The U.S. power system passed a landmark July 31 when Vogtle Unit 3 started selling power, the first newly built American nuclear power plant in three decades.

The project was a colossus, putting an average of 1,200 members from Augusta, Ga., Local 1579 to work for 13 years, with more than 1,800 on site for the three-year peak.

The 1,100-megawatt reactor will produce enough power for an estimated 500,000 homes and businesses around the clock for the next 60 to 80 years with zero carbon emissions.

When Unit 4 comes online later this year, Plant Vogtle, at 4,664 MW, will be the second-largest power plant in North America, only behind the Grand Coulee Dam's astonishing 7,000 MW.

The unit's details are staggering. Three million feet of cable. More than a half-million feet of conduit and supports. For a wind farm to provide the same amount of energy, it would have to cover 1,000 square miles.

"It was a blessing," said Fifth District International Representative Will Salters, who was Local 1579's business manager for much of the construction. "We were a 1,000-member local managing well over that many travelers as well as our normal work. I'm glad it's over, but it was a blessing."

The local's apprenticeship went from between 100 and 150 to 400, Salters said, and the local is now 30% larger than when the project began.

When Southern Co. started filing for permits in 2005, hopes were extremely high that Vogtle would be the clap of thunder that announced a monsoon of new U.S. nuclear generating capacity.

Fracking was barely a reality, and nuclear power was widely seen for what it is: a safe, reliable and necessary alternative to the threat of carbon emissions from burning coal. Public support for nuclear was high, and even traditional opposition from environmentalists was on the wane.

The Westinghouse AP1000 reactor was designed and sold as the simpler solution to the problems that plagued nuclear projects from the '80s. It had fewer parts, many of them standardized and built in factories, and multiple fail-safes were built into the design so the default in an emergency was an autonomous, controlled shutdown. Vogtle was the future of a 21st-century clean economy, the head of a parade.

Salters, too, was ready to learn from the past.

When units 1 and 2 were built in the '70s, he said, the local failed to work closely enough with its in-town contractors, so when the project ended, the local's market share had collapsed.

"We were cautiously optimistic we could find the workforce and come out stronger," he said.

The 2009 plan called for simultaneous construction on units 3 and 4 at a peak of 600 journeymen and apprentices. The 1,000-member local would need to call on the whole traveling army of the IBEW. The Great Recession had filled the pool of travelers, and the incentives in pay and per diem were a signal that every corner of the country could see.

"We used to joke that we had travelers from every construction local in the U.S., and in the end, we weren't half wrong," said Fifth District International Vice President Brian Thompson.

But even nuclear power's most fervent supporters now accept that the original schedule was optimistic, if not wildly so.

Westinghouse had hoped to simplify things with its reactor design, but it had been so long since the last nuclear powerhouses were built that there was little left of the workforce and domestic supply chain that could reliably meet the extreme standards of the industry, let alone construction managers with relevant experience.

"By the time construction began, the apprentices, forget the journeymen, who built units 1 and 2 were either at home retired or at their eternal rest," Thompson said. "We weren't just building the reactors; we were building everything."

The company's high hopes for prefabrication died a slow death in a nonunion factory in Louisiana. The work was catastrophically bad, Salter said, and union trades workers were constantly repairing and replacing work that wasn't on site.

"It was good we got the work, but it put the job behind right from the beginning," Salters said.

Worse, not only did construction begin before plans were available to work crews, but it also began before the drawings were even complete.

And then Vogtle was struck with what can only be called a historic run of extraordinarily bad luck.

Despite leading to only one death, the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami in 2011 turned public opinion about nuclear power 180 degrees overnight.

Safety standards were rewritten, and Vogtle designs were painfully updated at great cost in time and money.

Fracking sent domestic natural gas prices plummeting, and for the first time, existing nuclear power plants were economically at risk. Initial costs for plants were always high, but for decades, a nuclear plant was nearly always the most reliable and lowest cost power dispatched onto the grid.

The shocking became commonplace. Utilities shuttered nuclear plants years before their licenses expired, four in 2013 and one each in 2014, 2016 and 2018.

The final blow for two reactors in South Carolina at the V.C. Summer Plant came in 2017 when Westinghouse declared bankruptcy.

Of the 24 nuclear projects in the works by 2009, only Vogtle survived.

And then the pandemic hit, and the 7,000 workers at Vogtle were thrown into the same confusion and uncertainty as those at any other jobsite in America.

It was an astonishing run of stumbling blocks, catastrophes and tribulation.

But not even nuclear power's biggest critics lay the blame at the quality of the work done by union trades workers.

"I worked in coal, gas and nuclear plants before I went to the local, and the work process and standards in nuclear are like nothing else," Thompson said. "Not every member of the IBEW gets clearance, and not every member wants to deal with the paperwork, the obsessiveness and quality."

As the project wraps up, Thompson said he is confident that the Vogtle workforce is one of the finest anywhere in the world.

The project will end late this year or in early 2024 when Unit 4 comes online.

Salters' hope is that some of the many Fifth District and Tenth District utilities might see this as a chance to profit from Vogtle's experience and not let this workforce disappear as the generation prior did.

And the need is there: Kathryn Huff, the Department of Energy's assistant secretary of nuclear energy, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the U.S. needs the energy equivalent of 100 to 200 more Vogtle-sized units to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

At the moment, there are no similarly scaled nuclear plants in the works in North America.

There are at least six AP1000 projects in the works, but all are in China.

In the U.S. and Canada, the future of nuclear is hung on small reactors, between 150 and 300 MW, that are built in a factory to fit in a container, can shut down without intervention and are shipped ready-to-work to a reinforced concrete pad.

The hope is that this time an all-new design won't have the same growing pains.

But Salters is hopeful that at least one of the utilities in his district might try to reap some of what has already been sown.

"You know what would be great? We don't need to wait another 30 years to build another one," he said. "We have the workforce and the supply chain. If someone started one today, it would cost half as much and be done twice as fast."