Vogtle Unit 4 enters commercial operation
The second of two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia enters commercial operation, its sister unit having done so in 2023. They are the first newly constructed reactors completed in the United States in some three decades. The project ran many years beyond its original schedule and its final cost was several times the initial estimate; the reactor vendor entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy during construction. Vogtle is included here neither as an argument for nor against fission, but as the observable data point on the question this Journey asks about learning: two units built in sequence, in the same country, to the same design, is close to the minimum condition for learning to appear at all, and the cost history of Western first-of-a-kind projects is what the negative-learning literature is about.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Nuclear fission power · technology · not located
- The experience (learning) curve · phenomenon · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors
Supports the finding that overnight construction costs for nuclear reactors rose over time in the United States and France rather than falling with cumulative experience, with more varied trends in other national programmes — the empirical basis for treating constructed generation as behaving differently from manufactured generation. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session. This paper has been contested in subsequent literature on both data selection and interpretation, and a curator should represent that dispute rather than the finding alone.
Energy Policy (Elsevier) · 2016 · Partly verified
J. R. Lovering, A. Yip and T. Nordhaus, Energy Policy, volume 91, 2016
Recorded on Nuclear fission power
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.