolant water rose from ninety degrees Fahrenheit to one hundred thirty-six degrees. Plant operators declared a Site Area Emergency—the second-highest level of nuclear emergency classification.

They ultimately got the backup diesel generator running by using what's called an "emergency start," which involves breaking a glass cover to access a switch that bypasses most of the generator's safety interlocks. It's the nuclear equivalent of hot-wiring a car.

The incident revealed a critical design flaw: there was no easy way to connect the vital safety buses to non-vital power sources or to borrow power from Unit 2. Plant Vogtle has since been modified to allow such cross-connections. But the fact that a truck backing into a pole could bring a nuclear plant so close to crisis illustrates the knife-edge on which these facilities operate.

The AP1000: A New Generation

The reactors in Units 3 and 4 represent something fundamentally different from the original Vogtle units. They're Westinghouse AP1000s, where "AP" stands for Advanced Passive. The key innovation is right there in the name: passive safety systems.

Traditional nuclear reactors rely heavily on active safety systems—pumps, valves, and emergency generators that must operate correctly to keep the reactor safe during an accident. The incident with the truck in 1990 showed how these active systems can fail in unexpected ways.

The AP1000 takes a different approach. Its safety systems are designed to work through passive means: gravity, natural circulation, compressed gas, and the natural tendency of hot water to rise and cool water to sink. In theory, an AP1000 can cool itself for seventy-two hours after a loss of power without any operator action or external electricity.

The design includes a massive tank of water sitting on top of the reactor building. If the reactor loses cooling, this water can drain down by gravity alone to flood the containment structure and carry away decay heat. No pumps required.

It's an elegant concept. The execution proved rather less elegant.

The Last Nuclear Plant in America

When Southern Company announced plans to build two new AP1000 reactors at Vogtle in 2006, it was a genuinely historic moment. No new nuclear reactor had been ordered in the United States since before the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. The American nuclear industry had spent nearly three decades in the wilderness, and Vogtle was supposed to be its triumphant return.

The project assembled an impressive roster of participants. Westinghouse, then owned by the Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, would provide the reactor design and overall engineering. The Shaw Group, through its Stone & Webster division, would manage construction. Georgia Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, would own the largest share of the completed plant.

In February 2010, President Barack Obama announced eight point three three billion dollars in federal loan guarantees to help finance construction. The expected completion dates were 2016 for Unit 3 and 2017 for Unit 4.

Those dates would slip. And slip again. And again.

Fukushima Changes Everything

On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Japan, triggering a massive tsunami that overwhelmed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Three reactors melted down in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

The disaster forced regulators worldwide to reconsider their assumptions about nuclear safety. For the AP1000 program, the consequences were immediate and severe.

In December 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that oversees American nuclear plants, issued a nineteenth revision to the AP1000 design certification. This revision included what the regulatory document blandly described as a "new" design for the containment building—specifically, a complete redesign to handle seismic loads and the impact of a large aircraft.

The problem was that contracts had already been signed. Manufacturing had begun on long-lead-time components. The original containment design used reinforced concrete throughout. The new design required something called a composite wall module—essentially, steel plates with concrete sandwiched between them—joined to the reinforced concrete sections.

Construction ground to a halt while engineers figured out how to build something different from what they had planned.

The Cascade of Catastrophe

What followed was a masterclass in how large infrastructure projects can spiral out of control.

In 2013, Chicago Bridge & Iron Company acquired Shaw Group, putting a new contractor in charge partway through construction. That contractor, CB&I, would exit the project in 2015 after disputes over the growing delays and cost overruns. Westinghouse took direct control and brought in Fluor to manage day-to-day construction.

In 2016, Southern Company added yet another construction firm—Bechtel—to share management responsibilities. By this point, the project had become a rotating cast of contractors, each inheriting the problems created by their predecessors.

Then came the killing blow. In March 2017, Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy. The company that had designed the AP1000, that was supposed to shepherd nuclear power into a new era of passive safety and standardized construction, collapsed under the weight of its Vogtle and V.C. Summer commitments. (The V.C. Summer project in South Carolina, which was building two identical AP1000 reactors, was abandoned entirely after the bankruptcy.)

Remarkably, the Vogtle project continued. Georgia Power and its partners decided to push forward, taking on more direct management responsibility. Toshiba, Westinghouse's parent company, eventually paid one point nine billion dollars in settlement to help resolve the mess.

The Final Stretch

Unit 3 achieved its first sustained nuclear reaction—called criticality—in March 2023. It began commercial operation on July 31, 2023, becoming the first new nuclear reactor to come online in the United States in seven years. The previous one was Watts Bar Unit 2 in Tennessee, which itself had taken over forty years to complete after construction was suspended in the 1980s.

Unit 4 followed nine months later, entering commercial service on April 29, 2024.

Together, the four units at Plant Vogtle can generate four thousand five hundred thirty-six megawatts of electricity. That's enough to power roughly four million homes, making Vogtle by far the largest nuclear facility in the country. It's also the only American plant with four operating reactors—a distinction that says more about the decline of American nuclear construction than it does about Vogtle's success.

What Did It Actually Cost?

The financial accounting of Vogtle is complicated by the fact that multiple utilities own pieces of the plant. Georgia Power holds forty-five point seven percent. Oglethorpe Power Corporation, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, and Dalton Utilities own the rest.

According to Georgia Power's financial statements for the third quarter of 2024, their share of the capital costs for Units 3 and 4 came to roughly ten point six five billion dollars, with another eighty-three million expected for site cleanup. Extrapolating from Georgia Power's ownership share suggests total construction costs of around twenty-three point seven six billion dollars for the two new units.

But wait—there's more. Georgia Power also incurred three point five three billion dollars in financing charges during construction. This interest wasn't capitalized into the cost of the plant. Instead, it was recovered through surcharges on customer bills while the plant was still being built. Georgia ratepayers have been paying for Vogtle for years before they received a single kilowatt-hour of electricity from it.

And remember, these figures are just for Units 3 and 4. The original Units 1 and 2 cost nearly nine billion dollars in 1980s money.

The Nuclear Paradox

The Vogtle saga encapsulates a strange paradox about nuclear power in America. On one hand, the country's existing nuclear fleet is extraordinarily valuable. These plants run around the clock, producing carbon-free electricity with remarkable reliability. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been extending their operating licenses, and Vogtle Units 1 and 2 are now cleared to run until 2047 and 2049 respectively.

On the other hand, building new nuclear plants has become almost impossibly expensive and time-consuming. Vogtle is the only nuclear plant completed in the United States in decades. The only other AP1000 project attempted in America—V.C. Summer—was abandoned after burning through nine billion dollars with nothing to show for it.

Meanwhile, China has been constructing nuclear plants on schedule and on budget, using some of the same AP1000 technology. The difference isn't the reactors themselves. It's everything around them: the regulatory environment, the construction workforce, the supply chains, the institutional knowledge that comes from building things repeatedly rather than once every thirty years.

The Power of Precision

Lost in the drama of cost overruns and bankruptcies is a small but fascinating technical achievement at the original Vogtle units.

In 2008, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a power increase for Units 1 and 2—but not through any physical modification to the reactors. Instead, Southern Nuclear implemented what's called a Measurement Uncertainty Recapture uprate.

Here's the concept: Nuclear reactors are required to operate with a safety margin below their maximum theoretical output. This margin exists partly because the instruments measuring reactor power have some degree of uncertainty. If your instruments might be off by two percent, you need to stay at least two percent below the danger zone.

But what if you install better instruments?

Southern Nuclear replaced the older venturi-type flow meters—which measure water flow by forcing it through a narrowed pipe section and calculating flow from pressure differences—with ultrasonic flow meters. These newer devices work by comparing how long it takes sound pulses to travel upstream versus downstream through the water. The time difference reveals the flow rate with much greater precision.

More precise measurements mean less uncertainty. Less uncertainty means a smaller required safety margin. A smaller margin means you can run closer to the reactor's true limits while maintaining the same actual level of safety.

The uprate was only one point seven percent—but for a thousand-megawatt reactor, that's seventeen megawatts of additional capacity, roughly enough to power seventeen thousand homes. All from measuring water flow more accurately.

What Vogtle Means

Whether Plant Vogtle represents the future of American nuclear power or its epitaph remains an open question.

Optimists point out that the plant is now operational, generating enormous amounts of clean electricity that will serve Georgia for the next fifty years or more. The learning pains of building the first AP1000s in America are now behind us. Future projects might benefit from the workforce training and institutional knowledge accumulated at Vogtle.

Pessimists note that no utility in its right mind would attempt to replicate this experience. Thirty-four billion dollars for two reactors is roughly four times what the same amount of generating capacity would cost in solar farms, and solar doesn't require twenty-year permitting battles or carry the risk of multi-billion-dollar overruns.

The truth is probably somewhere in between. Nuclear power has genuine advantages—it runs when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, it takes up very little land, and it produces no carbon emissions during operation. But the American nuclear industry has clearly lost something over the past four decades: the ability to build these plants affordably and predictably.

Plant Vogtle stands as a monument to what nuclear power can be—and to how hard America has made it to get there.