Posted on 12/27/2023 1:59:45 PM PST by FarCenter
A new reactor at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear power plant is now in commercial operation, according to an announcement from Georgia Power, one of the plant’s owners. It is the first new nuclear reactor to start up in the United States since the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar 2 was commissioned in 2016.
The new 1,114 megawatt (MW) Unit 3 reactor joins two existing reactors at Plant Vogtle, which is jointly owned by Georgia Power and three other electric utility companies. The plant’s first two reactors, with a combined 2,430 MW of nameplate capacity, came online in the late 1980s. Georgia Power expects another similar-sized fourth reactor, Vogtle Unit 4, to begin operation sometime between November 2023 and March 2024. The two new reactors will make Plant Vogtle the largest nuclear power plant in the country, surpassing the 4,210 MW Palo Verde plant in Arizona.
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 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. The total cost of the project is now estimated at more than $30 billion.
Both Vogtle Units 3 and 4 use a new reactor design, the Westinghouse AP1000. This next generation advanced reactor has a smaller footprint and simpler design than previous generation reactor technologies. It also features robust passive safety systems that can shut down the reactor without any operator action or external power source. Units 3 and 4 are the first U.S. deployment of the AP1000 Generation III+ reactor. Two other Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were planned for a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but construction was halted in 2017.
(Excerpt) Read more at eia.gov ...
The Dims will figure out a reason to shut it down. They’re never satisfied.
Yeah, all those nukes coming online are going to power all those EVs the brilliant DC central planners are forcing us into . . .
I lived in Georgia during the onset of construction finacial woes at Westinghouse and massive cost overruns plagued tge project. I am goad it is completed and on line.
Too big, too unnecessary, with newer smaller safer more modular designs available.
The last part is key to nuclear power scaled to local needs instaed of the wasteful process of super giant reactors sending power hundreds of miles away.
That graph says it all. Almost all nuclear capacity is at least 30 years old.
For the Vogtle 3/4, construction started in 2013.
still, it could be worse. Germany has shuttered 6 nuclear plans in the last couple of years.
wow. something good came out of GA.
We’d probably have many more if not for Jane Fonda’s movie “The China Syndrome”.
If you consider that the US Navy has been operating small, mobile nuclear power plants for years, you really have to wonder why small modular nuclear reactors are not being used everywhere. It probably has something to do with “it works”, it’s efficient “, “it’s proven”, etc. Washington hates an obvious path to energy self sufficiency.
But, but, how will the NIMBY wokesters be able to use electricity if somebody else in flyover territory, far away from them, doesn’t produce it using those nasty nukes?? Hunh? /sarc
The government, the power companies, the power construction industry and the banks/lenders ALL like “bigger is better”.
But the newest nuclear energy power plant designs show for every necessary reason “bigger is better” is just wasteful and less efficient.
The downfall of the American industrial dream is exemplified by comparing construction of this plant to that of the Hoover Dam...
Also compared to the rebuilding of Pearl Harbor after the jap attack...
“Working Americans” meant something back then...
“Working Americans” meant something back then...”
Now we have work-free drug places...
We really need a lot more of these newer, safer designs getting online. Like yesterday.
Only other thing lately is “Archer”, and its heyday is kinda over.
OSHA.
Nobody wants a reactor near their home. So once you find a site where you CAN build one, you build a lot of capacity there.
Imagine how long the climate-justice communists would have delayed Hoover Dam...
Imagine how OSHA would have shut down the war production levels of ships, planes, and guns...
My mother worked in a shipyard, after training as a welder, 6-days a week, 12-hours a day from 1942 to early 1945 when the diseases set in...
Dad had joined the Marines in Feb 1942...
My brother & I went to live on grandparents’ farm till the war was over...
the two new reactors will make Plant Vogtle the largest nuclear power plant in the country, surpassing the 4,210 MW Palo Verde plant in Arizona.That's a lot of solar panels, a whole lot.
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