The U.S. Finally Has Two New Nuclear Projects Underway

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THE TOP FIVE

1. The U.S. officially has two new nuclear projects underway

Have Bart write this on the chalkboard: I Will Not Spread Nuclear Misinformation.The Simpsons

Let’s, for a moment, recast The Simpsons’ role in nuclear energy discourse. Rather than fearmongering with a pseudoscientific depiction of fission energy, imagine if that sign in the scene from the opening credits that reads “days without an accident” instead tracked how long it’s been since the United States started work on building newer, sleeker, and more efficient reactors. Until last week, the sign would have clocked 4,539 days — 13 years since construction began on the AP1000 reactor known as Plant Vogtle’s Unit 4. But last Friday, the next-generation reactor startup Kairos Power broke ground on its demonstration plant in Tennessee. Then this week, the Bill Gates-founded reactor company TerraPower started construction on its debut power plant in Wyoming. “This isn’t a test reactor,” Chris Levesque, president and chief executive of TerraPower, told The Wall Street Journal. “This is a grid-scale nuclear reactor that will be built in 42 months.” While there’s plenty of ambition to build more reactors in the U.S., the country has a very, very long way to go to even catch up with China’s actual construction output.

California won’t be the site of any new plants anytime soon, at least until the state lifts its legislative ban on building new reactors. But keeping the state’s last operating nuclear station, Diablo Canyon, running from 2030 to 2045 could offer net savings of capital and operating costs totaling more than $7.6 billion, or more than $500 million per year of continued operations, according to a new analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. The savings “more than double when calculated relative to the current portfolio of alternatives mandated” in a state bill that lays out the renewable energy options for meeting Sacramento’s 2045 climate goals. “In that case,” the report states, “the total present value of savings for extending the life of” the plant “exceeds $20 billion, or more than $1.3 billion per year.”

2. Energy Department enlists 90 nuclear firms in wartime reactor push

If the Trump administration achieves its goal of siring a nuclear renaissance, we’re going to need a lot more reactor fuel than we currently have available. Much of that supply has come in recent years from Russia, but a U.S. law will fully ban imports in 2028. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have lavished funding on fuel enrichers. But on Thursday, the Department of Energy tapped a new tool: the Defense Production Act, the once-obscure Korean War-era statute that gives the federal government more powers to direct manufacturing. Under a newly launched Nuclear Fuel Cycle Consortium, the agency assembled representatives of more than 90 companies in the nuclear industrial base to “address all facets of the nuclear fuel supply chain including milling, conversion, enrichment, deconversion, fabrication, recycling, and reprocessing.” The Energy Department also kicked off a campaign it’s calling “Nuclear Dominance — 3 by 33.” The program aims by 2033 to “catalyze a secure and cost competitive domestic fuel supply chain,” speed up deployment of advanced reactors and reprocessing facilities, and find ways to use the DPA to speed up the buildout.

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3. Interior Department launches a new offshore drilling and mining agency

The Department of the Interior is creating a new office called the Marine Minerals Administration to manage oil drilling and seabed mining in America’s territorial waters. The new office, formed by reunifying two offices that had been split up after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, threatens to weaken the environmental oversight of both the traditional oil and gas industry and the emerging mining sector. The move is “worrisome because it has the potential of bringing things back where they were, where there was this inherent conflict of interest between promotion of offshore oil and gas, and oversight safety,” Donald Boesch, emeritus professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, told The New York Times. On Wednesday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said “these unification efforts will streamline bureaucracy.”

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4. New Jersey admits defeat on offshore wind (for now)

The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities has canceled the agreement it reached with PJM Interconnection in 2021 to develop wires and substations needed to send electricity from offshore wind turbines across the state. The board terminated the deal, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote, “because much of New Jersey’s expected offshore wind capacity has either been canceled by developers or indefinitely stalled by President Donald Trump.” Despite soaring electricity prices, “New Jersey is now facing a situation in which there will be no identified, large-scale in-state generation projects under active development that can make use of [the agreement] on the timeline the state and PJM initially envisioned,” the board wrote in a letter to PJM requesting termination of the agreement. Newly-inaugurated Governor Mikie Sherrill has vowed to build new nuclear capacity in the state. As I wrote earlier this month, New Jersey became the latest state to lift its ban on new atomic energy plants.

5. ‘A postcard from the future’ and ‘one of California’s most important climate policymakers’

Heatmap House kicked off San Francisco Climate Week with a day of conversations and roundtables with leading policymakers, executives, and investors. Two talks in particular are worth highlighting.

• Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer spoke about electricity prices with John Reynolds, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, whom Rob called “one of California’s most important climate policymakers.”
• Rob also sat down with Mateo Jaramillo, the chief executive of the long-duration energy storage startup Form Energy, and discussed why Ireland is “a postcard from the future.”

THE KICKER

China is going all in on hydrogen as Beijing seeks ways to free itself from imported fossil fuels. Now the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics has announced a facility in Xinjiang to use 1.5 gigawatts of wind power to produce green hydrogen mixed with an engineered material in a slurry bed reactor to transform solid asphalt into synthetic crude oil. If successful, the new process would allow China to import heavy oil and asphalt very cheaply from Central Asia and convert it into crude oil, the technology blogger TP Huang wrote on X, adding: “China is continuing work to turn crap into useful energy source by applying green electricity derivatives in its bid for energy independence.”