SaportaReport84%
Plant Vogtle’s three-year anniversary: Time for an apology 41%
By Patty Durand0%
8/6/2026, 10:32:51 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Hasty Generalization, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 26.5% saturation with 275 hits. Analysis detected 1,870 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,038 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 38.1% and a BS Rank of 41% (18,113 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 59.20% of the article peer group.
Plant Vogtle.
(Photo via nrc.gov.)
Three years ago, on July 31, 2023, Plant Vogtle Unit 3 entered commercial service, the first new nuclear reactor completed in the United States in more than thirty years.
Georgia Power, Governor Kemp, and Georgia Public Service Commissioners celebrated the moment as a triumph of American engineering and a milestone for the nation’s energy future.
But completing a project with no cost cap and no deadline is not success.
Success means delivering what you promised, when you promised it, for the price you promised.
And in that regard, Plant Vogtle is the costliest failure in state history.
On Aug. 1, 2023, the day after Unit 3 entered commercial service, residential customers saw their rates increase 7.8 percent, the largest rate increase in Georgia history.
This came after years of assurances that both new reactors together would raise bills only about 2 to 3 percent.
What began as a $14 billion project became more than $36 billion and is now the most expensive power plant ever built on Earth .
Patty Durand is the founder of Georgians for Affordable Energy, a nonprofit that seeks fair utility rates and a clean energy future.
Yet no one has apologized.
Georgia Power has never apologized for Vogtle going $17 billion over budget or taking fifteen years to build instead of seven.
Governor Brian Kemp and legislators who continue to defend Vogtle have never apologized for saddling Georgia families with decades of higher electric bills.
There has, however, been political accountability: Georgia voters removed two of the five Republican commissioners at the first opportunity they had last November .
A third commissioner lost her bid for a seat in Congress in May of 2026.
Yet, the General Assembly appears not to have received the same message.
During this year’s legislative session, Republican legislators began to quietly lay the groundwork for another generation of nuclear construction.
Representative Don Parsons, chairman of the House Energy and Utilities Committee, sponsored House Bill 1320 to amend Georgia’s Integrated Resource Planning statute by explicitly adding nuclear generating facilities to the list of preferred electricity resources.
The bill passed out of committee on Feb.
25, 2026.
Senator Tim Bearden sponsored Senate Resolution 482, creating a Nuclear Power Study Committee to examine how advanced nuclear reactors could meet Georgia’s future electricity demand.
The Senate approved the resolution on March 31, 2026.
Senator Bearden stated in committee that nuclear power will strengthen Georgia’s economy.
Yet Plant Vogtle produced approximately a 25 percent increase in residential and small business electric rates, costs that ripple throughout the economy because electricity is a basic input to nearly every product and service.
Higher energy costs are a key driver of inflation .
Remarkably, Senator Bearden’s study committee includes only representatives of organizations that supported Vogtle, including Georgia Power, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, Electric Membership Corporations (EMC), and legislators.
Missing are consumer advocates who represent the people paying for Vogtle, and energy economists, renewable energy executives, environmental organizations, and university researchers with expertise in modern electric systems.
Representative Parsons claimed in committee that commercial fusion power is just around the corner.
That’s just not true: engineers and researchers say that fusion remains decades away from reaching commercial deployment, if it ever does.
Transformative wealth
It is clear that Georgia lawmakers would rather promote the next nuclear project than learn any lessons from the last one: neither Senator Bearden nor Representative Parsons has created a study committee to understand the failures of Vogtle.
Under the system created by the state legislature, Georgia Power earns billions of dollars in profits for building things like power plants, regardless of whether costs were managed.
That system rewards spending rather than performance and was created 100 years ago when we needed rapid investments in grid infrastructure.
That system is now rewarding Southern Company shareholders with huge riches for the billions of dollars in Plant Vogtle’s cost overruns while profoundly harming Georgians.
Georgia Power bills are eighth highest in the nation while Georgia Power earned an unprecedented $2.8 billion in profits last year, leading Southern Company CEO Chris Womack to term the year’s profits as “ transformational .”
A technological achievement
The real technological revolution in America is not nuclear power: it is solar paired with battery storage whose extraordinary cost reductions and performance improvements have transformed electricity markets around the world, including the U.S.
In 2024 and 2025, more than 90 percent of new generating capacity added in the United States came from wind, solar, and battery storage.
Last year, California powered its grid with two-thirds clean energy using solar and battery storage integration and reducing expensive gas and its harmful gas emissions by 40 percent.
Last year Texas surpassed California to become the nation’s leader, with renewables accounting for roughly 37 percent of the state’s total electricity supply.
Solar power is now the cheapest electricity in history and has been since 2020.
But Georgia ranks 39th nationally in solar generation per capita despite having some of the nation’s best solar resources because state law rewards spending without performance, and that means big spending on nuclear and gas, not affordable solar.
Georgia Power’s failure to deliver Vogtle on budget did more than produce the largest rate increase in Georgia history.
In 2025, Georgia Power disconnected 273,800 residential customers, or one in every nine households, for nonpayment, more than ten times the national average.
Georgia Power’s supporters point to a grid that is reliable, but 11 percent of Georgia Power’s residential customers did not find it reliable when they were disconnected.
No business should be rewarded simply for spending a lot of money while meeting no performance requirements.
If legislators want to reform Georgia’s energy future, they should begin by reforming the incentives that produced Plant Vogtle and are now causing Georgia Power to pursue expensive gas and high-voltage transmission lines for data centers.
Legislators who continue steering Georgia towards whatever financially benefits Georgia Power while ignoring the harm that results will find that voters notice them just as they did the three Georgia Public Service Commissioners who recently lost their seats.
The post Plant Vogtle’s three-year anniversary: Time for an apology appeared first on SaportaReport .
Speakers
2speakers2.5%attributed speech1,012writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageDon Parsons
14 attributed words54% of attributed speech79% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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