(Zero Hedge)—The Nuclear Company (TNC) unveiled plans on October 21st for Prosperity One, a campus on the Ohio River in Lewis County, Kentucky, with room for up to six Westinghouse AP1000 reactors.
At roughly 6.6 GW, a fully built Prosperity One would top Georgia’s four-unit Plant Vogtle as the largest nuclear plant in the country. That’s more than a third of the roughly 18 GW of generating capacity Kentucky currently has.
It would also be Kentucky’s first commercial reactor. The state only lifted its decades-old restrictions on new nuclear construction in 2017.
The first phase calls for two units, and TNC wants federal approvals in hand to start construction in 2028.
That’s ambitious for a project that hasn’t filed anything with the NRC or PJM yet…
The Carrs Bottom site near Vanceburg was once assembled for a coal plant that was later abandoned, and it sits half a mile from a 765 kV line feeding PJM. The land belongs to lifelong Lewis County resident Sam Howard, who is partnering on the project.
“I have nine grandchildren, and all of them live in Lewis County,” Howard said. “I want them to have the opportunity to stay.”
We’ve been tracking TNC for a while. In April, we reported the startup was preparing to propose an AP1000 at one of three South Carolina sites, noting that the $80 billion Westinghouse deal struck with Washington six months earlier had produced zero visible shovels in the dirt.
Weeks later, TNC and Brookfield, which owns 51% of Westinghouse, teamed up on a new company to develop Westinghouse reactor projects. Its first job is the possible completion of VC Summer Units 2 and 3, the two half-built AP1000s abandoned in 2017 after South Carolina utilities sank about $9 billion into them.
Cost overruns at the miserably managed Vogtle and Summer projects drove Westinghouse into bankruptcy that same year. Fast forward almost 10 years, and now the company is looking to IPO at almost $50 billion.
In May, we noted Brookfield was working toward a final investment decision by 2027, which would mean paying state-owned Santee Cooper $2.7 billion for the unfinished units. Brookfield has since told Santee Cooper’s board it will make that call by March 31, 2028.
Kentucky is a bigger undertaking. Prosperity One is a greenfield site rather than an expansion of an existing plant, and TNC is betting that building the same reactor over and over will bring costs down.
Vogtle Unit 4 came online roughly 30% cheaper and faster than Unit 3, according to Heatmap. Joe Klecha, TNC’s chief nuclear officer and a Vogtle construction veteran, expects at least that much at Prosperity One: “The 30%, I would say, is the floor on the savings from the first unit to the second unit.”
That squares with the McKinsey work we covered in July, which credited identical units at the UAE’s Barakah plant with cutting costs “from construction of the first unit to the fourth by roughly 40 percent.”
The NRC has done some of the work already. On October 14th, it renewed the AP1000’s design certification through 2066, folding in lessons from the nearly 200 license amendments approved during Vogtle’s construction and startup.
Chairman Ho Nieh said the update “provides the regulatory foundation for America to move from building individual reactors to deploying them at scale.”
Now find a buyer
What TNC doesn’t have yet is a customer. It hasn’t disclosed a cost estimate, a financing plan, or who will own the plant, though it says it’s negotiating offtake agreements and expects deals by next year.
In June, the DOE offered a $17.5 billion conditional commitment for long-lead AP1000 equipment, built around up to five two-reactor sites. Prosperity One’s two-unit first phase would match that structure.
Then there’s Korea. When Seoul’s $120 billion reactor pledge was announced last month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the units were “going in Kentucky,” among other states.
Brookfield says those AP1000s will go on federal land, but TNC hasn’t said whether Prosperity One is connected.
