Nuclear Fallout at the Georgia Public Service Commission 2.0

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In Georgia, the political fallout from nuclear power is no longer theoretical—it is electoral. On May 19, 2024, state officials enjoyed cake in the shape of nuclear reactors at the Plant Vogtle ribbon cutting in Waynesboro to celebrate the completion of the first two nuclear reactors built in the United States in 30 years. Just 18 months later, two of those pro-nuclear regulators, Commissioners Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson, were gone, ejected in landslide numbers by voters who did not like the huge utility bills that followed. Six months later, a third pro-nuclear regular, Commissioner Trisha Pridemore, announced that she would not run for reelection.

This fallout was of their own making: Plant Vogtle’s total cost of $36 billion marks it as the most expensive power plant ever built on earth. The project went $17 billion over budget and was delivered seven years late. Yet Georgia’s pro-utility regulators had only positive things to say throughout construction, then voted to make customers reimburse Georgia Power for nearly all of Vogtle’s cost overruns while granting them profits far above industry norms. Allowing billions in cost overruns to flow directly into customer bills raised rates a stunning 25%, the largest rate increase in state history, one that will last across the 60-year depreciation schedule for the reactors.

This harmful financial outcome for customers was predictable. Many nuclear energy experts, as well as commission staff, testified both before the project began in 2008 and again in 2017—after massive overruns drove main contractor Westinghouse Electric Company into bankruptcy—that the project should be scrapped. The financial risks for Georgians were too high, they said, and less expensive generation was available. Public opposition was strong too. All were ignored by regulators who voted to continue. 

Meanwhile, as Georgia Power customers experienced high bills, Georgia Power received record profits. The contrast is stark: while customers experience utility bills the size of car payments, in 2024 Georgia Power enjoyed record profits of $2.5 billion, and in 2025 profits were a stunning $2.85 billion. These profits are far higher than a monopoly market delivering an essential commodity, electrons, should earn, and would not earn without state protectionism. 

What comes with high utility bills? High customer disconnections. In 2025, Georgia Power disconnected approximately 275,000 customers, or one in nine Georgia Power households compared to a national average of only 1%.

The irony is striking: Georgia’s state officials celebrate grid reliability while overlooking a fundamental reality—electricity is not reliable for customers who cannot afford it. Even setting aside that Georgia Power’s reliability metrics fall below the national average, when a household is disconnected the grid is no longer reliable for the people it is meant to serve.

The political consequences are now spreading beyond Georgia. Lawmakers in Alabama are advancing proposals to eliminate elections for the Alabama Public Service Commission after watching Georgia voters elect two Democrats from their regulatory body following Vogtle-related rate increases. So rather than adjust energy policy to reduce consumer risk, policymakers seek to reduce voter oversight instead. 

Georgia’s experience demonstrates that when nuclear construction drives electricity prices sharply upward, voters hold regulators accountable. If elections are weakened or eliminated in response to nuclear-driven rate backlash, it signals that policymakers understand the financial risks but prefer to shield regulators from consequences rather than protect customers.

Despite the first nuclear reactor construction project in 30 years going off the rails, several states are now exploring nuclear construction using the same AP1000 reactor design that Georgia Power used. Policymakers in New York, Texas, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania have all discussed, or initiated, pathways for advanced or large-scale nuclear expansion involving Westinghouse technologies.

The discussion is particularly notable in South Carolina given the state’s similar nuclear construction project to Georgia’s. In 2017 that state ended its V.C. Summer nuclear project given that cost overruns had already raised bills nine times with no end in sight. Some South Carolina regulators and Westinghouse officials went to jail or paid hundreds of millions in fines for lying about cost estimates and construction progress.

The job of a commissioner is to balance utility financial viability with affordable bills, but instead Georgia’s regulators allowed costs that ballooned from construction delays, contractor failures, and project mismanagement to be transferred to Georgia Power customers. Georgia regulators thought voters wouldn’t see past their infrastructure promises while they ignored utility bill affordability, but electricity is not a luxury. It is a necessity. When bills rise but profits soar for the utility, voters correctly interpret the situation and move to end the political careers for those driving it.

Georgia’s experience should serve as a warning to those now pursuing nuclear power, few of whom understand what happened in Georgia. When nuclear construction costs spiral – and they always do because nuclear construction is the only generation type that does not go down in cost over time – voters rightfully hold regulators responsible for the surge in electricity bills. Regulators will not be thanked for building nuclear power. They will be removed.

Nuclear fallout reshaped Georgia’s political landscape, propelling two Democrats onto the state’s utility regulatory commission and prompting a third to drop out. 

The lesson is clear: costly energy decisions do not remain confined to regulatory dockets—they are judged at the ballot box. State officials who fail to protect consumers will be replaced. 

Byline: Patty Durand is the founder of Georgians for Affordable Energy, a nonprofit that advocates for fair utility rates and responsible energy policy in Georgia.

Dow Chemical Wants to Build an Experimental Nuclear Reactor on San Antonio Bay, What Could Go Wrong?

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By The Nuclear Skeptic

In a significant win for local opposition, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Atomic Safety and Licensing Board has granted a petition to intervene in the licensing process for Dow/X-energy’s proposed small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) project, the first of its kind to apply for a construction permit. The decision marks a pivotal victory for the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper, a local environmental advocacy group representing fisherpeople and community members who have long opposed the project and have dealt with water contamination stemming from Dow’s operation in Seadrift, Texas for decades.

The ruling effectively halts the immediate progression of the construction permit application for the Long Mott Generating Station (LMGS). The facility, proposed by Long Mott Energy (LME)—a subsidiary of the chemical giant Dow and Union Carbide (yes, the same Union Carbide responsible for the most deadly environmental disaster in history)—aims to construct four pebble-bed nuclear reactors in Seadrift. While the project has been touted as one of the first of its kind globally, the Licensing Board found that financial concerns raised by local petitioners merit intervention. The Board could ultimately deny the construction permit, placing the future of the Dow/X-Energy collaboration in jeopardy as well as other proposed X-energy reactors, including at the Hanford Nuclear Site on the Columbia River in Washington state. 

At the heart of the Waterkeeper’s successful petition is the contention that LME has failed to demonstrate the necessary financial qualifications to build and operate a nuclear facility safely. These concerns regarding financial viability were sharply underscored by recent corporate developments. Just days prior to the NRC’s decision, Dow announced a “restructuring” involving the elimination of 4,500 jobs, constituting nearly 15 percent of its global workforce. Many of these cuts are slated for Texas, with specific impacts on the Seadrift area. This juxtaposition of mass layoffs with an overly ambitious, capital-intensive nuclear construction project, prone to runaway cost escalations, has fueled the Waterkeeper’s argument that the project lacks the financial stability required for such a high-risk venture.

Despite the admission of their financial contention by the NRC, San Antonio Bay Waterkeeper expressed significant disappointment regarding the NRC’s dismissal of their safety concerns, albeit on a technicality. Nuclear safety expert, Dr. Edwin Lyman, asserted that the proposed X-Energy Xe-100 design—a “first-of-a-kind” pebble-bed reactor—presents unique risks that have not been arguably addressed:

“The Board’s decision to ignore critical evidence and accept Long Mott Energy’s unjustified assertion that containment-free reactors can satisfy NRC’s regulations poses a direct threat to the health and safety of Texans and the broader U.S. public,” said Dr. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nonprofit group. “Long Mott Energy will still need to prove its claims later to obtain NRC operating licenses for these reactors, but even if the fuel proves defective there is no way that the NRC would order the company to retrofit the reactors with containments after they are built.”

According to Dr. Lyman, the fuel balls inside the proposed Dow/X-energy reactor, will become “enormously more radioactive than when they first entered the reactor.” They will become high-level radioactive waste (irradiated or ‘spent’ fuel), which can give a lethal dose in a few minutes if unshielded. 

Texas and the surrounding community should assume that all of the waste will be kept on site indefinitely. Neither LME nor the NRC has even estimated if or how long the waste from pebble bed nuclear reactors can be stored and how dangerous the site will be as soon as the reactors start and for the thousands of centuries the waste stays radioactive.

For the local community, specifically the fishing industry dependent on the health of the San Antonio Bay, the stakes are existential. 

Diane Wilson, the executive director of San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper and a 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, emphasized the disconnect between Dow’s economic retreat from the region via layoffs and its simultaneous push for an expensive industrial experiment in South Texas:

“Dow is laying off thousands of Texans while at the same time seeking to build a wildly expensive experimental nuclear reactor in our backyard. (We) won’t stop until this radioactive experiment on South Texas and our bay is terminated.”

Regarding Nuclear Moratoria Repeals:

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“FIRST GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT; THEN YOU CAN DISTORT THEM AS MUCH AS YOU WANT,” – Mark Twain

By David Kraft, Director

Nuclear Energy Information Service, Chicago

As a critical component of advancing the nuclear power juggernaut on an ill-informed public, for several years now pro-nuclear cheerleaders have been working feverishly to get state legislatures to repeal state-mandated moratoria on new nuclear plant construction.

The Biden and now Trump Administrations both have lavished tens-of-billions of dollars on promoting the nuclear fetish. Both also turned the Dept. of Energy into a pro bono advertising arm for the nuclear industry, which conducted numerous promo tours, photo ops and produced slick literature and advertisements asserting the “need” for more nuclear power.  

But this promotional effort was not confined to mere government operations.  The mainstream media was heavily incorporated into the effort to once again (our third “Nuclear Renaissance” this century) try to sell nuclear power to the public, by any rationalization necessary (whether truthful or not): a  predicted – if as yet unsubstantiated —  energy shortage from data centers; a “nuclear power gap” with China and other international sellers; minimization of energy efficiency, renewables and storage; promises of reactors that will “eat” radioactive wastes, be meltdown-proof, are fully portable and mass-produced, be “cheap” to build, and provide “cheap” electricity – just to name a few of the promo points.

While all these glittering baubles were dazzling the public and their legislators, virtually no serious mention let alone detailed discussion of the numerous and universally unstated liabilities of nuclear power ever appear – proving that lies of omission can often be worse than lies of commission.

A prime example of this media propaganda campaign was a recent Washington Post editorial (Jan. 15, 2026)., praising Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and the state legislature for finally “seeing the nuclear light” by repealing Illinois’ 39-year old nuclear construction moratorium. As an Illinois nuclear power watchdog organization for 45 years, we wrote a rebuttal op-ed to correct the numerous “facts” of commission and omission in the WaPo’s op-ed on “the ‘facts’ about nuclear energy” here in Illinois – which of course they did not publish.

First, nuclear plant construction moratoria are not “bans.” The enormously significant difference is that construction is conditionally prohibited until the dangerous high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) produced by nuclear plants are given an environmentally responsible final and permanent place for disposal. The federal government was supposed to have provided a facility by 1997.  It failed to do so then, and continues to fail to this day.  Making more waste absent responsible permanent disposal methods is societally unacceptable and environmentally dangerous – a fact government and media nuclear cheerleaders routinely ignore.  We still have no permanent disposal methodology or facility for the ~100,000 tons of HLRW already produced, which grows annually in the U.S. by nearly 2,000 tons.  Building new reactors adding even more waste absent an operational disposal facility is – criminal.

Concerns about radioactive waste disposal are not trivial.  A study conducted by a team of experts which included former Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairwoman Alison Macfarlane determined that, depending on the design, the currently mythical “small modular reactors” (SMRs) would produce 2 to 30 times as much radioactive waste per unit of energy delivered compared to today’s “old fashioned” reactors.

Second, Illinois Governor Pritzker’s stated concerns about a lack of safety are now borne out as totally justified by President Trump’s recent Executive Orders which cut staff at the NRC while simultaneously calling for a quadrupling of nuclear capacity; shift new reactor licensing emphasis to speed over safety; allow for higher levels of “allowable” radiation exposure for the public; and allow DOGE personnel to overrule some NRC licensing decisions.  Recently, the President has suggested that private entities using nuclear power for data centers could get operating licenses within three weeks – as opposed to the years of thorough engineering review it now takes.  What could possibly go wrong?

Pritzker’s concerns about new large reactor costs are borne out by the most recent Lazard’s analysis (June 2025) of levelized costs, indicating new reactors as more expensive than new solar, on- and off-shore wind, and energy storage.  Projected costs for mythical SMRs vary wildly, but seem to be following this same trend.

Polling reports of increased public support should not come as a surprise.  Like all public opinion, it is driven by money spent and media saturation achieved.  Both the Biden Administration and now the Trump junta over the past five years have used the DOE’s bully-pulpit to lavish tens of millions of dollars into promotional nuclear power propaganda directed at the public, and bestowed huge grants to pro-nuclear projects.  Coupled with current panic-peddling over data center electrical demand and rising costs for electricity, and the Trump Administration’s ill-informed and pathologic policies towards viable renewable energy alternatives, they have driven a poorly informed, if not indoctrinated public to the dubious conclusion that new nuclear is a “necessity.”

Finally, not surprisingly the WaPo op-ed joins government and industry nuclear cheerleaders, in being totally silent about the inconvenient nuclear power side effects like nuclear security, environmental justice, just transitions for reactor communities, proliferation impacts, and the fact that wind and solar combined (and more, including storage) produce more electricity both in the U.S. and worldwide than all operating nuclear power reactors – cheaper, and without radioactive waste and nuclear safety/security concerns.

Ironically, it was a FoxNews analyst who once quipped that while facts may change opinions, opinions will NEVER change the facts.  Deliberately cherry picking and omitting inconvenient facts is not journalism, or responsible editorializing – it’s propaganda. It should be treated as such by the public, and with the healthy skepticism it deserves.