The US Energy Information Administration charted US nuclear capacity additions by year and marked Plant Vogtle Unit 3 in Georgia as the first new US reactor to start commercial operation since Watts Bar Unit 2 in Tennessee came online in 2016. EIA published the analysis on August 1, 2023, citing a Georgia Power announcement and its own generator inventory.

Unit 3 is a 1,114 MW reactor that joined two existing units at Plant Vogtle, which have a combined nameplate capacity of 2,430 MW and came online in the late 1980s. EIA said the two new reactors would make Vogtle the largest nuclear plant in the country, ahead of the 4,210 MW Palo Verde plant in Arizona.

The cost figures show the scale of the project. Construction on the new reactors began in 2009. They were originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 for Unit 3 and 2017 for Unit 4. EIA reported that construction delays and cost overruns raised the total estimated cost to more than $30 billion. Units 3 and 4 are the first US deployment of the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor. Two other AP1000 reactors planned for a South Carolina plant were halted in 2017.

Watts Bar Unit 2 offers a comparison. Construction began in 1973 and was suspended in 1985, work resumed in 2007, and the reactor came online in 2016. EIA noted that the first US commercial reactor started in December 1957 in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, and that most US reactors were built between 1970 and 1990. At the time of the article, the United States had 95,881 MW of nuclear capacity at 93 operating commercial reactors, more than any other country, and nuclear supplied nearly 20 percent of US electricity.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61106