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The Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant is a 2-unit nuclear power plant located in Burke County, near Augusta and Waynesboro, Georgia. The plant is jointly owned by Georgia Power (45.7%), Oglethorpe Power Corporation (30%), Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (22.7%) and the City of Dalton (1.6%). Each unit has a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor, with a General Electric turbine and electric generator. Units 1 and 2 were completed in 1987 and 1989, respectively. Each of Vogtle's units is capable of producing approximately 1200MW of electricity when online, for a combined capacity of 2400MW. Southern Nuclear lists the capacity as 1215MW each, for a combined output of 2430MW.^[1] The twin cooling towers are 548 ft (167 m) tall.

During Vogtle's construction, costs skyrocketed from an estimated $660 million to $8.87 billion.^{[2] [3]} This was typical of the time due to increased regulations after the Three Mile Island accident.

On March 20th, 1990 at 9:20 a.m. a truck carrying fuel and lubricants in the plant's low voltage switchyard backed into a support column for the feeder line supplying power to the Unit 1-A reserve auxiliary transformer (RAT). This set off a complicated chain of events that was exacerbated both by planned maintenance (in which some back-up systems were off-line) and by equipment failures in some back-up systems. The resulting loss of electrical power in the plant's "vital circuits" shut down the residual heat removal (RHR) pump that was cooling Unit 1 (which was nearing the end of a refueling shut-down) and prevented the back-up RHR from activating. Even though Unit 1 was not operating at full-power, residual heat from the natural decay of the radioactive fuel needed to be removed to prevent a dangerous rise in core temperature. At 9:40 a.m. the plant operators declared a site area emergency per existing procedures which called for an SAE whenever "vital" power is lost for more than 15 minutes. At 9:56 a.m., plant operators performed a manual start of the A-side emergency diesel generator (EDG), which bypassed most of the EDG's protective trips that had prevented it from coming on-line. RHR-A was then started using power from EDG-A. With core cooling restored the site area emergency was downgraded to an alert at 10:15 a.m. The temperature of the Unit 1 core coolant increased from 90F to 136F during the 36 minutes required to re-energize the A-side bus. Ironically, throughout the event, non-vital power was continuously available to Unit 1 from off-site sources. However, the Vogtle electrical system was not designed to permit easy interconnection of the Unit 1 vital buses to non-vital power or to the Unit 2 electrical buses.(ref NRC Information Notice No. 90-25) Since this incident, Plant Vogtle has implemented changes to the plant that allow power to be transferred from one side to the other from an off-site source.

1. ^ Plant Vogtle - Southern Company. Southern Company. Retrieved on March 2, 2007.
2. ^ Gertner, Jon. "Atomic Balm?", New York Times, July 16, 2006.
3. ^ Moens, John (Fri Mar 18 09:15:09 EDT 2005). U.S. Nuclear Plants - Vogtle. Energy Information Administration - U.S. Department of Energy. Retrieved on March 2, 2007.

• Plant Vogtle Southern Nuclear Homepage
• DoE Page
• NRC Page for Vogtle 1
• NRC Page for Vogtle 2
• Maps and aerial photos Coordinates: 33.143005° -81.765747°
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