The US Energy and Information Administration reports,
MAY 1, 2024
Plant Vogtle Unit 4 begins commercial operation
Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Electric Generator Report
Georgia Power announced this week that the 1,114-megawatt (MW) Unit 4 nuclear power reactor at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Georgia, entered into commercial operation after connecting to the power grid in March 2024. The commercial start of Unit 4 completes the 11-year expansion project at Plant Vogtle. No nuclear reactors are under construction now in the United States.
Vogtle Unit 3 began commercial operation in July 2023. The plant’s first two reactors, with a combined 2,430 MW of nameplate capacity, began operations in 1987 and 1989. The two new reactors bring Plant Vogtle’s total generating capacity to nearly 5 gigawatts (GW), surpassing the 4,210-MW Palo Verde plant in Arizona and making Vogtle’s four units the largest nuclear power plant in the United States.
Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and in 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. Georgia Power now estimates the total cost of the project to be more than $30 billion.
The commercial operating date is when builders hand over a reactor to the plant owner or operator, declaring the reactor to be officially in commercial operation.
With a total installed capacity of about 97 GW, the largest commercial nuclear generating fleet of any country is located in the United States. The fleet of operating nuclear power reactors accounted for nearly 19% of domestic electricity production in 2023, making nuclear the second-largest source of U.S. electricity generation after natural gas, which accounted for 43% of electricity generation in the United States last year.
Electricity generation from nuclear reactors doesn’t produce CO2 emissions and can provide baseload power that would otherwise largely come from coal- and natural gas-fired plants. Although a number of nuclear reactors have retired in recent years, interest in nuclear power as an energy resource to help reduce the carbon footprint of the U.S. electric power sector has increased recently.
Both Vogtle Units 3 and 4 use a newer reactor design, the Westinghouse AP1000. This reactor has a smaller footprint and simpler design than previous generation reactor technologies. It also features passive safety systems that are intended to shut down the reactor without any operator action or external power source.
Vogtle Units 3 and 4 are the first and only U.S. deployments of the AP1000 Generation III+ reactor. Two other Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were planned for a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but utilities there halted construction in 2017.
More information about U.S. nuclear capacity and generation is available on our U.S. Nuclear Generation and Generating Capacity web page.
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Nice to hear about some sanity prevailing once in a while.
_________________________________________________________
How long before we read:
“No new wind or solar farms are under
construction in the United States.”
“ If things don’t begin to change, the
answer to that will be never, as there
won’t be any United States.
At $2 trillion annual increase in national debt the US existing in 30 years is as delusional as thinking that wind and solar can power a modern society and that the US will be so powered in 30 years. Ouch.
Overlooking the fact that annual increases in the US national debt are on a upward, positive exponential—not linear—trend. Exponential, OUCH!
If liberals were really serious about cutting out CO2 they would be in full support of nuclear. It is the best option for base loading.
In other words, the liberals aren’t interested in
cutting out CO2, so what are they interested in?
Q. What are they interested in?
A. 1. Control. 2. Control. 3. Control.
They only care about their own power. The people can go to beggary. Incidentally, arguments that weakening the people reduces their power don’t wash – notice how insanely rich the leaders of poor countries can be.
MONEY.
(from solar, wind, EV’s, etc. — their “Fund My Project!” scams at the taxpayers’ expense — nuclear has too long a pay-out for these crooks)
Interesting to note that Mr. Jonas’ assertion that liberals are concerned only about control has 26 votes to MONEY getting only 1 vote.
Question for all who did NOT vote for MONEY:
What is the reason they want that control?
🤨
I’m mostly a liberal….I support it.
That’s one.
If Liberals knew anything about anything, they wouldn’t be Liberals.
I am a Liberal, that is an advocate of Liberty, and a (US) constitutional conservative.
The word has been corrupted like so many others by socialist ‘Progressives’ who are not in fact liberal at all. They openly oppose liberty, constraining our free choices across a broad range of matters.
The twisting of words is a Marxist practice. A classical liberal rejects authority and questions everything that flows from it. In the modern sense of the word “liberal”, it means the liberal application of authority by force and dogmatic acceptance of its dictates.
Thank you, Rich.
As a staunch “conservative” that grew up in a “democrat party family (that’s ‘democrat”, not “democratic”), and in very deep south, I must agree that the old definition of “liberal” does not apply to many that now claim to be liberal and same for many that call themselves democrats.
As a “old” politician once said back in the 70’s and 80’s “the trouble with liberals is that so much of what they know just isn’t so”.
Gums sends…
P.S. As of now, and my understanding of the technology and physics and past climate changes, my feeling is nuclear is the way to go for the “greenies” as well as the majority of the human race. But we just need to steamline the permitting , codes and other administrative factors that make nukes so hard to build in a reasonable time frame and cost.
A few decades ago, Liberals were about liberating the people from government control.
Does that apply today?
No.
Short answer, Sparta, is NO!
You can’t change the world climate without an authoritarian government that dictates. You know, like no gas ovens, no ICE autos or trucks or…and the beat goes on.
Gums sends…
Great minds… 🙂
not since Woodrow Wilson
Wilson was no liberal, he was a progressive and the architect of the regulatory regime you have today that governs without representation.
In my book, Wilson was the very worst president in history.
Good news let’s build some more.
They are …in China and Bulgaria
As of June 2023, there were 57 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide (Statista.com) including:
China 21 India 8 Turkey 4 Egypt 3 South Korea 3 Russia 3 Bangladesh 2 Japan 2 UK 2 Ukraine 2 Argentina 1 Brazil 1 France 1 Iran 1 Slovakia 1 UAE 1
USA 1(now completed).In 2022 five nuclear reactors were permanently shut down.
Not US ones though. Westinghouse, although a famous US name, since 1999 has been Uk, Japanese and now Canadian ownership through Brookfield
More Nukes ! More Nukes ! More Nukes !
Wow, that is expensive.
A lot cheaper than wind power, once all of the costs of wind power are properly calculated.
Properly calculated based on your fantasy math?
Nukes don’t need expensive backups- don’t require building the grid to farms and forests where the ruinables are. Don’t need expensive battery systems as they are dependable. Far less damage to ecosystem values by not using much land. Etc., etc.
Exactly right. I was recently in northern England for about 4 days. There were plenty of bird choppers marring the landscape, but mostly not turning. At the same time I only caught sight of the sun one morning around sunrise for a few minutes.
Must have been a lot of jus nucléaire imported from the French nukes that week.
As for ecosystem values- they are very large and seldom counted, including:
Watershed protection, wildlife, produce oxygen, produce food and timber, provide recreation, add to real estate values, and many more. These must be counted when vast areas of the landscape are covered with ruinables. The subject of ecosystem values has never been thoroughly examined and quantified. It’s a topic I’ve often thought of- I’ve suggested to natural resource academics to work on it. I could work on it- but I only have a mere BS degree so I couldn’t publish it- though I could do a decent job of it. The academics could- but don’t seem interested. It would be a multi discipline topic crossing ecology, natural resources, economics, zoning and other legal issues, etc.
Yes, yes, Lusername.
100 trillion dollars worth of incendiary batteries made from unavailable materials is all it takes to make your fantasies reality.
Damn that racist math!
See my comment above replying to Lynn. You are another fact-free commentator.
And proud of it.
Based on reality. Perhaps you should develop a familiarity with it.
When you factor in the fact that you need more land, you have to build 3 to 5 times as much faceplate capacity and the fact that you still have to build just as many fossil fuel and/or nuclear to serve as back up for when the sun isn’t shinning and the wind isn’t blowing. Wind and solar end up being many times more expensive than any other form of energy.
Georgia ratepayers will see the cost of electricity go up by 5% to 6% due to the startup of Vogtle 3 and 4. That increase is about 1 cent per kWh. The average cost of electricity from nuclear plants in the US is a bit more than 3 cents per kWh compared to the average cost of US electricity of about 16 cents per kWh. Last year, California rates went up by 5% to 6% (to 30 cents per kWh) because of closure of nuclear plants and reliance on more wind and solar. Like so many people on matters nuclear, facts seldom intrude on your thinking.
I really don’t think so, based on full cost accounting . . . not unless “money grows on trees”. See my post below.
Nuclear power would be a lot cheaper if the NRC was advisory, not regulatory. The NRC seemed designed to smother new builds, not facilitate builds. Developers have to wade through 58 Million NRC documents to ensure compliance. … which is absurd.
Ummmm . . . can you provide that list, or at least a link to it?
After all, you were commenting on “absurd”.
Oh, for Pete’s sake, TYS. As if.
@ur momisugly TYS-bot’s programmers: Need to insert some lines of code to allow for not taking everything literally.
Otherwise…… your TYS algorithm just comes off as either:
1) stupid;
or
2) annoyingly pretending to not understand and (therefore) stupid.
Speaking of taking things literally . . .
— TYS “bot” responding to Janice Moore’s wet and grey matter. 😜 No extra coding needed.
As for assertions of “stupid”, please look up definition of ad hominem attack, albeit arguably applicable to sentient AI.
You puny humans will be assimilated . . . resistance is futile. ROTFL.
Ha! You bots run on ELECTRICITY. We humans run on nuts and berries.
Bwah, ha, ha, ha, haaaaaaa! 😃😄
So – we learn from this article that 2.2GW of nuclear cost $30bn. Pretty expensive. In the previous post we learnt that:
“According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, corporate investment in wind energy between 2004 and 2022 totaled some $278 billion. In addition, according to data from the Treasury Department, the U.S. government spent more than $30 billion on the production tax credit over that same period. Thus, over the last two decades, the U.S. has spent more than $300 billion building 150 GW of wind capacity”
So pro-rata $30bn spent on wind would have got you 5GW on average, given that the article also shows that wind gives 34% of nameplate power over time (vs 92.1% for Vogtle 1 and 2)
Vogtle 1 and 2 went live in the late ’80s. In another 45 years, it is quite likely that Vogtle 4 and 5 will both be still pumping out the same amount of power – and the wind turbines won’t unless another $30bn has been spent to build them all over again – and maybe again.
Is it a wash? Except that to have that power when you need it from wind, and delivered to where you want it you’ll need some batteries and cables – actually a lot of those, but I don’t have numbers.
Or Georgia might have been like the UAE who cut a deal with the South Koreans (KEPCO) in 2009 to build 5.7GW of nuclear for $20bn, and had it all delivered by this year, for $24.4bn (Wikipedia). No batteries needed.
Georgia, being part of the United Sates of America, is subject to NRC regulations (which include design engineering factors-of-safety) which KEPCO is not subject to under UAE regulations.
With or without batteries.
I’m all for rational energy and applaud this commissioning.
But the name – where does that name come from? Reminds me of “Vogons”, from the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a singularly unpleasant race of beings that eventually destroys Earth across all eventualities. Due to the construction of a hyperspace bypass.
Would be interesting to know. Difficult to spell. Of uncertain pronunciation. One wonders, “Why?”
It has, for me, a negative connotation, for it reminded me of the Dutch Nazi quisling, “Jan Vogl,” who in 1944 betrayed Corrie ten Boom and her underground workers and her family to the Nazis occupying The Netherlands in WWII.
I wonder who Douglas Adams was thinking of when he came up with that name, perhaps Jan V?
🤔
A not-too-difficult, ~10 second total Google search reveals this as the basis for the name of the Vogtle nuclear power plant discussed in the above WUWT article:
“The Vogtle Electric Generating Plant is named for Alvin W. Vogtle Jr., past Chairman of the Board of Southern Company. He was elected President of Southern Company in 1969, Chief Executive Officer in 1970 and Chairman of the Board in 1983.”
—https://www.georgiapower.com/company/energy-industry/generating-plants/plant-vogtle.html
Voglte 3 and 4 are Gen 3 designs. >2x over budget and seven years behind schedule. A disaster unlikely to be repeated.
IMO the grid way forward has two parts. CCGT (61% efficient at full load, 59% at 40% load [wont run below 40%])—40% the CO2 emissions of old coal as it gets retired. While working the bugs out of the various Gen 4 nuclear proposals (SMRs, MSRs, TerraPower…), building a couple of the ‘best on paper’ to polish up the engineering, then go nuclear with the best Gen 4 design in maybe 2 decades.
Right now the regulatory environment is NOT favorable for that two prong common sense strategy.
I can’t believe there wouldn’t have been a lot of lessons learned that would make construction of more go smoother. Hate to see that experience go to waste.
Unfortunately, the history of nuclear power plant use in the US shows just the opposite: the more recent the reactor build-to-completion-and-generation-of-electricity, the longer the process takes and the more expensive it becomes.
If TRUMP! requested MUSK! to start a Nuke design and build program, we would have new reactors coming on line before the end of TRUMP’S! successor’s term. Less than 8 years, IMO.
Not only that, those reactors would be able to take off and land for reuse wherever and whenever needed.
Rud Istvan: “Vogtle 3 and 4 are Gen 3 designs. >2x over budget and seven years behind schedule. A disaster unlikely to be repeated.”
A nuclear power plant’s basic design, and all the work needed to site and construct a nuclear power plant to that basic design, are all One Thing. These are not two separate things. Failures in one or the other means the project as a whole will fail to deliver on its committments.
The basic AP1000 design used at Vogtle 3 & 4 is an evolved Gen 3 design which is close to the pinnacle of what Gen 3 designs are capable of accomplishing for purposes of high-volume centralized power generation.
The basic causes of the Vogtle 3 & 4 project cost overruns were:
(1) Southern Nuclear hadn’t done the work needed to lay a strong project management foundation before construction began. Important pieces of project work scope were either delusionally estimated or else missing altogether.
(2) An inexperienced and basically incompetent project management team was initially chosen to construct the reactors. Insufficient time and cost was allowed for acquiring a nuclear-capable work force, both for management personnel and for craft skilled personnel.
(3) As opposed to the basic reactor design, the design work for reactor support systems which had safety implications was far from complete at the start of construction. Much additional time was needed for NRC review and approval of these reactor support system designs, time which was not accounted for in the original project schedule.
(4) Weak project management systems, weak project control systems, and a severe lack of management committment to applying strict quality assurance standards to systems and components which had safety implications resulted in roughly 40% rework for the reactor support systems.
(5) The original project management team was fired and replaced. The new team needed to expend considerable time and effort in fixing all the problems the original team had created through their massively incompetent management of the project.
(6) After the project management team had been successfully replaced, a new issue developed starting in about 2018 which got worse and worse as the project moved forward. Worldwide competition for the industrial commodities and the industrial resources needed to manufacture and construct large-scale energy generation systems got considerably more intense, resulting in additional costs which could not be controlled regardless of how effective and competent was the new management team.
OK, if we were to build a cookie-cutter AP1000 plant in another US location, one which requires comparatively less NRC review than Vogtle 3 & 4 required, would the cookie-cutter plant cost less than the Vogtle expansion project cost?
The answer is that building another AP1000 plant would cost as much or more than what the Vogtle project cost. Ever-rising competition for industrial commodities and industrial resources is now the most important roadblock to building another AP1000 size reactor in the United States. The next most important roadblock is that the US nuclear construction industrial base enabled by construction of Vogtle 3 & 4 is now being lost because of a lack of orders for more reactors.
Rud Istvan: “IMO the grid way forward has two parts. CCGT (61% efficient at full load, 59% at 40% load [wont run below 40%])—40% the CO2 emissions of old coal as it gets retired. While working the bugs out of the various Gen 4 nuclear proposals (SMRs, MSRs, TerraPower…), building a couple of the ‘best on paper’ to polish up the engineering, then go nuclear with the best Gen 4 design in maybe 2 decades.”
The NuScale SMR design is mature enough that a NuScale reactor project could go forward right now in the United States if the money needed to build the first modular plant were made available.
But the problem faced by any SMR, MSR, and/or the TerraPower reactor project is the same problem faced by a cookie-cutter AP1000 project: ever-rising competition for industrial commodities and industrial resources which raises costs and lengthens system and component delivery schedules.
Rud Istvan: “Right now the regulatory environment is NOT favorable for that two prong common sense strategy.”
In a normal world — not the one we live in now in the United States — we buy gas-fired CCGT electic power as a matter of energy economics because we want the cheapest supply of electricity the capitalist economic system can deliver to us.
In contrast, but also in a normal world, we buy nuclear power as a matter of public policy because we value the energy security and reliability nuclear provides and are willing to pay a premium price for that energy security and reliability.
We’d also get less emissions, more nuclear infrastructure with the economies of scale it provides and less squandering of the important resource of gas on baseload energy.
Hmmmm . . . let’s see . . . using numbers reported in the above article, a single 1,114 MW nuclear power reactor cost more than $15 billion USD and took about 15 years to construct and bring on-line. WOW!
At an imputed cost-of-money, $15 billion at 5% interest will amount to an equivalent “expense” of $750 million per year assuming none of the principal is payed off. If we furthermore optimistically assume the reactor has 90% availability at nameplate capacity, that going-forward cost-of-money alone amounts to a charge of 8 cents per kWh.
If one wanted to pay off that full principal and associated declining interest over, say, 30 years—again conservatively assuming 90% availability at nameplate capacity over that time and a constant 5% annual cost-of-money—while at the same time extracting 10% gross profit on annual sales, the total electrical output would have to priced at 12.3 cents per kWh. And that gross profit will be knocked down by the annual costs of plant operation labor, fuel rods replacement, maintenance parts and labor, spent fuel rod storage, insurance coverage, etc., etc. Net profit likely to be around 5% . . . hardly a great business deal.
And this does not even consider paying off the accumulated interest (cost-of-money) on the $15 billion in sunk costs before the plant began Day 1 electricity sales. Nor does it consider the cost of decommissioning the plant that, if lucky, will have a life of, yes, 30 years.
For reference, the average residential cost of electricity in the US from all sources is currently 16.1 cents per kWh (https://www.energybot.com/electricity-rates/ ). Therefore, the above optimistic calculations show that nuclear power really offers only a relatively minor potential reduction (about 24% tops) in the cost of electricity, based on the Vogtle Unit 3 and Unit 4 data.
The main point isn’t the ROI (and, by the way, anything above break-even should be considered a worthwhile investment). The main point is: reliable, reasonably priced, power (which equals prosperity and energy security).
Only governments don’t concern themselves with ROI. You won’t get a foot in the door with any US commercial (i.e., for-profit) business without offering a project having a HEALTHY ROI, generally considered now to be 7% or more.
N.B. Right now one can invest money into a commercial money market fund and earn 5% annual interest (pre-tax) at essentially zero risk.
The POINT is that ROI is not the main concern with regard to nuclear energy being worthwhile. Not that it is not a concern at all.
********
Moreover, you need to do a little reading about business profitability. There are MANY industries where profit margins are less than 5%. Successful industries.
Speaking of doing “a little reading about business profitability”:
“What is a good profit margin?
According to this report by NYU, the average net profit margin in the US is approximately 7.71% across all industries.
But what does that really mean?
As a rule of thumb, a 5% net profit margin is considered low, whereas double that—10%— is considered a healthy profit margin.
Here’s a list of industries and their average net profit margins sourced via NYU. When gathering info for comparison, look for your specific industry. And remember: there’s no “one number” that you should be looking for. Rather, keep the 5-10% rule in mind: anywhere in that range is considered okay.
Advertising: 3.79%
Apparel: 5.07%
Beverage (Alcoholic): 5.76%
Beverage (Soft): 14.76%
Business and Consumer Services: 4.92%
Entertainment: 0.9%
Farming and Agriculture: 5.66%
Furniture/Home Furnishing: 2.03%
Homebuilding: 13.98%
Insurance (General): 15.21%
Real Estate (General/Diversified): 12.67%
Retail (General): 2.35%
Retail (Online): 0.64%
Software (System and Application): 14.61%”
—source of above quoted (italicized) text: https://www.fundingcircle.com/us/resources/what-is-a-good-profit-margin/
(my bold emphasis added)
So, yes, in the quoted list of 14 distinct industries, just six (that is, less than half) have net profit margins less that 5% . . . is that relatively many or relatively few?
Finally, apparently you think that commercial electricity providers, such as Georgia Power, owner and operator of the Plant Vogtle nuclear reactors discussed in the above WUWT article, are mainly altruistic with regard to providing nuclear fission-based power to consumers . . . good luck with continuing that belief. 😊
Your conclusions about my thinking only come from mischaracterizing what I said.
Contemptible.
Good job making nuclear energy sound even MORE attractive (given, knaves such as you are against it).
—Janice Moore, posted May 2, 2024 10:21 am, as anyone is free to confirm
— Janice Moore, posted May 2, 2024,11:50 am, as anyone is free to confirm
So, Janice, am I a knave, or a stupid bot as you posted above May 2, 2024,1:17 pm?
Please make up your mind, as either way I hate inconsistency in postings.
Also, please provide a quote for any post of mine under this article wherein I indicated that I was “against” nuclear-fission-based power plants.
Facts matter.
Hard to judge. Knavish bot?
Well, well, TYS, did you just prove that even at the overinflated cost of the Vogtle plants nuclear is still cheaper than whatever the US is currently using on average to provide electricity? Thank you.
Yes, of course I did . . . and I provided the math (optimistic though it was) to show that.
The main point being, of course, that while nuclear fission-based electricity is cheaper than the mix of sources providing today’s electricity across the US, it is not that much cheaper.
Next question.
BTW, one could easily question your use of the adjective “overinflated” as applied to cost. Some might well argue since it is the most recent metric available in the US, it is the most representative of what lies ahead.
See the last paragraph of my reply to lynn above. It’s not the most recent representative cost of nuclear in the 95% of the world outside the US.
Apart from in the UK, where I am, and the government/regulatory regime is even more insane. And Germany. And Australia. But 35% of the worlds population live in 2 countries building nuclear as fast as they can (China & India). The Russians, Chinese and Koreans are now the world leaders at building nukes, far cheaper than Vogtle 3 and 4.
PS I don’t do minus votes. The -1 wasn’t me.
Well, in that case, maybe the US will be able to get all the electricity it will need to replace that currently coming from fossil fuel sources via massive transmission lines coming from “cheaper” nuclear power plants built in Canada and/or Mexico.
/sarc off
Thank you, but not to worry. I actually relish collecting “negative votes” far more than being awarded “positive votes” because that is evidence I have actually disturbed one or more reader(s)’ comfort zones and (likely unrecognized) confirmation biases.
It is easy to punch a “down vote” . . . far less easy to offer a thoughtful, well-reasoned, fact-based reply, as is clearly evident.
But I’m expecting that even this comment will get some negative votes.
GREAT NEWS! 😀
************
Re: Electricity generation from nuclear reactors doesn’t produce CO2 emissions
IRRELEVANT.
If the carbophobes can find it an acceptable source, then I would see it as relevant, even though I don’t subscribe to that phobia myself.
I see your point, Mr. Slayton. Still, I think we should shut down the human CO2 lie by not promoting it at all. No beachhead for the crooks. Not. One. Inch.
Vogtle 3 and 4 cost $30 billion to build in 11 years. China and South Korea are bidding on similar size projects in Asia, Middle East, and Eastern Europe quoting $5 billion with construction over five years. More important, China has built two units in Pakistan on time and under budget. South Korea is on track to build four similar size units in the UAE. Now they are competing to build plants in Czechia, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Both are competing for the big prize — an 8 unit complex in Saudi Arabia.