The Tennessee Valley Authority Is Taking a Big Swing on Small Nuclear

Can the nuclear renaissance be publicly owned? And will the Trump administration let it?

That’s the question facing the Tennessee Valley Authority as it continues its long-gestating project to build a small modular nuclear reactor, or SMR, to complement its already sizable nuclear fleet. On Tuesday, the project reached another milestone when the public power company applied for a construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a facility for GE Vernova Hitachi’s BWRX-300 reactor at a site on Tennessee’s Clinch River.

Because of the long lead times for nuclear projects and the promise (for now, at least) of government support, how developers talk about them tends to change along with the partisan revolutions of power.

TVA has been considering the Clinch River site for new nuclear since 2010, applied for an early site permit from the NRC in 2016, and received it in 2019. When TVA announced in 2022 that it would spend another $150 million on the project, in addition to the $200 million that had already been authorized, the public utility’s then-CEO Jeff Lyash justified the investment as part of an overall effort to convert America to clean energy. “We believe advanced nuclear technologies will play a critical role in our region and nation’s drive toward a clean energy future,” he said. The following year, when then-Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm visited the Clinch River site, the TVA touted how new nuclear generation would reduce the system’s overall carbon emissions.

As the project marches on under Donald Trump, however, the emissions talk is gone.

In Tuesday’s announcement, “carbon,” “emissions,” and even “clean” go unmentioned. Instead the construction application is “TVA’s next step in … establishing America’s energy dominance to power artificial intelligence, quantum computing and advanced manufacturing.”

American energy — and nuclear — policy is in flux, but rhetoric aside, TVA’s nuclear ambitions appear to be an area of continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations. The Trump White House is reportedly working on a series of executive actions to speed up regulatory approvals for nuclear projects and remove some of the NRC’s power and independence.

At the same time, energy policy experts have lambasted Republicans in Congress for their proposed cuts to the Loans Program Office and phase-out of tax credits for nuclear power. Contra the legislative winds, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said Tuesday that he supports “every incentive” for nuclear power, and that he favors extending tax credits for nuclear and geothermal for another 15 years while more quickly phasing out wind and solar credits.

While this is not the first construction permit application for a SMR, it is the first for a utility that seeks to connect the planned reactor to the grid. Both the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower and the partnership of X-Energy and Dow have applied for construction permits for reactors.

The TVA application is another step in a long journey towards new nuclear for the power authority, which is one of two organizations to actually turn on a nuclear plant in the United States this century. It’s also a big step for Ontario Power Generation, TVA’s Canadian counterpart, which recently received a construction permit from Canadian regulators to build a BWRX-300. By building the same design multiple times in sequence — first in Ontario, then in Oak Ridge, and then hopefully in Ontario again — the projects’ developers hope to be able to apply lessons learned from one reactor to the next, as well as shuttle specialized workers back and forth between construction sites.

“If you flip flop sites, they can transition from one site that’s ready to another site that’s ready for the stage that needs that speciality. That’s better utilization of workforce and supply chain,” Adam Stein, director of the nuclear energy innovation program of the Breakthrough Institute, told me.

GE-Hitachi, meanwhile, applied to the NRC for a license for its SMR design in 2019. Despite all the excitement and investment around SMRs, there is only one licensed design, NuScale’s US600 — and no current plans for anyone to build it.

The fastest the Clinch River project could actually go into operation is about five years, Stein told me. “A construction permit is part of a two-step licensing process. You get a construction permit, and then you’re allowed to start building the plant. Then you need to get an operating license,” he explained.

The environmental review should go quickly, Stein said, because TVA already has its site permit. “They should be able to do less intensive environmental review to make sure that nothing changed in the application versus what it’s already approved,” Stein added.

While TVA is a government entity, it funds itself and operates independently, albeit with a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed board. The board currently does not have a quorum thanks to the Trump administration firing two Biden-appointed members, and would not be able to make a final investment decision on the project until it adds new members. The firings came after Tennessee’s two Republican senators, Bill Hagerty and Marsha Blackburn, wrote an op-ed criticizing the TVA for moving too slowly on its SMR work. TVA also has a new chief executive, Dan Moul, who took over in March, after Lyash announced in January that he intended to resign and looked forward to “spending more time with family.”

Nuclear already comprises over 40% of TVA’s generation capacity. The utility has asked for assistance from the Department of Energy to increase that, including an $800 million grant to help speed up construction at Clinch River and an $8 million grant to specifically defray licensing costs for the SMR.

The Trump administration has shown some friendliness to Biden-era nuclear initiatives, including honoring a loan guarantee to restart the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan.

Considering the long and uncertain time frame for building any nuclear reactor, it’s almost certain that, if TVA’s application is approved, the project will be completed under a different president than Trump. By then, it might be a carbon-free and emissions-reducing one again.