Nuclear

On 31 July 2023 Georgia Power declared Unit 3 of Plant Vogtle, near Waynesboro, Georgia, in commercial operation. It was the first reactor of Westinghouse's AP1000 design to run in America. Unit 4 followed on 29 April 2024. Together they added about 2.2 GW of firm, carbon-free capacity that could run for sixty to eighty years. They were about seven years late. The project's total cost for all its owners, including financing, was more than about $35 billion (Georgia PSC data, reported), against an original estimate of about $14 billion; on narrower bases, most reported figures exceed $30 billion. That is roughly $15,900 per kilowatt all-in, in nominal dollars including financing.

The overrun had broken the companies around it. Westinghouse, then owned by Toshiba, had converted the Vogtle and V.C. Summer construction contracts to fixed-price terms in 2015–16, and on 29 March 2017 it filed for Chapter 11; Toshiba paid about $3.7 billion under its parent guarantee to the Vogtle owners (reported). On 31 July 2017 SCANA and Santee Cooper abandoned the two AP1000s at V.C. Summer in South Carolina after spending about $9 billion, and South Carolina customers paid for reactors that were never finished. Georgia's customers carried most of Vogtle's cost, because a 2009 state law let Georgia Power collect financing costs during construction and the commission later approved the capital in rates; Southern Company's shareholders absorbed billions of charges. In November 2025 two incumbent members of Georgia's elected Public Service Commission lost to challengers in an election fought largely over bills and Vogtle (reported).

Fourteen months after Unit 3 started, on 20 September 2024, Constellation Energy announced a 20-year agreement with Microsoft to restart Unit 1 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which it had closed for economic reasons in 2019, renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center. The ~835 MW reactor would cost about $1.6 billion to restart (company estimate, reported), about $1,900 per kilowatt, roughly an eighth of Vogtle's cost per kilowatt, and Microsoft would buy its output through the PJM grid. The price was not disclosed. The restart target was later moved from 2028 to 2027, and in November 2025 DOE guaranteed a loan of up to $1 billion (company). Within eighteen months, existing American reactors that had been closing because they could not compete with cheap gas had become some of the most sought-after assets in the industry. This chapter explains why nuclear power has the widest gap in energy between the value of what exists and the cost of building more.