The photo is sourced from Georgia Power
The units will be the first nuclear capacities commissioned in the United States in the last few decades. The last capacities commissioned previously were two power units at the Watts Bar NPP located in Tennessee, which were connected to the grid in 1996 and 2016 respectively. The construction of these units commenced back in 1973 but was put on hold in the mid-1980s due to an expected reduction in power demand. Construction works only resumed in 1992 for the first reactor and as late as in 2007 for the second one.
The third and fourth power units of the Vogtle NPP will raise the number of nuclear reactors operating in the U.S. to 94 and their aggregate capacity to 97 GW. According to IAEA, the U.S. ranks first worldwide in terms of the number and capacity of its NPPs, with France coming in second (as of February 2023, it had 56 power units with a total capacity of 61.4 GW), and China (55 reactors totaling 52.2 GW), Russia (37 reactors totaling 27.7 GW) and South Korea (25 reactors totaling 24.4 GW) rounding out the top five.
The share of NPPs in the U.S. energy mix in the first 11 months of 2022 stood at 18% – the biggest share among low-carbon energy sources, including hydro power plants (6%), solar power plants (4%), and all other types of renewables (12%). Moreover, nuclear reactors are known for the reliability of their power supplies: according to EIA, the average utilisation rate of NPPs in the U.S. in the same period reached 92%, whereas the utilisation rates of wind and solar power plants stood at 36% and 26% respectively. The only types of power plants, which do not use fossil fuels and have comparable reliability are those powered by biomass (61%) and wood pellets (59%), whose utilisation rates depend not on the weather but on the availability of feedstock and the ultimate power demand.
