The first new US nuclear reactor since 2016 has begun splitting atoms, a key milestone that comes after years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns.
Startup testing will continue at Unit 3 of Southern Co.’s Vogtle plant in Georgia, which is slated to start producing electricity and enter commercial operation in May or June, the company said in a statement Monday. The company delayed Vogtle’s in-service date and took a $201 million charge on the project last month.
The last commercial-scale US reactor to start up was Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar 2 seven years ago.
If you like nuclear, you should hope it stays quiet. It’s an embarrassing project.
The cost of the two units have climbed from its original estimate of $14 billion to close to $35 billion.
The total cost of the project to build a third and fourth reactor at Vogtle will cost all its owners more than $30 billion. Georgia Power owns 45.7% of the project, while Oglethorpe Power Corp. owns 30%, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia owns 22.7% and the city of Dalton owns 1.6%.
Yes it is
I am glad they finally have it up and running.
I hope they learn from these mistakes and do better the next 20 times.
When I read the articles one delay ws for a leaky valve and one was for a vibrating pipe. I am thinking maybe these are things that engineers and scientists can learn to prevent.
They’re going to have a hard time sweet-talking policymakers and investors for future projects with 11 digits margins of error on their cost estimates. They won’t get 20 more chances in any democratic society.
Depends on whether the decision is made logically or with falsehoods and politics.
I once heard of a movie set that shut down and cost $30,000 a day because a single actor didn’t show up. It did not lead to a permanent ban on movies or actor or anything.
I personally know of a $500,000/day wholesale club that shut down for a day because of a faulty fire extinguisher in the rotisserie chicken area.
Only a moron would look at that and say
no more fire extinguishers ever, or
no more chickens ever, or
no more wholesale clubs ever.
Believe it . . . or pretend you don’t it is possible to cook chickens and sell them
and we should not shape policy based on what liberals can pretend they don’t understand.
I once heard of a country that opened it’s borders giving free hotels, education and medical care to all of those who had crossed over either seeking “asylum” or illegally.
It costs that country about 20 billion per year. Yet, many of the people of that country didn’t care about the cost to taxpayers but were very concerned about other things such as cost overruns on a nuclear power plant calling it “embarrassing”.
And to think we got it for 35 billion to give power to Americans that’s roughly the same amount of money we send to the Ukraine each month for people to kill each other.
I guess folks just don’t understand return on investment.
Build a new home, pay your contractor cost plus. Now, there is a shortage on lumber and other materials causing prices to skyrocket. What the original budget for the home was when it started increased exponentially.
