The Trump administration is pushing to revive the U.S. nuclear industry — but slow-moving talks with the developer of the nation’s flagship nuclear reactor have prompted officials to explore alternatives.
Last May, amid surging demand for more electricity, President Donald Trump issued a flurry of executive orders aimed at quadrupling how much nuclear energy the United States produces.
For all the hype around next-generation technologies, a key prong of the expansion rests on the large-scale reactors the U.S. knows how to build and operate. One order directed the Department of Energy to “facilitate 5 gigawatts” of upgrades that squeeze more electricity out of existing plants and to “have 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.” Two weeks ago, the DOE’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing — previously known as the Loan Programs Office — closed a record $25.6 billion deal with Southern Co. to fund 6 GW of upgrades.
Building those new reactors is proving trickier, even though the language of that executive order was clearly designed to benefit one specific reactor model.
In the early 2000s, Westinghouse Electric Co., the legendary Pennsylvania developer whose pressurized-water reactor technology makes up three-quarters of the global fleet, rolled out the AP1000 as the crown-jewel American reactor model for the 21st century. After years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns, the U.S. finally completed its first two — and, so far, only — AP1000s at Southern Co.’s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in eastern Georgia in 2023 and 2024.
The Trump administration has also explicitly embraced the reactor with a separate announcement. Last October, the Department of Commerce brokered a framework for a deal with the Japanese government that would secure an $80 billion investment for building at least 10 new AP1000s, though the details have yet to be ironed out.
But now the Trump administration is actively considering at least two rivals to the AP1000 that would qualify under the executive order. The DOE has held talks in recent weeks with executives from GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy and South Korean diplomats representing the state-owned Korea Electric Power Corp. to discuss potential financing if either company decides to compete with Westinghouse to build new large reactors, according to nine industry and administration sources who talked to Canary Media on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Both companies have gigawatt-scale reactors already certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The DOE declined to comment on the talks but said in a statement that the Office of Energy Dominance Financing “plays a pivotal role in deploying high impact capital, which meets the goals for more large-scale nuclear deployment.”
The agency said, “DOE is fully committed to unleashing America’s next nuclear renaissance, from reinvigorating domestic supply chains to delivering gigawatts of new reactors.”
The talks developed as the Trump administration struggles to reach a deal with Westinghouse’s majority owner, the private equity giant Brookfield Asset Management, the sources said. To the DOE, Westinghouse and Brookfield are moving too slowly. To the utilities that the developers would likely work with, the federal government’s generous financing options for new reactors still don’t include the one thing they want most: cost-overrun insurance. Westinghouse was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2017 after the costs of building the two reactors at Plant Vogtle ballooned.
“Westinghouse is not easy to negotiate with,” one industry source said. “But the bigger problem is the cost overruns.”
Brookfield did not respond to emailed questions. Westinghouse declined to comment on talks with the DOE but, in an emailed statement, called the AP1000 “the only construction-ready, gigawatt-scale, advanced modular reactor that is fully licensed and operating in the U.S.”
The company said, “Westinghouse and its experienced U.S. supply chain partners are ready now to deliver a fleet of AP1000 plants.”
A spokesperson also sent a 24-slide report, released this week and conducted by the consultancy PwC on behalf of the firm, which found that building 10 new AP1000s would give the U.S. economy a nearly $93 billion boost. It’s difficult to compare the price of the AP1000 with the cost of its two U.S.-certified rivals. GE Hitachi — as the U.S.-Japanese joint venture is referred to — has not built its ABWR in 20 years. Meanwhile, South Korea provided state-backed loans that may not be available in the U.S. in its most recent international bids for its competitor, the APR-1400. But research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has separately found that the AP1000’s settled design and supply chains make it the cheapest option to build next in the U.S., compared with the small modular reactors on offer. The AP1000, and designs like it, have made up 12 of the 14 new units connected to the grid worldwide since 2023.
The AP1000’s competition
GE Hitachi expressed little interest in bringing back its ABWR, three of those sources said. The company did not respond to emailed questions.
The developer built four of the 1,300-megawatt powerhouses in Japan between 1996 and 2006. It nearly finished another two at Taiwan’s canceled fourth nuclear station. The company’s partner in the early 2000s, the Japanese giant Toshiba, also laid plans for the first U.S. ABWR 90 miles southwest of Houston, before abandoning the proposal in 2018. The intellectual property for the ABWR is shared between GE, Hitachi, and Toshiba.
But bringing back the ABWR could pull resources away from GE Hitachi’s big gamble on small modular reactors. The company is currently developing its first two 300-megawatt BWRX-300 reactors: one in Tennessee, with $400 million in backing from the Trump administration, and the other in Ontario, Canada.
South Korea, meanwhile, has long wanted to work with the U.S. on nuclear power, but a legal barrier has stood in the way.
In 2022, Westinghouse accused South Korea’s APR-1400, a 1,400-megawatt pressurized-water reactor, of relying on patented technology derived from the American company’s subsidiary without permission. The threat of a lawsuit kept any project plans at bay even though the Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified the APR-1400 for use in the U.S. in 2019.
The legal dispute has since simmered down. In January 2025, Westinghouse announced a global settlement of the intellectual property dispute with South Korean state nuclear company Korea Electric Power Corp., or Kepco, which owns the developer Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power. The terms of the agreement aren’t public, but the business press in Seoul has reported that the deal was hugely unpopular in South Korea and prohibits the country from bidding on nuclear power projects in North America and Europe. Last August, the Yonhap News Agency reported that Kepco was considering creating a joint venture with Westinghouse to work on projects.
Three industry sources familiar with the settlement confirmed that the agreement bars Kepco from developing an APR-1400 in the U.S. While debate has raged in Seoul over the territorial boundaries drawn into the deal, it’s unclear whether the Trump administration is prepared to press Westinghouse to reopen discussions. Under the settlement, Kepco could partner with Westinghouse to build AP1000s in the U.S. But two sources with direct knowledge of the talks said high-ranking DOE officials met with top Korean diplomats last week about building an APR-1400 in the U.S.
Neither Kepco nor the South Korean Embassy in Washington, D.C., responded to requests for comment. But South Korea’s Industry Minister, Kim Jung-kwan, confirmed in a parliamentary session Monday that the government is in talks with the U.S. to invest in an American nuclear power project as part of the $350 billion deal Seoul brokered with the Trump administration to reduce tariffs.
“We are in serious discussions regarding nuclear power,” Kim said in response to a lawmaker’s question about potential Korean nuclear investments in the U.S., according to Reuters.
A test of Trump’s nuclear ambitions
To Nick Touran, a veteran nuclear engineer who spent 15 years at Bill Gates’ next-generation reactor company, TerraPower, working with South Korea is “the best way to get big reactors done for cheap.” The East Asian nation emerged in recent years as the democratic world’s leading nuclear developer after Kepco completed work on the United Arab Emirates’ debut atomic power station, Barakah, relatively on time and on budget.
“They can deliver megaprojects, as they just demonstrated in the UAE,” said Touran, who now works as an independent industry consultant and runs the website What Is Nuclear. “For years I have said that if we could do anything in the U.S., we should just hire the Koreans to build a few APR-1400s and train the American construction managers and craft labor in their process.”
The U.S. and Korean nuclear industries have long been entwined.
In the 1980s, Combustion Engineering licensed its underlying technology to Kepco and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power for the pressurized-water reactor that ultimately became the APR-1400. But the American company granted the license for use only in South Korea. When Kepco started work on the Barakah in Abu Dhabi, the company needed permission from the U.S. to transfer American atomic power technology. Westinghouse, which bought Combustion Engineering in 2000, also stepped in to demand licensing fees for any APR-1400s sold outside South Korea.
“We taught the Koreans how to do nuclear when we sold them Combustion Engineering technology. Korea maintained the knowledge, made it better, perfected it. Now, we want it back. So let’s pull ourselves out of the dark ages by bringing that Korean construction management, design expertise, and supply chain back,” Touran said. “Let’s forget about geopolitics — forget about Westinghouse’s cartel — and get the Koreans to come help America.”
Likewise, he said, the ABWR is a reliable choice.
The U.S. could ultimately provide at least some of the cost overrun insurance the industry is demanding. Last month, Sen. Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican, and Sen. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, introduced a bill that would cover up to $3.6 billion in budget busters.
At this point, however, the U.S. has no large reactor projects underway, and industry and government efforts remain largely focused on small modular reactors and microreactors that have yet to be proven out. Dozens of next-generation reactor designs are winding their way through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission process, and 10 designs are currently undergoing testing in a DOE pilot program with a July 4 deadline for at least three projects to split atoms for the first time.
While Touran said that “competition is inherently good and American,” it’s also true that the divided efforts in the U.S. have kept costs high for domestic nuclear power plant construction. Zeroing in on the AP1000 “would help us learn the lesson of serialization faster by focusing on one,” he said.
Jigar Shah, the former head of the DOE’s Loan Programs Office during the Biden administration, agreed that the department needs to narrow its selection of reactors, not widen it.
“If the Trump administration is serious about making a lasting impact on nuclear, it needs to be winnowing down the list of companies that are racing to the finish line,” Shah said. “At some point, the Trump administration can’t say, ‘We’re The Cheesecake Factory, and we have 64 pages of menu items.’ At some point, you have to say, ‘We’re a tasting menu, and here’s what you have to choose from.’”
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