SHELL BLUFF, Ga. --- Workers at Plant Vogtle are toiling 20 hours a day to accelerate progress on what is likely to become the nation's first new commercial reactor project in decades.

"Everyone anticipates, and recognizes, that according to our industry peers, Vogtle will be the first," said David Jones, Southern Nuclear's site vice president for Units 3 and 4. "It is part of our job to make that happen."

The company received an early site permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in August and has moved more than 320 workers and a fleet of heavy equipment to the Burke County site, where 4 million cubic yards of dirt are being excavated to prepare for the $14 billion construction project.

If all goes well with permitting and construction, the new units -- producing 1,170 megawatts apiece -- will go online in 2016 and 2017, Mr. Jones said. "I don't know of any other utility that has published a schedule that advanced."

Across the nation, the NRC is evaluating 16 similar applications for 24 new reactors, but many of those projects remain on the drawing board and most are not as advanced as Vogtle's, which expects to receive its major final hurdle -- a combined operating license -- in 2011.

Vogtle is among only four new nuclear projects that have received an early site permit, said NRC spokesman Roger Hannah. The other three are the Clinton site in Illinois, which has not yet filed a combined operating license request; the Grand Gulf project in Mississippi; and the North Anna project in Virginia, which remains in the environmental-impact-statement phase, he said.

The existing units at Vogtle were among the last in the nation's current fleet of nuclear-generating plants to go online in the late 1980s, Mr. Jones said. Now the site is poised to lead the nation in what some have dubbed a "Nuclear Renaissance" that will bring jobs and electricity to growing areas, especially in the South.

"There are a lot of reasons for added confidence today in meeting that schedule that we didn't have in the 1970s," he said.

Decades ago, nuclear projects faced costly delays because of changes in rules and specifications that occurred as reactors were being planned and built. The combined operating license program, devised by the NRC to streamline the permitting process, simultaneously authorizes reactor construction and operation.

"It's a big change," he said. "In the '70s and '80s, you got a construction license to build it over five years, and then you had to apply for a license to operate it," he said. "There was a lot of risk of changing expectations and changing technology that we don't have this time around."

Much of the current work is focused on excavating the site to a depth of 95 feet, after which much of the dirt will be repacked to create a firm foundation.

"We've recently gone to two 10-hour shifts, six days a week," said Mark Tanner, the site's engineering construction liaison. "Right now they are moving about 20,000 cubic yards per shift."

The 42-acre site, surrounded by more than seven miles of silt fence and erosion barriers, includes 79 wells that capture and remove water that seeps into the area during construction.

Once online, the new reactors will roughly double the site's 850-person work force to 1,700. During the peak of construction, expected to occur in 2013-14, about 3,000 to 3,500 workers will be employed.

In addition to the contractors at work on the new site, almost 800 temporary workers were at Vogtle's Unit 1 this week to refuel the reactor during one of its rare -- and costly -- scheduled outages.

Ellie Daniel, a corporate communications specialist at the site, said the 25-day shutdown began Sept. 20 to allow scheduled maintenance and major refueling operations that are performed every 18 months. Unit 2 will undergo a similar refueling shutdown next spring. Such shutdowns cost the owners about $1 million a day in lost revenue.