Donald Trump aims to spur the biggest nuclear development boom this side of the 21st century. The big question: Will it work?
Trump signed a fleet of executive orders on Friday seeking to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity, expanding generation from 100 gigawatts today to 400 gigawatts by 2050. To that end, he also set a near-term goal to start construction on 10 new conventional reactors by 2030 — that is, within the next five years.
The interim goal on its own is, on its face, extremely ambitious. There have only been three reactors completed this century: Watts Bar Unit 2, which had a complicated, multi-decade development timeline and finally entered operation in 2016; and Vogtle Units 3 and 4, which started construction in 2009 and came online in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
Part of the reason those three facilities took so long is the convoluted permitting process nuclear hopefuls must navigate. (Chris Gadomski, lead nuclear analyst at BloombergNEF, called it a “gauntlet.”) It can take almost a decade for a new nuclear project to receive what’s called a “combined operating license” from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal body charged with overseeing civilian nuclear technology and power plant operations. The orders seek to simplify and accelerate the NRC’s licensing procedure, giving the body 18 months to issue new rules and guidance designed to shorten the timeline for processing new applications to 18 months at the longest, and to reduce the timeline for considering continuing operations licenses to just a year.
In the even nearer term, however, “If you want to build nuclear fast in this country, you would go to sites that are already licensed or already have infrastructure,” Brett Rampal, senior director of nuclear and power strategy at Veriten, told Heatmap. Many of these sites received NRC approval in the 2000 and 2010s but languished due to poor market conditions (the rise of cheap natural gas), the nuclear industry’s own instability (Westinghouse, a major contractor, went bankrupt in 2017), or some combination of both.
But even then the process is complicated, as Adam Stein, director of the nuclear energy innovation program of the Breakthrough Institute, told Heatmap. “Several of the sites with licenses for AP1000 [reactors] theoretically could start construction fairly quickly without major license changes,” he said. “However, that’s not likely to happen.”
The AP1000 is a 1-gigawatt pressurized water reactor made by Westinghouse, and it’s currently pumping out electrons at the Vogtle site in Georgia. There are hopes that it can become a standard design that is built over and over again at scale.
But even on an already-licensed site, any new project would be starting from scratch with its supply chain and workforce. And just because the site has a license now doesn’t mean its developers are done with the licensing process. “The licenses for those sites were issued for a design that was essentially what Vogtle started out as,” Stein explained. Vogtle subsequently underwent almost 200 license amendments, and it’s probable that a new build would want to incorporate many of these design changes into their license, as well. “That takes time,” Stein said.
Duke Energy, which serves over 8 million customers largely in the Southeast, has an active combined operating license for AP1000s in South Carolina. The company told South Carolina utilities regulators in April that its W.S. Lee site in the state “offers the best opportunity to deploy large light-water reactors in the Carolinas” — but that, at least at the time, “the conceptual deployment timeline from when a definitive “go forward” decision is made is about 13 to 14 years.” (Emphasis mine.)
The spokesperson noted that the combined operating license at the site “gives us optionality in the future to construct and operate two Westinghouse AP1000 units at the site,” and that “we will have an opportunity to update state Commissions in the Carolinas on our progress regarding the potential for future new nuclear investments later this year.” The spokesperson gave no specific indication that the company’s timeline for building a new plant had changed due to the executive orders.
Duke also terminated a combined operating license for a Florida site in 2018. “We currently have no nuclear planned for Duke Energy Florida per our 10-year site plan, although advanced nuclear overall is still a longer-term option,” the spokesperson said.
What about “advanced nuclear”? Several advanced nuclear projects have either applied for or gotten construction permits. Kairos Power received construction permits for demonstration reactors, while X-Energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and TerraPower have applied for construction permits for advanced reactors. These companies are pursuing a different pathway than the combined operating license application process and will need to apply for operation licenses as well. Two advanced reactor designs by NuScale have received approval from the NRC to date, including one that’s fresh as of Thursday, but there are no current plans to deploy either anywhere.
That hasn’t dampened excitement about advanced nuclear, including on sites with licenses for larger reactors. Virginia utility Dominion Energy is looking at new nuclear development at its North Anna site, which is licensed for a GE-Hitachi Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor, a large reactor which has received an NRC design certification but has not yet been deployed. But instead of conventional reactors, Dominion has a memorandum of understanding with Amazon to explore small modular reactor development.
Duke Energy, meanwhile, told Heatmap that the company “strongly supports the advancement and deployment of new nuclear technologies, including large reactors and small modular reactors, to meet the growing energy needs of our customers.”
There is one nuclear company that greeted the executive orders with fulsome excitement: The Nuclear Company. Unlike other newer entrants in the space, The Nuclear Company — which raised a $51 million Series A in April — aims to build six conventional reactors with “proven, licensed technology.”
“I feel like I’m Jack and Rose from the Titanic and my arms are out. I feel like we're flying finally,” Juliann Edwards, chief development officer at The Nuclear Company, told Heatmap. “I feel like we’ve been unleashed through these executive orders.”
As difficult and costly as it was to bring the new Vogtle reactors online, the process jumpstarted the previously dormant domestic nuclear industry. And The Nuclear Company thinks it would be a shame for this emergent expertise to go to waste.
The Nuclear Company has identified the first site where it plans to build, but it’s not yet public, Edwards told Heatmap, though she pointed to states such as Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama as places where the company could “hit the ground running,” given that they already have the necessary licenses in place.
And yet The Nuclear Company does not, itself, intend to design or operate these reactors. Instead it would run licensing, permitting, and construction, while also potentially serving as the facility’s long-term owner, depending on the regulatory structure of the local utilities and grid operators.
That still leaves the question of whether the market will end up valuing the power produced from all these new reactors at a level that will keep an operator in business. That’s not a given. In the 2010s, nuclear capacity fell in part because the market preferred natural gas to nuclear, since it was cheaper and could respond quickly to varying demand. “Why would you build a nuclear reactor when you got very cheap natural gas?” BNEF’s Gadomski, told Heatmap.
But the prospects of an artificial-intelligence-fueled data center boom, as well as the broader electrification of the economy, has begun to change this calculus, as utilities look to catch up to quickly rising electricity demand for the first time this century.
"I’m hoping that this environment doesn’t create too much uncertainty for folks, and I’m hoping it sends signals to get things going and that things will hopefully work out,” Rampal said. “I love my utilities, but they are 14 times bitten, 97 times shy.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Duke Energy terminated its Florida license.
Courtesy of Harbinger