The Atlanta airport blackout could hardly have come at a worse time for Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power.

Days after the outage, which authorities say appears to have been caused by a fire in a piece of Georgia Power equipment, state utility regulators on Thursday are set to decide the fate of a half-finished nuclear plant the company is building that is years behind schedule and billions over budget.

With memories of massive travel delays still fresh in the minds of many Georgians, five elected officials on the state’s public-service commission will decide whether the company should be allowed to pass on to electricity customers cost overruns from adding two reactors to the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant.

Georgia Power has vowed to go on with the project, which would be the first new nuclear reactors built in the country in more than three decades, despite projected completion costs that have soared to about $25 billion, from an initial estimate of $12.5 billion. But the company has said it could drop the project if it doesn’t get the approval to share the added burden with utility customers.

Georgia Power Chief Executive Paul Bowers said Monday that the nuclear vote and the airport blackout were “separate issues” and he didn’t think one would affect the other.