History of nuclear power
From a squash court in Chicago to the reactors rising in Wyoming and Tennessee, twenty places that made American nuclear power. A story in 20 stops on the Wattlas map of the North American grid.
Act I · 1942–1945
Chicago Pile-1 (1942)
On the afternoon of Wednesday, December 2, 1942, forty-nine people gathered in an old rackets court under the west stands of Stagg Field, the University of Chicago's idle football stadium, all but one of them crowded onto a balcony. Below them rose a great pile of 45,000 graphite blocks, black with dust and studded with lumps of uranium metal and uranium oxide. Enrico Fermi, who had left Mussolini's Italy four years before so that his Jewish wife would be safe, spent the day having the control rods drawn out a few inches at a time, checking the clicking counters against his slide rule at every step. At 3:25 pm the count began to climb and did not level off. For the first time anywhere, a nuclear chain reaction was sustaining itself, and it was under control. The pile ran for about four and a half minutes at half a watt before Fermi had it shut down. Eugene Wigner opened a bottle of Chianti and the scientists drank from paper cups, and Arthur Compton telephoned James Conant in code to say that the Italian navigator had landed in the New World. The pile made no useful power at all, but it proved that the energy locked in the uranium atom could be released on command, and the United States was already racing to turn that into a weapon, on a scale that would reshape the country's industry and its grid.
On the map: The dot marks Chicago Pile-1 on the University of Chicago campus, dated 1942, where the west stands of the old Stagg Field once stood. The lights are Chicago at night. The nearest nuclear plant on the map, Dresden, is about 70 km to the southwest.
Sources: Wikipedia: Chicago Pile-1, Wikipedia: Enrico Fermi, University of Chicago Library
Oak Ridge (1943–1945)
Chicago had shown that the chain reaction could be tamed, but turning it into a bomb would take industry on a scale nobody had tried, and that industry would run on electricity. In September 1942 General Leslie Groves, the Army engineer running the Manhattan Project, chose a stretch of ridges and farms along the Clinch River west of Knoxville. It had a highway and a railroad and few people, and the Tennessee Valley Authority's new Norris Dam had brought power within reach. Some 3,000 people were moved off their land, several families for the second time after TVA's reservoirs had already taken their farms, and by 1945 a secret city of 75,000 had grown up behind the fences. Its X-10 Graphite Reactor went critical at 5 am on November 4, 1943, the second reactor in the world and the first built to run around the clock, and the engineers and operators who learned their trade on it moved on to the far larger reactors planned in Washington state. The uranium plants were bigger still, and K-25, a U-shaped building half a mile long and then the largest in the world, got a powerhouse of its own, 238 MW, because a single failure on the TVA lines could cost it weeks of work. Uranium enriched at Oak Ridge went into the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. After the war, in August 1946, X-10 began shipping radioisotopes for medicine, and that year a Navy captain named Hyman Rickover arrived to learn how a reactor might drive a ship. To feed the atomic city TVA later built Kingston, down the river, and when it was finished in 1955 it was the largest coal-burning power plant in the world.
On the map: The dot marks the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, dated 1943, and the lab's Frontier supercomputer is the data center beside it. TVA's Kingston coal plant, 1,147 MW from 1954, is about 18 km to the west, and Melton Hill dam, 79 MW, is 5 km to the south.
Sources: Wikipedia: X-10 Graphite Reactor, ORNL, Graphite Reactor, Wikipedia: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Wikipedia: K-25, Wikipedia: Kingston Fossil Plant
Los Alamos (1943–1945)
The uranium from Oak Ridge and the plutonium to come from Washington would be useless until someone worked out how to make them explode, and that work needed a place nobody would think to look. In November 1942 Robert Oppenheimer led General Groves up onto the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico, to a boys' ranch school among the pines with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains across the valley. The Army bought the school and the mesa around it, and by the spring of 1943 the laboratory called Project Y had moved in, with Oppenheimer as its director. The town grew faster than anyone had planned, from about 3,500 people at the end of 1943 to 8,200 two years later. Water ran short, a new power line had to be run 25 miles up to the mesa, and by late 1945 the lights were failing. The hardest problem arrived in April 1944, when the laboratory found that plutonium bred in a reactor carried an isotope, plutonium-240, that would set off the simple gun-type bomb it had designed before the core could come together. Oppenheimer reorganized the whole laboratory around implosion, crushing a plutonium sphere inward with carefully shaped charges of high explosive, and every kilogram of plutonium it needed would have to come from the great reactors already rising in Washington. Decades later, Los Alamos County, which runs its own electric utility, signed up in 2017 to buy power from the country's first small modular reactor project, and stayed with it until the project was canceled in 2023 when its costs climbed.
On the map: The dot marks the Los Alamos Laboratory at Fuller Lodge, dated 1943. Los Alamos County runs its own electric utility, and the map lists two of its hydro plants, Abiquiu Dam, 17 MW, about 40 km to the north, and El Vado Dam, 8 MW, about twice as far.
Sources: Wikipedia: Los Alamos Laboratory, Los Alamos Daily Post, Wikipedia: Nuclear power in the United States
Hanford's B Reactor (1944–1945)
Plutonium by the kilogram needed reactors far larger than X-10, and they went up on the far side of the continent. In the last days of December 1942 Colonel Franklin Matthias and two DuPont engineers surveyed the sagebrush flats along the Columbia River in south central Washington, and what sealed their choice was a wire. A high-voltage line from Grand Coulee Dam to Bonneville ran straight across the land, with a substation at its edge, and beside it flowed a great river to cool the reactors. The towns of Hanford and White Bluffs were emptied, the Wanapum people lost the river where they had fished for thousands of years, and a construction camp of some 45,000 workers rose on the desert. B Reactor, the first full-scale production reactor in the world, went critical on September 26, 1944, with Fermi on hand. Within hours its power began to sag and then died away. The culprit was xenon-135, a fission product that swallowed neutrons, and the cure was already built in, because DuPont's engineers had given the reactor more fuel tubes than the physicists' design called for, 2,004 in all, and loading the extra tubes overpowered the poison. On March 10, 1945 a Japanese balloon bomb came down on the Grand Coulee line, and the surge that followed shut the reactors down for a time. Hanford built nine production reactors in all, and cleaning up after them has become one of the largest environmental projects in the world. Downriver on the same reservation, Columbia Generating Station has sent power into the Northwest grid since 1984.
On the map: The dot marks B Reactor on the Hanford Site, dated 1944. Columbia Generating Station, 30 km down the Columbia on the same reservation, is 1,151 MW from 1984 and the only nuclear plant the map lists in Washington. Priest Rapids dam, 1,017 MW, is 20 km upstream.
Sources: Wikipedia: Hanford Site, Wikipedia: B Reactor, NPS, Displacement at Hanford, Atomic Heritage Foundation, Hanford construction camp
Trinity (1945)
Long before dawn on July 16, 1945, in a stretch of New Mexico desert the Spanish had named the Jornada del Muerto, a sphere of Hanford plutonium sat at the top of a 100-foot steel tower, wrapped in the explosive lenses Los Alamos had spent a year learning to shape. The scientists called it the gadget. At 5:29 am it went off with the force of about 25 kilotons of TNT. The tower vanished, the mountains around the valley lit up brighter than day, and the blast was felt more than 100 miles away. Oppenheimer said later that a line from the Bhagavad Gita came to him, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Three weeks later the weapons were used on people. On August 6 a B-29 dropped Little Boy, a uranium gun bomb, on Hiroshima, and on August 9 another dropped Fat Man, a plutonium bomb of the Trinity design, on Nagasaki. Within about four months the two bombs had killed somewhere between 150,000 and 246,000 people, most of them civilians. Japan announced its surrender on August 15. The ranch families downwind of the test had not been told what was coming, and not until July 4, 2025 did Congress make them eligible under its law compensating the victims of the bomb tests. The atomic age had begun in a flash over the desert, and what the atom would do in peacetime was now a question for Congress. On August 1, 1946 President Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act, which took the atom from the Army and gave it to a civilian Atomic Energy Commission.
On the map: The dot marks Trinity Site on the White Sands Missile Range, dated 1945. The map lists no power plant within 60 km of it, and the nearest, a 3 MW solar array at Carrizozo, lies about 70 km to the east.
Sources: Wikipedia: Trinity (nuclear test), Wikipedia: Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Heritage Foundation, the bombings, Searchlight New Mexico, 2025
Act II · 1946–1974
EBR-I and Arco (1951–1955)
The new commission went looking for a place to test reactors where a mistake would hurt no one, and in 1949 it chose a stretch of lava plain in eastern Idaho for its National Reactor Testing Station. One of the first machines built there came from Walter Zinn's team at Argonne, the laboratory that had grown out of Fermi's work in Chicago. Experimental Breeder Reactor I was built to test a daring idea, a reactor cooled by liquid metal that would make more fuel than it burned. At 1:50 pm on December 20, 1951 its heat was turned into electricity for the first time, and four 200-watt bulbs glowed on a string along the wall. The next day it powered the whole building, and the people who had been in the room chalked their names on the generator room wall. In 1953 it showed that it could breed. Out on the same desert Argonne was testing another idea, letting water boil right inside the core. The BORAX experiments showed it could be done safely, and on July 17, 1955 BORAX-III was tied into the local lines and for about an hour supplied all the electricity of Arco, a town of about 1,000, the first community anywhere powered entirely by the atom. By the time President Lyndon Johnson came to dedicate EBR-I as a National Historic Landmark in 1966, both of the ideas tested on this desert, the breeder and the boiling water reactor, had power plants of their own.
On the map: The dot marks Experimental Breeder Reactor I, dated 1951, on the desert of the Idaho National Laboratory southeast of Arco. The map lists no power plant in operation within 50 km of it.
Sources: Wikipedia: Experimental Breeder Reactor I, ASME landmark brochure, Wikipedia: BORAX experiments, DOE, The History of Nuclear Energy
Nautilus (1953–1955)
Hyman Rickover left Oak Ridge sure that a reactor could drive a submarine, and he pushed until one did. From 1949 he ran the naval reactor program for both the Navy and the Atomic Energy Commission, a double post he used to great effect. He chose water under high pressure to carry the reactor's heat, a design Westinghouse developed at its Bettis laboratory outside Pittsburgh, and he had a full-size prototype built inside a section of hull in the Idaho desert, where it went critical on March 30, 1953. The keel of the boat itself had already been laid at Electric Boat in Groton by President Truman on June 14, 1952, and Mamie Eisenhower christened her in January 1954. At 11 am on January 17, 1955 Commander Eugene Wilkinson backed Nautilus away from the pier with Rickover beside him, and as she slipped down the Thames a signalman blinked the words every nuclear engineer knows, underway on nuclear power. She set one submerged record after another, and on August 3, 1958 she passed beneath the ice at the North Pole. Her design became the basis for nearly all of the Navy's nuclear submarines and surface warships. Ashore, Rickover's team built the same type of reactor at Shippingport, and today about two in three American power reactors are pressurized water reactors like hers, the two at Millstone just down the coast among them.
On the map: The dot marks USS Nautilus, a museum ship at Groton on the Thames River, dated 1955. Millstone, about 11 km to the southwest in Waterford, is 2,108 MW on the map and the only nuclear plant the map lists in Connecticut.
Sources: Wikipedia: USS Nautilus (SSN-571), Wikipedia: S1W reactor, Wikipedia: Hyman G. Rickover, Wikipedia: Nuclear power in the United States
Shippingport and Atoms for Peace (1953–1957)
On December 8, 1953 President Eisenhower told the United Nations that the atom should be put to work for peace, and the next summer he broke ground for the proof without leaving Denver. On Labor Day, September 6, 1954 he waved a wand over a neutron counter there, and the signal set an unmanned bulldozer moving on the bank of the Ohio River at Shippingport, 25 miles from Pittsburgh. Rickover had its blade riding on rails buried under the dirt so that it could not stall in front of the cameras. His team built the plant with Westinghouse and Duquesne Light around a reactor first drawn up for an aircraft carrier Eisenhower had canceled. It went critical on December 2, 1957, fifteen years to the day after the pile in Chicago, and the following May Eisenhower dedicated it from the White House as the first of the world's large-scale nuclear power stations devoted exclusively to peaceful purposes. Britain's Calder Hall had been sending power since 1956, though it was also making plutonium for bombs. Late in its life Shippingport tried something bolder, and from 1977 to 1982 it ran on a core of thorium seeded with uranium-233, and when engineers took the spent core apart they found about 1.4% more fissile fuel than it had started with, a breeder made from an ordinary water reactor.
On the map: The dot marks Shippingport Atomic Power Station on the Ohio River, dated 1957. Beaver Valley, 1,808 MW with 1976 as its year, runs on the adjoining site, one of four Pennsylvania nuclear plants the map lists as operating.
Sources: The American Presidency Project, Wikipedia: Shippingport Atomic Power Station, World Nuclear Association, Thorium
Dresden (1960)
A reactor went critical on the prairie southwest of Chicago on October 15, 1959, where the Kankakee and Des Plaines rivers meet to form the Illinois, and not a dollar of it was federal money. Shippingport's reactor had belonged to the government, and the industry's question was whether a utility would risk its own capital on one. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 let private companies own reactors, and the Price-Anderson Act of 1957 capped what they would owe after an accident, with the government standing behind the rest. Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago utility Samuel Insull had built, took the plunge with General Electric, and in 1960 its Dresden 1 went into service, the first nuclear plant in the country a utility paid for itself. Its reactor boiled water into steam inside the core, the idea BORAX had proven in Idaho, and the boiling water reactor became the second great branch of the American fleet. That August Yankee Atomic's plant at Rowe, in the hills of western Massachusetts, went critical with a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor, and the two designs have competed for American orders ever since. Dresden 1 retired in 1978. The two larger units built beside it came on in 1970 and 1971 and are running today, and Illinois, with eleven reactors at six plants, makes more nuclear power than any other state.
On the map: The ring is Dresden Generating Station, 1,797 MW, where the Kankakee and Des Plaines rivers meet. The view holds all six Illinois nuclear plants the map lists as operating, about 11.6 GW, more than any other state.
Sources: DOE, The History of Nuclear Energy, Wikipedia: Dresden Generating Station, Wikipedia: Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station, EIA, Illinois state profile
Fermi 1 and the roads not taken (1966)
Detroit Edison's Walker Cisler believed the breeder was the future, and he gathered a consortium of utilities and manufacturers to build a commercial-scale version of what EBR-I had shown, a fast reactor cooled by liquid sodium on the shore of Lake Erie, named for Enrico Fermi. The United Auto Workers under Walter Reuther fought its construction permit all the way to the Supreme Court, which let the work go on in June 1961. Fermi 1 reached criticality on August 23, 1963, and on October 5, 1966, while it was being raised in power, temperatures in part of the core began to climb. A piece of zirconium, one of the plates fitted to the bottom of the vessel as a safety measure, had broken loose and blocked the sodium flowing into some of the fuel, and that fuel melted. Nothing escaped the containment building, but finding and fishing out the fragment took years, and the reactor ran again only from 1970 to 1972. The scare became a 1975 book, We Almost Lost Detroit, and then a Gil Scott-Heron song. The other alternatives to water had troubles of their own. Peach Bottom 1 in Pennsylvania ran a small helium-cooled reactor until 1974, but its big successor at Fort St. Vrain in Colorado struggled from 1979 until 1989, and its owner rebuilt it to burn natural gas. When Congress stopped paying for the Clinch River breeder in Tennessee in 1983, the American breeder went quiet for a generation.
On the map: Fermi, on the Lake Erie shore near Monroe, Michigan, is 1,192 MW of nuclear on the map, the Fermi 2 reactor beside the site of Fermi 1. The Monroe coal plant, 3,080 MW, is 11 km away.
Sources: Wikipedia: Fermi 1, Wikipedia: Fort St. Vrain Generating Station, Wikipedia: Peach Bottom Nuclear Generating Station, Wikipedia: Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project
The boom years (1963–1974)
The boom began with a price. On December 12, 1963 Jersey Central Power & Light announced it would build Oyster Creek, a General Electric boiling water plant near Barnegat Bay on the Jersey Shore, the first time an American utility chose a nuclear plant over a fossil one on its economics alone. General Electric and Westinghouse were selling the first of these plants at fixed prices, often at a loss, to win the market, and the orders poured in. The units grew from a couple of hundred megawatts to more than a thousand, and in 1974 Commonwealth Edison's Zion 1 became the first 1,000 MW nuclear plant in service. The oil embargo of 1973 only added to the rush, and that year utilities ordered 41 reactors, a record that still stands. Most of the plants on this map were ordered in that decade and finished in the fifteen years after it. The boom was already losing speed, though. On March 22, 1975 a worker at TVA's Browns Ferry in Alabama, checking for air leaks with a candle, set fire to the cables beneath the control room and knocked out the safety systems of one reactor, and new fire rules followed. Construction times stretched while interest rates and costs climbed, and demand stopped growing the way the forecasts had promised. Within a few years the orders dried up altogether, and more than 120 reactor orders were eventually canceled.
On the map: Every dot is a nuclear plant. The map lists 54 in the US as operating, about 98 GW, and the 45 of 1,000 MW or more draw first, the rest as you zoom in. Only three stand west of the Rockies, Palo Verde, Diablo Canyon and Columbia. Ontario's Bruce, Pickering and Darlington line the Great Lakes.
Sources: DOE, The History of Nuclear Energy, Wikipedia: Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant, Wikipedia: Nuclear power in the United States, Grist
Act III · 1979–1996
Three Mile Island (1979)
At about 4 am on Wednesday, March 28, 1979 the pumps feeding water to the steam generators of Unit 2 at Three Mile Island stopped, and the reactor shut itself down as designed. A relief valve at the top of its pressurizer opened to let off pressure and then stuck open, while a light in the control room told the operators it had closed. For more than two hours reactor coolant poured out through it. The gauge the crew trusted most said the system was filling with water, so they throttled back the emergency cooling that would have saved the core, and about half of it melted. Less than two weeks earlier The China Syndrome, a film about a near meltdown at a California nuclear plant, had opened in theaters. Now the country watched a real accident unfold on the evening news. On Friday Governor Dick Thornburgh advised pregnant women and small children within five miles to leave, and within days some 140,000 people had left the area. On Sunday President Carter, a former naval officer who had served in Rickover's nuclear submarine program, toured the plant and stood in its control room. The releases were small, and studies found no detectable health effects. The accident changed everything around the reactor. The NRC put resident inspectors at every plant and required emergency plans for the ten miles around each one, control rooms were redesigned around the people who worked in them, and before the year was out the industry had founded the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations to police its own performance. The cleanup of Unit 2 took until 1993 and cost about $1 billion.
On the map: The dot marks Three Mile Island Unit 2 in the Susquehanna south of Harrisburg, dated 1979. EIA lists Unit 1 beside it as Crane Clean Energy Center, 803 MW from 1974 and out of service, and the island's 500 kV substation, THREE MILE ISLAND, lies just to the east.
Sources: Wikipedia: Three Mile Island accident, WITF, Carter at Three Mile Island, Wikipedia: Institute of Nuclear Power Operations
Shoreham (1983–1989)
The rule that every plant needed an emergency plan for the people within ten miles came out of Three Mile Island, and on Long Island it doomed a finished reactor. The Long Island Lighting Company had announced Shoreham, on the North Shore, in 1965 as a 540 MW plant costing $65 to $75 million. It grew to 820 MW, and by the time it was finished in 1984 it had cost about $6 billion. Long Island is long and narrow, and its roads jam on an ordinary summer Friday. On February 17, 1983 the Suffolk County Legislature voted 15 to 1 that the county could not be safely evacuated, and Governor Mario Cuomo ordered state officials to approve no evacuation plan from LILCO. Shoreham won permission for tests at 5% power and got no further. On May 19, 1989 LILCO agreed with the state never to run it, most of the cost was passed on to Long Island customers, and in 1992 the Long Island Power Authority bought the plant for a dollar. By 1994 it had been taken apart without ever selling a kilowatt-hour. On the other side of the country the bust was even more expensive. The Washington Public Power Supply System had set out in the 1970s to build five large reactors, and in July 1983 it defaulted on $2.25 billion of bonds, at the time the largest municipal bond default in American history. Only one of the five, at Hanford, was ever finished.
On the map: The dot marks the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island's North Shore, dated 1989, the year it was given up. Two oil-fired plants on the map share the site, Shoreham (66 MW, from 1966) and Shoreham Energy (85 MW, from 2002), and the map lists no nuclear plant anywhere on Long Island.
Sources: Wikipedia: Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, American Nuclear Society, Showdown at Shoreham, Wikipedia: Washington Public Power Supply System
Watts Bar and the long pause (1996)
For almost twenty years after Three Mile Island the plants already under way were finished one by one, some after a decade or more of delay, and no new construction began anywhere in the country after 1977. In May 1996 TVA's Watts Bar Unit 1, on the Tennessee River, entered commercial service twenty-three years after its construction started, the last American reactor to come online in the twentieth century. Its twin stood unfinished beside it. The long pause turned out to be the fleet's best years. Pushed by the industry's new Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, the plants learned to run better and safer, and the average reactor went from producing about half of what it could over a year in the early 1970s to more than 90% by 2002. In March 2000 the NRC renewed the forty-year licenses of Calvert Cliffs in Maryland for twenty more years, the first of many, and over the years it approved uprates that together added close to 8,000 MW, the output of about eight new reactors, without a single new plant. Through it all nuclear kept supplying close to a fifth of the country's electricity. TVA took up Watts Bar Unit 2 again in 2007, and when it entered commercial service on October 19, 2016 it was the first new American reactor in twenty years.
On the map: TVA's Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, on the Tennessee River, is 2,245 MW on the map. The map dates each plant by its earliest unit, and Watts Bar's 1996 is the latest of any nuclear plant it lists as operating. TVA's Watts Bar dam, 196 MW from 1942, stands 2 km to the north.
Sources: Wikipedia: Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, World Nuclear Association, Nuclear Power in the USA, EIA, Plant Vogtle Unit 4
Act IV · 2012–present
Closures, and Diablo Canyon's reprieve (2012–2026)
In January 2012 a tube leaked in one of the new steam generators at San Onofre, on the coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, and the next year Southern California Edison retired the plant for good. A broader threat to the fleet came from cheap natural gas and flat demand. As shale gas pulled wholesale prices down, reactors that had long since paid for themselves began losing money in competitive markets. Vermont Yankee closed at the end of 2014 and Indian Point on the Hudson in 2020 and 2021. Between 2013 and 2022 more than a dozen American reactors shut down, most of them because they could no longer compete. Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear plant, was supposed to follow. PG&E had needed nearly two decades to build it. An offshore fault was found while it was going up, and in 1981 some 1,900 protesters were arrested at its gates in two weeks, the largest mass arrest in the history of the American antinuclear movement. Within weeks PG&E found that earthquake supports in one reactor had been built from the other reactor's blueprints, the mirror image of what was needed. The units came online in 1985 and 1986, and in 2016 PG&E agreed to close them when their licenses ran out in 2024 and 2025. Then California's grid ran short in the heat of August 2020, and on September 2, 2022 Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law to keep Diablo Canyon running to 2030. On April 2, 2026 the NRC renewed both licenses for twenty more years, its 99th and 100th renewals, though running past 2030 will take the legislature's consent. PG&E says the plant makes nearly 20% of California's clean energy.
On the map: Diablo Canyon, on the coast west of San Luis Obispo, is 2,240 MW on the map and the only nuclear plant the map lists in California. San Onofre, closed in 2013, no longer appears.
Sources: Wikipedia: Diablo Canyon Power Plant, CPUC, Senate Bill 846, PG&E, April 2, 2026, American Nuclear Society, April 3, 2026, World Nuclear Association, Nuclear Power in the USA
Vogtle 3 and 4 (2023–2024)
Plant Vogtle, on the Savannah River below Augusta, won NRC licenses for two new reactors in February 2012, the first new construction the agency had authorized in more than thirty years. They were Westinghouse AP1000s, a design meant to be simpler and safer, able to cool itself for days after a shutdown with water moved by gravity and natural circulation, and they were supposed to cost about $14 billion and be running by 2016 and 2017. Building them turned into an ordeal. Modules arrived late and flawed, the crews had to relearn a trade no one had practiced in a generation, and in March 2017 Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy. Four months later the utilities building two AP1000s at V. C. Summer in South Carolina abandoned them, with billions already spent. Georgia Power kept going, and Unit 3 entered commercial service on July 31, 2023 and Unit 4 on April 29, 2024, the first reactors built from scratch in the United States in decades, at a cost Georgia Power now puts at more than $30 billion. The two new units made Vogtle the largest nuclear plant in the country, ahead of Palo Verde in Arizona.
On the map: Vogtle, on the Savannah River below Augusta, is 4,530 MW on the map, the largest nuclear plant on it. With Hatch, Georgia has about 6.3 GW of nuclear listed as operating, fourth among the states after Illinois, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.
Sources: EIA, Plant Vogtle Unit 4, Wikipedia: Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, Wikipedia: Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station
Palisades comes back (2022–2026)
Palisades had made power on the Lake Michigan shore at Covert since 1971, and on May 20, 2022 its owner, Entergy, shut it down for good. A few weeks later the plant passed to Holtec International, a company in the business of taking closed reactors apart. Holtec set out instead to do something no one in the United States had done and bring a retired nuclear plant back. Michigan wanted the power, Wolverine Power Cooperative signed up to buy it, and the Department of Energy lent up to $1.52 billion. Crews reinforced the tubes in the plant's two steam generators and replaced worn parts, and in July 2025 the NRC moved Palisades from decommissioning back to an operating license, the first American plant ever to make that return. On Sunday, August 30, 2026 workers began loading the 204 fuel assemblies of its core, and on September 11 they reconnected the plant to its 345 kV switchyard, its road back to the grid. Late in September the loading paused while engineers worked out how to lift out an assembly that had tilted in the vessel. Holtec also means to build two small modular reactors on the same site.
On the map: Palisades, on the Lake Michigan shore at Covert, is 769 MW on the map, run by Holtec, and EIA-860M August 2026 lists it as out of service. D. C. Cook, 2,177 MW, is 44 km down the shore.
Sources: American Nuclear Society, September 25, 2026, American Nuclear Society, July 28, 2025, World Nuclear News, fuel loading, Wikipedia: Palisades Nuclear Generating Station
Crane and the data centers (2024–2027)
Three Mile Island's Unit 1 stood beside its ruined twin through the accident and the cleanup, returned to service in 1985, and ran for another thirty-four years, until cheap gas made it a money loser and Exelon closed it on September 20, 2019. Five years to the day later, Constellation, the power producer Exelon had spun off in 2022, announced it would bring the unit back. Microsoft had signed a twenty-year agreement to buy its power, to match the electricity its data centers use in PJM, and the plant would carry a new name, the Crane Clean Energy Center, after Chris Crane, the former chief executive who had died that April. The Department of Energy lent $1 billion in November 2025, and Constellation, which rates the unit at 835 MW against EIA's 803, now expects it to run again in the second half of 2027. The data centers that had brought back growth in electricity demand were reaching for nuclear power. Up the Susquehanna near Berwick, Talen sold Amazon the data center campus it had built beside its Susquehanna plant in March 2024, and in June 2025 the two agreed on a supply that grows to 1,920 MW and runs through 2042. Meta signed for Constellation's Clinton plant in Illinois, and Google for the restart of Duane Arnold in Iowa. After a generation in which utilities could hardly give nuclear plants away, the biggest buyers of power in the country were lining up for them.
On the map: The ring is Crane Clean Energy Center, Three Mile Island's Unit 1, 803 MW on the map and listed as out of service. About 116 km to the northeast, TalenEnergy Susquehanna (2,494 MW) has a data center on the map beside it, AWS Susquehanna Data Center, under 300 m away.
Sources: Constellation, September 20, 2024, American Nuclear Society, November 20, 2025, American Nuclear Society, August 13, 2026, Wikipedia: Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, Constellation and Meta, June 3, 2025, American Nuclear Society, October 28, 2025
Kemmerer (2024–2030)
The Naughton plant outside Kemmerer, Wyoming burned coal from 1963, and its owner, PacifiCorp, means to close it by 2036. In 2021 TerraPower, the company Bill Gates founded, chose the town for its first Natrium plant, which would reuse the grid connection of a retiring coal plant and hire from its workforce. Natrium belongs to the line EBR-I began, a fast reactor cooled by liquid sodium, and it leans on the lessons of EBR-II, which in April 1986 showed in the Idaho desert that such a reactor could cool itself safely with its pumps switched off and no operator stepping in. TerraPower's design pairs a 345 MW reactor, a figure EIA lists as 342 MW, with tanks of molten salt that store its heat, so the plant can surge to 500 MW when the grid needs more. TerraPower broke ground in June 2024. On March 4, 2026 the NRC approved its construction permit, the first for a commercial reactor not cooled by water in more than forty years, and nuclear construction began that April. In January 2026 Meta agreed to help pay for two more Natrium plants.
On the map: Kemmerer Unit 1 is on the map as a planned nuclear plant, 342 MW for 2030, listed under US SFR Owner LLC. Naughton, a 604 MW PacifiCorp coal plant from 1963, is 7 km to the north-northwest.
Sources: TerraPower, March 4, 2026, American Nuclear Society, April 24, 2026, Wyoming Public Media, June 2024, Wikipedia: Experimental Breeder Reactor II, World Nuclear Association, Nuclear Power in the USA
Oak Ridge again (now)
Seven kilometers southwest of the old X-10 reactor, a stretch of Clinch River bottomland has waited more than forty years for a reactor. The Clinch River Breeder Reactor was to stand there, a sodium-cooled cousin of Fermi 1 and the Natrium plant, until the Senate voted 56 to 40 on October 26, 1983 to stop paying for it. TVA kept the land. It won an early site permit for small modular reactors there in December 2019, and in 2025 it applied to build a GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300, a 300 MW boiling water reactor in the line that began with BORAX and Dresden. In June 2026 the NRC staff recommended the permit, and on August 13 the commission held its hearing in Oak Ridge. Across town, on the old K-25 grounds, Kairos Power broke ground in April 2026 on Hermes 2, a reactor cooled by molten fluoride salt that is meant to send power to the TVA grid by 2030, and TVA has agreed to buy that power to serve two of Google's data centers. Beside the old graphite reactor, Oak Ridge National Laboratory runs Frontier, which in 2022 became the first computer to pass an exaflop. The city built in secret to split the atom for a bomb has become a place to build reactors for the grid, eighty-four years after the pile under Stagg Field showed it could be done.
On the map: The dots mark X-10, dated 1943, and the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project, dated 1983, where TVA means to build its first small modular reactor. The map draws no reactor there yet. Frontier is the data center beside X-10, and Kingston, 1,147 MW of coal, is at the west edge of the view.
Sources: American Nuclear Society, July 1, 2026, Federal Register, hearing notice, Wikipedia: Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project, Kairos Power, Tennessee, American Nuclear Society, April 21, 2026, American Nuclear Society, August 19, 2025, Wikipedia: Frontier (supercomputer)