Last edited Sat Jan 10, 2026, 04:39 PM - Edit history (1)
Vogtle 4 - online 29 April 2024
Vogtle 3 - online 31 July 2023
Watts Bar 2 - online 4 June 2016
Watts Bar 1 - online 27 May 1996
Comanche Peak 2 - online 3 August 1993
Comanche Peak 1 - online 13 August 1990
And that's the story of the last 35 years. In addition to these six, there were two reactors entering service in 1990 other than Comanche Peak.
46 units came online from 1980 to 1989, inclusive, most of which had begun construction (more or less) ten years before. And if the same more or less ten-year timeline holds for any new units, they wouldn't be ready until the mid-2030s at the earliest.
With that guesstimate of a timeline in mind two additional considerations:
1. By the mid 2030s, we'll be at roughly 460 parts per million atmospheric CO2 content - that is, there will be another 90 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The uptake of those additional 90 billion tons by natural systems will not be complete for somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 years.
Certainly, adding generation that doesn't directly add to that GHG production will be welcome, but who the hell knows if existing plants in Texas and Arizona are going to be able to operate, given constraints on temperatures and water? Who the hell knows if plants in coastal Florida are going to be able to work in the face of rising sea levels and more powerful hurricanes?
2. What will the AI bubble do to warp utility investment patterns? It's possible that a collapse in the farcical inflation of valuations of Nvidia et. al. will provide a way to break the fever of stupid that's driving investment in even more NG and bringing coal out of mothballs. Or not. It may be that investor hot air keeps the shitshow going long enough to involve long-term, legally binding and very expensive buildouts of power plants that won't be used for server farms that are never built.
What then? Will utilities, facing debt and malinvestment, keep those power plants offline? Probably not, and those carbon-energy plants will do what they've always done - add even more GHGs to our air. Meanwhile, the additional funding that would have been available for investments in nuclear will either be lost, unavailable or prohibitively expensive because Win AI Race Shiny New Thing Line Go Up.
Oh, and invoking small modular reactors doesn't count. We are not talking small modular and unproven - we are talking here about large, baseload plants, which are the only kind likely to make a dent in future output.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors
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