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The nation’s largest public power provider just applied to build a small modular reactor.

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.
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The state formerly led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum does not have a history of rejecting wind farms – which makes some recent difficulties especially noteworthy.
A wind farm in North Dakota – the former home of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum – is becoming a bellwether for the future of the sector in one of the most popular states for wind development.
At issue is Allete’s Longspur project, which would see 45 turbines span hundreds of acres in Morton County, west of Bismarck, the rural state’s most populous city.
Sited amid two already operating wind farms, the project will feed power not only to North Dakotans but also to Minnesotans, who, in the view of Allete, lack the style of open plains perfect for wind farms found in the Dakotas. Allete subsidiary Minnesota Power announced Longspur in August and is aiming to build and operate it by 2027, in time to qualify for clean electricity tax benefits under a hastened phase-out of the Inflation Reduction Act.
On paper, this sounds achievable. North Dakota is one of the nation’s largest producers of wind-generated power and not uncoincidentally boasts some of cheapest electricity in the country at a time when energy prices have become a potent political issue. Wind project rejections have happened, but they’ve been rare.
Yet last week, zoning officials in Morton County bucked the state’s wind-friendly reputation and voted to reject Longspur after more than an hour of testimony from rural residents who said they’d had enough wind development – and that officials should finish the job Donald Trump and Doug Burgum started.
Across the board, people who spoke were neighbors of existing wind projects and, if built, Longspur. It wasn’t that they didn’t want any wind turbines – or “windmills,” as they called them, echoing Trump’s nomenclature. But they didn’t want more of them. After hearing from the residents, zoning commission chair Jesse Kist came out against the project and suggested the county may have had enough wind development for now.
“I look at the area on this map and it is plum full of wind turbines, at this point,” Kist said, referencing a map where the project would be situated. “And we have a room full of people and we heard only from landowners, homeowners in opposition. Nobody in favor.”
This was a first for the county, zoning staff said, as public comment periods weren’t previously even considered necessary for a wind project. Opposition had never shown up like this before. This wasn’t lost on Andy Zachmeier, a county commissioner who also sits on the zoning panel, who confessed during the hearing that the county was approaching the point of overcrowding. “Sooner or later, when is too many enough?” he asked.
Zachmeier was ultimately one of the two officials on the commission to vote against rejecting Longspur. He told me he was looking to Burgum for a signal.
“The Green New Deal – I don’t have to like it but it’s there,” he said. “Governor Burgum is now our interior secretary. There’s been no press conferences by him telling the president to change the Green New Deal.” Zachmeier said it was not the county’s place to stop the project, but rather that it was up to the state government, a body Burgum once led. “That’s probably going to have to be a legislative question. There’s been nothing brought forward where the county can say, We’ve been inundated and we’ve had enough,” he told me.
The county commission oversees the zoning body, and on Wednesday, Zachmeier and his colleagues voted to deny Longspur’s rejection and requested that zoning officials reconsider whether the denial was a good idea, or even legally possible. Unlike at the hearing last week, landowners whose property includes the wind project area called for it to proceed, pointing to the monetary benefits its construction would provide them.
“We appreciate the strong support demonstrated by landowners at the recent Commission meeting,” Allete’s corporate communications director Amy Rutledge told me in an email. “This region of North Dakota combines exceptional wind resources, reliable electric transmission infrastructure, and a strong tradition of coexisting seamlessly with farming and ranching activities.”
I personally doubt that will be the end of Longspur’s problems before the zoning board, and I suspect this county will eventually restrict or even ban future wind projects. Morton County’s profile for renewables development is difficult, to say the least; Heatmap Pro’s modeling gives the county an opposition risk score of 92 because it’s a relatively affluent agricultural community with a proclivity for cultural conservatism – precisely the kind of bent that can be easily swayed by rhetoric from Trump and his appointees.
Morton County also has a proclivity for targeting advanced tech-focused industrial development. Not only have county officials instituted a moratorium on direct air capture facilities, they’ve also banned future data center and cryptocurrency mining projects.
Neighboring counties have also restricted some forms of wind energy infrastructure. McClean County to the north, for example, has instituted a mandatory wind turbine setback from the Missouri River, and Stark County to the west has a 2,000-foot property setback from homes and public buildings.
In other words, so goes Burgum, may go North Dakota? I suppose we’ll find out.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Staten Island, New York – New York’s largest battery project, Swiftsure, is dead after fervent opposition from locals in what would’ve been its host community, Staten Island.
2. Barren County, Kentucky – Do you remember Wood Duck, the solar farm being fought by the National Park Service? Geenex, the solar developer, claims the Park Service has actually given it the all-clear.
3. Near Moss Landing, California – Two different communities near the now-infamous Moss Landing battery site are pressing for more restrictions on storage projects.
4. Navajo County, Arizona – If good news is what you’re seeking, this Arizona county just approved a large solar project, indicating this state still has sunny prospects for utility-scale development depending on where you go.
5. Gillespie County, Texas – Meanwhile out in Texas, this county is getting aggressive in its attempts to kill a battery storage project.
6. Clinton County, Iowa – This county just extended its moratorium on wind development until at least the end of the year as it drafts a restrictive ordinance.
A chat with with Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank that handles energy issues. This week, the Institute released a report calling for a “public option” to solve the offshore wind industry’s woes – literally. As in, the group believes an ombudsman agency akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority that takes equity stakes or at least partial ownership of offshore wind projects would mitigate investment risk, should a future Democratic president open the oceans back up for wind farms.
While I certainly found the idea novel and interesting, I had some questions about how a public office standing up wind farms would function, and how to get federal support for such an effort post-Trump. So I phoned up Johanna, who cowrote the document, to talk about it.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How did we get here? What’s the impetus for this specific idea – an authority to handle building out offshore wind?
As you have covered very closely, [the Trump administration is] stymying huge manufacturing opportunities for union workers, and obviously putting [decarbonization] way off course. Even though it’s an odd time to talk about a federally-focused offshore wind agenda, I think because the administration is scaring off investment in this sector, increasingly our only option in a more amenable administration may be to just do it ourselves.
From my perspective, we can’t just abdicate this critical decarb sector. It’s so close to coastal population centers, so close to where people live in high-density urban areas that need electricity. So we need to be preparing for how we make up for this massive amount of lost time. We’re also trying to break through some of the longer term coordination problems the offshore wind sector has run into.
Your report outlines past examples of authorities like the Tennessee Valley Authority – help me understand what this would look like for offshore wind.
There are definitely examples of what we’re discussing here, and we evoke the moonshot as one of these examples where the government got behind a major technological jump and used industrial policy to make that happen — doing some of the planning, investing in companies directly via equity stakes, developing its own public enterprises or departments within the government to drive towards a common goal.
Then, of course, there was the rural electrification administration and the TVA development. The federal government has used more of its planning muscle to drive toward a critical goal, and from our perspective, a critical goal is decarbonizing the electricity sector. Yet at the same time, we’re seeing massive electricity cost spikes, so we’re trying to ponder how an authority like this could actually do that.
There are three areas where we’d imagine this authority to be involved. The first is actual development of offshore wind projects – a stable baseline for offshore wind by always being the bidder of last resort, actively bidding on projects along the coast. This also creates a baseline for the supply chain generally.
We also see an opportunity here in offshore transmission grids, because I’m sure you’re well aware how mired those grids have become. There are opportunities for increased planning around the grid to ensure a higher level of coordination. And by having a federal authority, it will lower the cost to other offshore wind developers.
The third piece is the supply chain manufacturing — more so a coordination role, sure, but also an opportunity for the federal government to leverage its large-scale procurement power. It would help provide security for a lot of the components in this moment of uncertainty.
On one hand, the benefit of the public option is a birch rod for the private sector. If the public entity is providing things at lower cost and with potentially higher commitments to higher wages, with more people wanting to work for the public entity, it can bring the entirety of the industry up because they’d have to compete with the agency.
On the other hand, I think there’s pieces of this that actually draw down costs, like the transmission and supply chain pieces.
What do you say to the percentage of the public that is opposed to offshore wind development?
I think there has been a very effective disinformation campaign. We also see a benefit in planning because we can limit overbuild and be strategic about where it’s deployed to limit permitting snags and other turmoil.
Okay, but the big question hovering over this is how it gets done. You’re going to need to convince the public to create this authority. And this is such an ambitious idea. How do you reckon with that?
Because so much has been lost during this administration, in terms of public planning and the DOGE cuts, there will be this need on a grand scale to supercharge and re-double efforts in a wide range of areas. My feeling is that we have to build toward a political appetite.
We have to think about big, ambitious solutions like this. Is this actually an opportunity to lower costs, not just decarb? Are there ways to think about that to build an enduring political coalition?
We’re seeing the Trump administration use some of these policy levers much more stridently than former Democratic presidents have used — like with equity stakes. We could do that kind of thing, too.
The truth is we have three years to build the political opportunities and coalition to do this.