Vogtle Electric Generating Plant — Units 3 & 4

For three decades, no new commercial nuclear reactor came online in the United States. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 ended that drought. The two Westinghouse AP1000 units, built next to two older reactors near Waynesboro, Georgia, brought first-of-a-kind passive-safety nuclear back to American soil, and the scars from how hard it was are part of the record.

Project Scope

Each AP1000 unit generates roughly 1,114 megawatts, adding about 2,200 MW of carbon-free baseload and pushing Plant Vogtle’s four-unit capacity toward 4.5 gigawatts, the largest nuclear station in the country. Unit 3 reached commercial operation in July 2023; Unit 4 followed in April 2024. The AP1000 design leans on passive safety, using gravity, natural circulation, and stored water to cool the core without operator action or AC power. Bechtel took over construction in 2017 after the bankruptcy of the original contractor and drove Unit 4’s costs down by roughly 30 percent against Unit 3 by repeating a now-known sequence. The expansion’s total cost climbed past $30 billion against a 2009 estimate near $14 billion, a gap that became the project’s other headline.

Why It Matters

Vogtle is the test case everyone in the nuclear conversation cites, for better and worse. It proved the AP1000 can be built and operated in the U.S., and it rebuilt a domestic supply chain and workforce that had gone dormant. It also showed what first-of-a-kind megaproject risk looks like in dollars and years. As data-center and electrification demand drives fresh interest in nuclear, the lessons from Units 3 and 4, on modular sequencing, on owner oversight, on the cost of learning curves, shape how the next builds get priced. Bechtel carried that experience straight into other large U.S. industrial work, including Micron’s U.S. fab program.

Project Team & Details