It is immediately northeast of the Morris Operation—the only de facto high-level radioactive waste storage site in the United States.

It serves Chicago and the northern quarter of the state of Illinois, capable of producing 867 megawatts of electricity from each of its two reactors, enough to power over one million average American homes.

In 2004, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) renewed the operating licenses for both reactors, extending them from forty years to sixty.

The BWR at GE's Vallecitos Nuclear Center and the AEC's BORAX experiments provided research data and operator training for Dresden.

[12][13] The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Dresden was 1 in 52,632, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.

On September 13, 2021, the Illinois state senate passed a bill subsidizing the Byron and Dresden nuclear plants,[16] which Governor J.