There’s one interesting nuclear power story in this country that you’ve probably heard before.\u00a0Georgia spent about 14 years and more than $30 billion to bring two new reactors online at Plant Vogtle, and the whole industry has lived in the shadow of that bill ever since. So when a company announces it wants to build six of the exact same reactors in a corner of Kentucky that has never had a single one, you’d assume it has a utility, a budget, and a customer lined up before it says a word.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t, at least not yet<\/em>. Right now it has a landowner, a county vote that went 4-1, and a video.<\/p>\n The Nuclear Company put the announcement out on October 21. The pitch is a campus called Prosperity One on a stretch of Ohio River bottomland in Lewis County, Kentucky, with room for up to six Westinghouse AP1000 reactors totaling roughly 6.6 gigawatts.<\/p>\n The company says it wants to start with two and have federal approvals in hand to begin construction in 2028. Every sentence of that comes with the word “proposed” attached, and I’m going to keep it attached, because nobody has filed anything with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission yet.<\/p>\n Here’s what is. A lifelong Lewis County resident named Sam Howard, who runs a local outfit called Trace Creek Construction, bought a 738-acre tract called Carrs Bottom on July 1 for $8 million, according to the Lewis County Herald<\/a>.<\/p>\n Since then, his team has picked up options on more than 4,200 acres of the roughly 4,500 that Kentucky Power originally assembled there nearly 50 years ago for a coal plant that never got built. The Nuclear Company has what the two companies call “site control” through a teaming agreement with Trace Creek, which basically means it’s allowed to go poke around with drill rigs and surveyors. It hasn’t bought the land.<\/p>\n Howard’s reason for doing this is the line quoted everywhere, and it’s fair enough. “I have nine grandchildren, and all of them live in Lewis County,” he said in The Nuclear Company’s announcement<\/a>, and he wants them to be able to stay.<\/p>\n He also said the county’s unemployment rate has been among the highest in the state for years, and that checks out. The Kentucky Center for Statistics put Lewis County at 7.3% in September, the fourth-highest of the state’s 120 counties, compared with 3.4% in Woodford County, at the bottom of the list.<\/p>\n In February, it was 9.5%. The whole county has about 13,000 people.<\/p>\n Here’s what isn’t in the announcement: a cost, a financing plan, a utility to buy the power, or a date when the first reactor would actually make electricity. I went looking for any of those and came up empty, and the Herald reported that neither company offered them.<\/p>\n For a project that would be the biggest nuclear plant in the country on paper, that’s a pretty big set of blanks. It’s also normal at this stage, frankly. You don’t get a price tag before you’ve drilled the first core sample.<\/p>\n Big enough to beat every operating nuclear plant in America. Plant Vogtle became the largest in the country when Units 3 and 4 came online in 2023 and 2024, and the Energy Information Administration<\/a> puts its four reactors at about 4.5 gigawatts combined, ahead of Palo Verde in Arizona at 3.9 gigawatts.<\/p>\n Six AP1000s at roughly 1,100 megawatts apiece would put Prosperity One north of both. Kentucky, which has never generated a watt of commercial nuclear power, would jump from nothing to first place in a single project, which is a strange sentence to type.<\/p>\n You may be wondering who needs 6.6 gigawatts in a county that size. As far as I can tell, the answer is “not Lewis County.” The site sits within about half a mile of a 765-kilovolt transmission line, which is the biggest class of power line on the US grid, and it has a CSX railroad mainline crossing it and about two miles of river frontage for barges.<\/p>\n Power made here can go a long way. That’s why this patch of ground keeps getting picked for power plants.<\/p>\n Kentucky Power wanted a 2.6-gigawatt coal plant on it half a century ago, and American Electric Power later looked at a coal-gasification plant on the same acreage. Neither one got built.<\/p>\n If you don’t follow this stuff, the AP1000 is a full-size pressurized water reactor from Westinghouse, roughly 1,100 megawatts, designed to cool itself for 72 hours after a shutdown using gravity and a big tank of water on the roof instead of pumps. It’s the only large reactor design with units actually running in the United States, which is both its selling point and its baggage.<\/p>\n The baggage is Vogtle. Georgia Power started building Units 3 and 4 in 2009, expecting power by 2016 and 2017.<\/p>\n They arrived roughly seven years late at a cost that Nuclear Engineering International puts at more than $30 billion, and the overruns helped push Westinghouse into bankruptcy in 2017. We’ve written about the 2.2-million-pound module lifts at Vogtle<\/a>, and they’re spectacular, but the paperwork held things up at least as much as the cranes did.<\/p>\n The selling point is that the hard lessons are now written into the rulebook. On October 14, the NRC renewed the AP1000 design certification<\/a>, folded in Revision 20 of the design document (essentially Vogtle Unit 4 as it was actually built), and extended the certification through 2066. Chairman Ho K. Nieh said the approval lets America move “from building individual reactors to deploying them at scale.” The Nuclear Company’s announcement landed exactly one week later, and I doubt that was an accident.<\/p>\n The renewal doesn’t approve a site. Prosperity One still needs its own site-specific licensing review, and that’s years of work before anyone pours nuclear concrete.<\/p>\n The Nuclear Company came out of stealth in July 2024 and describes itself as a project development and delivery outfit rather than a reactor designer. Its chief nuclear officer, Joe Klecha, has 33 years in the business, from Navy submarines to construction and startup roles at Vogtle 3 and 4, and the company says its services arm has maintained more than 40% of the country’s operating reactors.<\/p>\n That’s the company’s own figure, so maybe take it with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n Its other major project says a lot about how it works. In May, The Nuclear Company and Brookfield Asset Management set up a joint venture to run the feasibility study, and potentially the construction, for the two half-built AP1000s at V.C. Summer in South Carolina<\/a>.<\/p>\n Santee Cooper, the state-owned utility that owns them, signed a memorandum of understanding with Brookfield in December 2025, and Brookfield has until March 31, 2028, to make its final investment decision on the $2.7 billion deal. So the company’s r\u00e9sum\u00e9 includes one unfinished plant it may finish and one empty field it hopes to fill.<\/p>\n That’s arguably still the deepest AP1000 bench in the country outside of Westinghouse itself.<\/p>\n Here’s what happens next, in the order the company laid it out: detailed site characterization, geotechnical drilling, environmental assessments, transmission interconnection planning, and then preparing a federal license application. Planning also has to cover housing, roads, water use, and emergency preparedness, because Vogtle’s construction workforce peaked at about 9,000 people and Lewis County isn’t built to absorb that overnight.<\/p>\n Then there’s the local side. Lewis County Fiscal Court voted unanimously in July to start the state’s Nuclear Energy Ready Community process. That program is run by the Kentucky Nuclear Energy Development Authority, an agency the legislature created in 2024, nine years after the state lifted the moratorium on new nuclear plants it had kept on the books since 1984.<\/p>\n On October 12, the court voted 4-1 to actually file the application, with Magistrate Woody Underwood switching from a yes in July to the lone no. The designation, if the county gets it, says a community is open to nuclear development. It doesn’t approve a plant, and the county’s own resolution says so in writing.<\/p>\n Residents have shown up to the public meetings with the questions you’d expect: safety, spent fuel, what happens to the river, emergency planning, and whether they should get a direct vote on any of this. The Herald described both interest and opposition. From the looks of things, the opposition is organized enough to flip a magistrate, and the county still voted to file.<\/p>\n I’d be a little careful with the headline number too. Six reactors is the ceiling, not the plan. The first phase is two units, and only if the site passes what the company calls diligence, feasibility, and permitting.<\/p>\n Kentucky’s neighbors are moving down the same road at a smaller scale: the Navy wants a microreactor running at its Crane base in Indiana by September 2028<\/a>, which would be that state’s first power reactor. Two AP1000s on the Ohio River in the same window would be a different order of magnitude.<\/p>\n The Nuclear Company says it will take Prosperity One to the NRC with the goal of starting construction in 2028, and Howard’s team signed its latest land option on October 20, the day before the announcement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s one interesting nuclear power story in this country that you’ve probably heard before.\u00a0Georgia spent about 14 years and more … <\/p>\nSo what’s in the announcement, and what isn’t?<\/h2>\n
How big is 6.6 gigawatts, really?<\/h2>\n
The AP1000 is the reactor America knows how to build, more or less<\/h2>\n
Who’s actually behind this?<\/h2>\n
There’s a long list before 2028<\/h2>\n