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As it pivots from shutting down nuclear plants to building them, Holtec says small modular reactors can cut costs and speed construction. Now it has to prove it.
Nuclear giant Holtec International is betting big that its 300-megawatt small modular reactors are the future of atomic energy.
On Friday, the Florida-headquartered firm filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in order to sell shares in the company on the Nasdaq.
Across hundreds of pages, the disclosure document outlines the 40-year-old Holtec’s plans to transform itself from the industry’s undertaker — manufacturing canisters to safely store radioactive spent fuel and decommissioning shuttered nuclear plants — to its midwife, producing and operating new electrical stations. This transition comes as nuclear energy regains popularity in the U.S. as a way to meet booming power demand without creating more planet-warming pollution.
Developers have traditionally offset nuclear’s high up-front costs by building ever-larger reactors to capture the economies of scale. Since the early 2000s, however, a number of companies have proposed building small modular reactors that can be constructed identically and in batches. SMRs could generate about a third of the electricity of conventional large-scale plants, but, proponents argue, would bring down costs through assembly-line repetition rather than physical scale.
That cost reduction has yet to be proven out in the real world with actual plants. But in its S-1 filing, Holtec said, “SMRs will offer scalable, cost-effective solutions for new capacity with enhanced safety features, reduced construction timelines and reduced land and transmission infrastructure needs as compared to traditional, larger-scale reactors.” It noted that a single-unit SMR plant would only need 15 acres of land and take a mere three years to build. By contrast, the big reactors on the grid today can take up hundreds of acres, and construction typically drags on for nearly a decade.
Holtec’s SMR-300, as the pressurized-water reactor is named, “is expected to receive regulatory approval for deployment in 2029” and reach its first deployment “in the early 2030s,” according to the filing.
The company said it expects SMRs to play “a meaningful role in the expansion of nuclear capacity,” noting that they can “complement large-scale nuclear generation through lower upfront costs” and more flexible planning around how much power is needed.
For example, smaller reactors may be better suited for converting some old coal-fired stations into nuclear plants. The DOE has been researching the idea for years, given that nuclear and coal are both thermal resources that operate with similar rates of frequency and therefore use similar equipment to generate electricity from steam — which in nuclear plants is made from the heat created by splitting atoms and in coal plants is made from heat created by burning the black rocks. Converting a 400-MW coal plant into a similar-size nuclear reactor makes more financial sense than using a bigger reactor, which could require costly transmission upgrades and more space.
“We believe that our SMR-300 plant can become a favored nuclear generation source over large reactors because of certain advantages,” the company said in its filing.
The company will also operate at least one conventional reactor, the 800-MW unit it’s currently restoring at its Palisades nuclear station, in western Michigan. That project — the nation’s first effort to return a permanently shuttered nuclear reactor to service — could be completed within months, though its contract to sell power to the local grid won’t kick in until next year.
Holtec hopes to combine its plant-restart strategy with its SMR vision. It’s planning to deploy two SMRs at the Palisades site; if that works out, the company has said it may build SMRs at New Jersey’s Oyster Creek nuclear plant, which it’s been in the process of decommissioning for eight years.
Holtec owns three other defunct nuclear plants — Massachusetts’ Pilgrim, Michigan’s Big Rock Point, and New York’s Indian Point — that it could also try to rebuild. The Trump administration has called for reconstructing Indian Point, but Albany remains opposed to the controversial proposal.
Local opposition isn’t Holtec’s biggest hurdle, however. That would be competition from the nuclear behemoths in Russia and China. Virtually every Western nuclear developer is facing an uphill battle to compete with the Kremlin’s state-owned Rosatom, by far the biggest international vendor of nuclear technology in the world, and China’s two state-owned nuclear companies, which are building more than three dozen reactors at home and are expected to enter the export game soon.
Still, among its domestic rivals, Holtec may be the best positioned to hold its own on a global playing field. It is an established company with profitable enterprises in a dozen countries across four continents, and has experience managing infrastructure so sensitive it’s overseen by a dedicated agency, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company has facilities with electrical equipment on-site that can be potentially used to deploy SMRs. It also has won significant support from the federal government, both in the form of a $1.52 billion loan the Department of Energy provided to finance the Palisades restart and the $400 million the agency gave the company to support construction of its first SMR-300s.
“We began work in 2011 on a small modular reactor solution, and drawing on our in-house capability to design, license, manufacture, construct, and commission nuclear systems, honed through decades of turnkey supply, we are now uniquely positioned to launch the development of our small nuclear reactor,” Krishna Singh, Holtec’s founder and chief executive, said in a letter to prospective investors.
After a few missed targets, Holtec says the remaining tasks to bring Michigan’s Palisades plant back online are equal to restoring service after a routine outage.
Up until recently, the U.S. was in a yearslong dry spell in the construction of new nuclear power plants. The hiatus finally ended in April, when two next-generation nuclear developers broke ground on their debut plants.
Though those facilities will take years to finish, the next reactor set to patch onto the U.S. grid could be mere months away.
That’s because Holtec International, long known for its work decommissioning shuttered nuclear plants, is seeking to restart a defunct power station in Michigan — a first for the U.S.
Last week, the nuclear industry’s undertaker-turned-doula announced that it had reached a “watershed moment” by completing all major renovations for its reconstruction of the Palisades plant’s single 800-megawatt reactor, on Michigan’s western coast. While the checklist of 5,000 remaining maintenance issues sounds long, Holtec compared the outstanding workload to that for a routine refueling outage at an operational plant.
“At this point, what we’re doing is typical of a routine outage,” said Nick Culp, a longtime worker at the Palisades plant who now serves as Holtec’s senior manager of government affairs and communications.
The average length of a planned maintenance or refueling outage at a U.S. nuclear plant was 34 days as of 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The longest planned outage in 2024 lasted roughly two months, though recent years have seen reactors idled for as long as three or four months.
It’s possible, of course, that Palisades’ timeline could drag on longer. Florida-headquartered Holtec has already missed two stated target dates for the restart, which it initially said would happen last year. After the firm failed to meet that deadline due to unexpected repair work, a spokesperson told Engineering News-Record that Holtec was aiming for early 2026 — which has now come and gone. Culp declined to comment on multiple questions about exactly when the company expects the reactor to come online.
But once Palisades does return to service, it could generate enough clean electricity to single-handedly power every household in Detroit twice over — and could also serve as a model for reviving other nuclear plants nationwide.
Previously owned by the utility giant Entergy, Palisades’ pressurized-water reactor was shut down in 2022, the last in a wave of nuclear plant closures brought on by the costs of repairing and relicensing facilities amid competition from relatively cheap natural gas and renewables.
In the 2010s, following decades of mostly flat electricity demand, debates over the future of American energy mirrored those seen in other Western democracies, primarily revolving around the strategic value of renewables versus fossil fuels. On the political right, which traditionally supported atomic power, enthusiasm for natural gas appeared to crowd out backing for reactors. On the left, which historically opposed nuclear energy, the falling prices of wind and solar seemed to make reconsidering atomic power unnecessary. Despite repeated warnings from federal researchers that growing industry and electrification would drive up power demand, policy discussions on both sides focused on promoting their preferred energy sources rather than preserving existing nuclear capacity.
So the U.S. allowed for 13 reactors to go out of business between 2013 and 2022 as the country prioritized natural gas. Those reactors represented roughly 10 gigawatts of output, roughly enough power to supply every household in Pennsylvania and New Jersey combined.
When Holtec bought the site in 2018, the plan was to demolish the facility and make money on the decommissioning fund. But in 2024, the company — which was already planning to expand into building and operating live reactors — proposed something that had never been tried in the U.S. before: restarting a shuttered plant. At that point, skyrocketing energy demand from the AI boom was beginning to foster renewed support for nuclear energy across the political spectrum.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office awarded Holtec a $1.52 billion loan to finance the renovations needed to relicense Palisades’ 54-year-old reactor, previously the oldest in operation in the U.S. fleet. While the Trump administration froze all clean energy spending after taking office, the loan to Holtec was among the first the DOE allowed to move forward.
Holtec took on the project in two parts. The first involved overhauling the reactor side of the plant, where atom-splitting reactions produce enormous amounts of heat that are used to turn water into steam. The second — the milestone completed last week — focused on repairing the generator side of the plant, where the steam spins turbine blades and generates electricity.
The work was significant. Holtec conducted the only deep cleaning of the station’s generator in more than half a century, including replacing all the degraded metal tubes in the steam and condenser systems, recoating all the metal in the electrical system to prevent corrosion, and disassembling the entire machine for its first full refurbishment. The company also saved the fuel left in the reactor after its final shutdown, and received a shipment of fresh fuel — currently stored on-site — to be loaded right before the plant starts back up.
Holtec went on a hiring and training spree, too. The company said it requalified 26 former plant operators to maintain their Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses in addition to graduating a new class of specialists. A second class of newly hired operators is set to undergo final NRC licensing exams this month.
“We’re down to what we characterize as bulk work: routine maintenance activities,” Culp said. “At this point, if you’re out on the turbine deck, it looks fully assembled. We’re now going through the process to tighten everything up.”
Among the items on the to-do list: finishing up some of the pneumatic air controls, removing scaffolding, and carrying out inspections. Installation of a new instrument air-compression system just wrapped up on Monday, Culp said.
“It’s like cleaning up our work,” he said. “What we’re saying is we’re progressing toward the end of the process.”
If Holtec is successful in restarting the first nuclear plant, it would make it easier for other defunct reactors to come online.
The first of those is Constellation Energy Generation’s Crane nuclear plant, formerly Three Mile Island. The station infamously lost one of its reactors in 1979 in the nation’s only major civilian nuclear accident. But the other unit stayed in service until 2019. Two years ago, Microsoft pledged $16 billion to reopen the plant’s operable reactor to supply its data centers with clean electricity. Just last month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission cleared the way for the plant to patch back onto the grid as early as next year. The second is NextEra’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant. Last October, Google inked a deal with the utility to fund the restart of Iowa’s only atomic power station, which shut down in 2020. The plant could begin pumping out electricity by early 2029. It’s unclear whether either project would move forward if something happened to thwart Palisades’ progress.
At least five other nuclear stations could be rebuilt if not restarted. Experts widely agree that the demolition at California’s San Onofre, New York’s Indian Point, New Jersey’s Oyster Creek, Massachusetts’ Pilgrim, and the geographically eponymous Vermont Yankee is already too far along for the reactors themselves to be revived. But certain elements — the containment domes over the reactor chambers, for example — could be reused. Last fall, Holtec floated the idea of rebuilding a new reactor inside the existing facilities at Indian Point, which supplied much of New York City’s power until its final reactor closed in 2021. But Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has rejected the idea, citing opposition from local officials in Westchester County.
Palisades’ completion would also pave the path for Holtec’s budding initiative to construct reactors from scratch. The company plans to build two of its SMR-300s, 300-megawatt pressurized-water reactors at Palisades. If successful, Holtec wants to build the units across the country, including at other sites it owns, such as Oyster Creek. In December, the Energy Department gave Holtec $400 million to support the SMR construction, although questions remain about the timelines and economic viability of the technology.
If nothing else, the Palisades restart serves as “an object lesson in the power and necessity” of the DOE’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing (the new name for the Loan Programs Office), said Emmet Penney, a historian of the nuclear industry and the director of energy and infrastructure at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning think tank that advocates for building more reactors in the U.S. Palisades’ rebirth also demonstrates that long-horizon nuclear projects can maintain government support even as the partisan pendulum swings in Washington, he said.
“It is proof positive of the bipartisan consensus around nuclear,” Penney said.
New U.S. regulations and a wave of startup interest are breathing new life into TRISO-fueled reactors, which have struggled to take off due to high fuel costs.
As the U.S. looks to revive its stagnant nuclear industry, a group of companies is racing to realize the promise of a “meltdown-proof” fuel that for decades has struggled to progress beyond federal lab experiments.
Tri-structural isotropic fuel, known as TRISO, is safer and more stable than the fuel rods used by the large-scale water-cooled reactors that make up the vast majority of the world’s nuclear power plants. Both fuel sources use enriched uranium, but in TRISO, the element is balled into poppyseed-sized spheres with ceramic coating that can absorb dangerous radioactive materials.
The hitch is the cost: TRISO is orders of magnitude more expensive than conventional assemblies of low-enriched uranium. Given that hefty price tag, only a few TRISO-fueled reactors have ever been built worldwide, even though the technology has existed for years and the world is hungry for nuclear projects that promise to avoid the worst accidents of the past.
But renewed interest is growing as TRISO producers claim they can cut the cost of the fuel by as much as 50% in the coming years, and as a growing number of companies make progress building reactors that can demand that supply.
In mid-May, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission made history when it advanced a new nuclear plant with a mere monthslong environmental assessment rather than the yearslong environmental impact statement required of every other atomic power station in the country. Regulators said they moved faster in part because the 80-megawatt design from the next-generation developer X-energy relied on TRISO.
But X-energy is not the only developer seeking to use TRISO.
One of the two new nuclear plants currently under construction in the U.S. is a TRISO-based design from Kairos Power. Of the nearly two dozen U.S. startups hawking next-generation reactor designs, at least seven companies are aiming to build fission plants that run on TRISO.
New licensing pathways at the NRC could also give TRISO a boost, as the fuel’s well-documented safety qualities make permits easier to come by for the startups using it.
The momentum comes as public support for nuclear power reaches its highest level in years in the U.S. Some advocates see nuclear energy as a necessary tool to meet surging power demand, while others — particularly blue-state lawmakers and environmental groups that have abandoned anti-nuclearism — view the most reliable carbon-free energy source as a bedrock of a future electrical grid free of fossil fuels.
The 94 operating nuclear reactors in the U.S. are all large-scale models that are cooled by water; most of them were designed and built more than a half century ago. Firms looking to develop reactors that run on TRISO are part of a broader wave of startups that think the best way to build new atomic energy is by pursuing lower-powered small modular reactors, whose designs can be refined and made cheaper through assembly-line repetition.
Companies looking to go the route of microreactors and small modular reactors, however, face not only the challenges that plague large-scale reactors, such as pushback over radioactive waste and costly fuel sources, but new ones, too. For TRISO, those challenges are cost and an immature supply chain — plus the fact that the fuel’s performance remains largely untested at any commercial scale.
Research on TRISO began in the late 1950s in the United Kingdom. At the time, British nuclear regulators had started work on the so-called Dragon reactor at a U.K. Atomic Energy Authority site in Dorset, England. Cooled with pure helium, which can absorb three to five times as much heat as water, the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor needed a fuel that could match its heat tolerance. Thus, TRISO was born.
The first attempts to run a reactor on TRISO worked. The British Dragon ran on the fuel, as did similar experimental high-temperature gas-cooled reactors completed in the 1960s, such as Peach Bottom Unit 1 in Pennsylvania, Germany’s Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor, and Japan’s government-owned high-temperature test reactor.
But the market remained tiny. Of those four midcentury test reactors, just the Japanese unit remains in operation. In Colorado, the Fort St. Vrain nuclear plant, the only American attempt at commercializing a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor running on TRISO, shut down in 1989 after a decade of high maintenance costs and frequent technical troubles.
Right now, the only commercial TRISO-fueled reactor in the world is in China. It came online in 2023 and uses a form of the fuel based on low-enriched uranium, rather than the more potent high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, that many U.S. firms are eyeing.
The small number of TRISO-fueled reactors has made it hard for fuel companies to dedicate any space or capacity to producing the fuel, and has kept prices high as a result. TRISO costs an estimated $30,000 per kilogram — more than nine times the roughly $3,300 per kilogram for conventional fuel.
These fuel costs can be offset in part by the fact that TRISO designs don’t need to build expensive concrete containment domes. A reactor’s containment dome alone, after all, made up on average about 4% of the total upfront costs for reactors built between 1976 and 1987, according to a 2020 study in the journal Joule. And that doesn’t include the cost of the steel containment vessel that encloses the reactor under the dome. Nor does it account for the fact that, as the study concluded, productivity at recent U.S. plants — likely meaning the infamously budget-busting pair of gigawatt-sized Westinghouse reactors at Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle in Georgia — was 13 times lower than industry expectations.
While there’s no obvious magic number on which the economics hinge, producers agree that the TRISO market will not take off until the fuel is produced at a large enough scale to significantly bring down costs.
X-energy, for its part, owns a TRISO-manufacturing subsidiary to ensure its own fuel supply. It plans to get the facility online by as soon as next year and said it’s using a standard fuel design honed as part of a decades-long DOE program to support research into the fuel.
BWX Technologies, the nuclear fuel giant that generates fuel for the U.S. government, is currently working on a dedicated $500 million plant to manufacture the fuel in Gillette, Wyoming.
If operations begin as expected by 2031, the plant alone would slash the price of TRISO in half, said Erik Nygaard, BWXT’s director of product development. Recent supply contracts from firms including Antares and Kairos have buttressed BWXT’s investment plans for the facility.
“If you’re making hundreds of kilograms a year in a factory that has all this other cost and overhead, and then you go to a dedicated factory that’s completely designed around how you want your process flow, you get to spread your cost over a much, much greater volume,” Nygaard said. “It doesn’t take a lot to make the economics work. The problem has just been needing enough demand booked to put the shovel in the ground and build this really big facility.”
TRISO-based designs may be at a disadvantage when it comes to fuel cost and supply — but in the U.S., a series of recent regulatory moves have given this class of reactors a leg up when it comes to permitting.
In March, the NRC made the first major update to its licensing standards since 1956 — the culmination of an effort to speed up nuclear licensing that started with a bipartisan law signed by former President Joe Biden and that has been accelerated under President Donald Trump.
Known as Part 53, the licensing pathway allows developers of next-generation technologies to assess the safety of reactors through a risk-informed analysis. It’s a less prescriptive approach than the traditional pathways, which were written to account for the specific safety concerns that come with building a conventional, large light-water reactor.
That new flexibility could benefit TRISO-based designs. Part 53 offers an open-ended option to prove, for example, that the inherent qualities of a TRISO-based design may make it unnecessary to build an expensive concrete containment dome for a reactor.
“Absolutely, there are substantial safety benefits to using TRISO,” said Jeremy Bowen, the head of the NRC’s newly created Office of Advanced Reactors.
In fact, when the NRC greenlit construction permits for the first two demonstration units Kairos Power is building at its debut plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the agency cited the unique safety of the Google-backed developer’s molten salt-cooled, TRISO-fueled reactors. Those reactors, under construction with a target commissioning date of 2030, are the first TRISO-based reactors underway in the U.S since Fort St. Vrain, which closed 37 years ago.
“We were able to credit the safety of TRISO,” Bowen said of assessing Kairos’ applications.
The combination of the molten salt coolant, which can reach much higher temperatures than water, and the TRISO fuel amount to what the NRC called “functional containment design,” meaning a meltdown was so impossible to fathom that a concrete dome over the reactor wasn’t needed.
“Those aspects gave us confidence there was minimal risk of a radiation release and public safety concerns for impacts on the environment,” Bowen said.
The newly proposed Part 57 — another licensing pathway the NRC designed for smaller reactors — also peels back some of the initial safety layers that apply to traditional atomic stations, including both concrete containment domes and miles-wide emergency planning zones.
The NRC created both Part 53 and the proposed Part 57 in large part to speed up permitting processes for smaller nuclear reactors. But these pathways may be viable only for the crop of next-gen nuclear firms that use TRISO in their designs.
To use a licensing pathway such as Part 57, for example, a developer would need to prove that an accident would risk the release of less than 1 rem of radiation, the same amount the human body gets from a CT scan, throughout the duration of the incident.
“TRISO, according to the NRC, is its own containment vessel,” said Adam Stein, the director of nuclear energy innovation at the Breakthrough Institute. “It would be difficult for a different fuel source to meet that 1 rem criteria.”
Other firms may be forced to rely on the traditional, slower-moving Part 50. It’s not a death sentence — X-energy opted for that approach for both of its debut power stations — but other developers have complained that Part 50 puts them at a disadvantage in terms of timing, and requires pushing back against measures in the process that were designed for large water-cooled reactors.
The safety features of TRISO are all the more appealing given that many nuclear startups are staffed by people with no prior experience working with reactors, said Paul Dickman, an expert at the American Nuclear Society and the former chief of staff to the NRC chair from 2006 to 2010, the last time the U.S. had planned to embark on a large buildout of new reactors.
Under the new regulatory structures, “you’re putting a lot of reliance on the fuel — that’s your primary defense mechanism,” Dickman said.
“This is a bunch of guys who don’t have pilot’s licenses designing airplanes. That isn’t to say their airplane isn’t going to fly, but there’s a lot of things you learn from experience,” he added. “To them, it’s all about reinventing everything. That’s a problem.”
But a solution, he said, is turning to a fuel that has inherently safe properties — even if it comes with different challenges in terms of cost and availability.
For his part, Dickman expects the market for TRISO to expand in response to the new regulatory options.
Kurt Terrani, the chief executive of the TRISO manufacturing startup Standard Nuclear, also expects the same.
“They’re not saying you have to use TRISO, but it’s pretty, pretty easy to arrive at the fact that if you really want to meet the limits, it behooves you to use TRISO,” he said.
It’s a milestone for the Amazon-backed firm, which still needs safety approvals from the NRC before it can begin building its 80-MW gas-cooled reactors.
X-energy, the Amazon-backed nuclear startup looking to revive the United States’ high-temperature gas-cooled reactor efforts, just took a major step toward securing federal permits to start construction on its debut plant.
On Monday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the key environmental review for X-energy’s first project, which would see it build four of its 80-megawatt Xe-100 reactors at chemical giant Dow’s UCC Seadrift Operations, the 4,700-acre manufacturing complex on Texas’ Gulf Coast just north of Corpus Christi.
For months, the NRC conducted an environmental assessment of the proposed project — a step required by the National Environmental Protection Act for any large-scale energy project seeking federal permits. The results of that study determined whether a more rigorous, potentially yearslong environmental impact statement is needed. The agency, Canary Media has learned, has concluded the process with a “finding of no significant impact,” meaning that the project can forgo the impact statement.
This marks the first time in the NRC’s 52-year history that the agency has greenlit a commercial nuclear project’s environmental review through an assessment rather than an impact statement.
The environmental approval is the first of the two biggest steps in the construction permitting process, and is a requirement to complete the second stage: the safety review. X-energy expects the NRC’s staff to issue recommendations on the safety review in November, after which the five-member commission can render its final verdict at any time.
“We did the same studies you would for any reactor. We didn’t take any shortcuts. We didn’t try to game the system. And what we came out with was an assessment that told us that we had very minimal impacts,” said Robert Taylor, X-energy’s vice president of regulatory affairs and licensing.
“The ability within NEPA to do an environmental assessment and to reach a finding of no significant impacts has always existed,” he added. “But the conservative approach has always been to just start with an environmental impact statement, because the perception was the impacts will be big. That’s probably true for large light-water reactors, but it’s not necessarily true for small modular reactors like us.”
If approved, X-energy’s Xe-100 would signal a U.S. return to a commercial technology that effectively died out in 1989, near the end of America’s atomic heyday.
General Atomics built a 40-megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled reactor at the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station along Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River in 1966, but shut down the demonstration unit in 1974. The same developer started a larger, 330-megawatt project around the same time at Colorado’s Fort St. Vrain nuclear plant. That single high-temperature gas-cooled unit came online in 1979, but lasted only 10 years because of repeated technical malfunctions and steep repair costs.
X-energy’s permitting milestone comes amid a broader wave of activity in the long-stagnant U.S. nuclear sector. Two new commercial nuclear reactors broke ground last month, as many as three more decommissioned reactors are set to be restarted in the coming months and years, and several states that had banned nuclear construction in the mid-20th century are now lifting those moratoria.
It also comes nearly a year after the NRC agreed to speed up the permitting process for the firm’s first plant by setting an 18-month review schedule for the company. That’s roughly half the time the agency has historically taken to issue a construction permit.
The faster timeline reflects the NRC’s efforts to streamline reactor approval following orders by both the Biden and Trump administrations. Much of the regulatory overhaul currently underway at the NRC stems from the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act of 2024, which former President Joe Biden signed after nearly unanimous approval in the U.S. Senate. The statute gave the NRC a clearer mandate to protect the public against not only the threat of nuclear accidents but also the risk that reactors don’t get built.
Then, in May 2025, President Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders designed to deepen the regulatory changes and spur new reactor construction — including the controversial move to replace the bedrock model for measuring the health risk of radiation exposure.
X-energy’s expedited pathway also highlights the benefits of the company’s early engagement with government programs and its efforts to court deep-pocketed corporate backers.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy included X-energy in its Advanced Reactor Concepts program. When the DOE established the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program in 2020, in which the federal government took on half the cost of building a participating company’s first reactor, X-energy was one of the first participants. While X-energy said it hasn’t released price projections for each project, the company disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission that the 50/50 cost-share agreement with the DOE covered a total estimated cost of up to $2.4 billion.
In 2022, X-energy announced Dow as its first commercial offtaker for the Texas project. Two years later, when the artificial intelligence boom spurred tech giants to sign a series of deals with nuclear startups, Amazon placed its bet on X-energy, vowing to help finance construction of 5 gigawatts of reactors through deals to buy power for its data centers. The company took an equity stake in X-energy, which went public on April 24 on the Nasdaq composite.
Amazon is now providing financing for the construction of X-energy’s second project, a multiphase expansion of an existing nuclear-energy complex in Washington state operated by the public utility Energy Northwest. Depending on the utility’s willingness to buy the units, the startup aims to eventually build up to a dozen of its Xe-100 reactors at the site.
On both projects, “a real differentiator for us is truly how we used our pre-application process with the NRC,” Taylor said. The company provided more than two dozen reports to the NRC ahead of submitting its application. “We submitted a vast number of topical reports and white papers that we got feedback on that informed the design and formed the regulatory submittals,” he said. “We substantially de-risked the project with the NRC through all of that engagement. Almost all the methodologies we use in designing the reactor and the support systems have been approved by the NRC.”
While rival developers of next-generation small modular reactors and microreactors have pushed for regulatory changes or new licensing pathways that are designed to benefit new technologies, X-energy chose the time-honored pathway for permitting its first two projects.
“Part 50 is a great process for new designs because it allows changes to the design as you construct,” Taylor said. “Once we get the first approvals of our design under Part 50, and we get through that first operating license, we’ll be in a position to take a standardized design back to the NRC.”
Among the design elements that Taylor said bolster X-energy’s safety qualities is the fact that the company is using tri-structural isotropic fuel, or TRISO for short. The fuel encases tiny bits of enriched uranium inside poppy seed–sized balls coated in ceramic materials that effectively make a meltdown impossible.
TRISO, however, is far more expensive than the traditional low-enriched uranium fuel used in light-water reactors, which has held back its adoption to date. Only one commercial reactor uses TRISO worldwide today: the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor that China hooked up to its grid in December 2022. Another experimental reactor operated by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency at a facility north of Tokyo, whose design a Japanese American startup is now looking to commercialize in the U.S., also uses TRISO, as do nearly half a dozen proposed designs now competing with X-energy.
Unlike many other next-generation reactor designs that are using coolants such as molten salt, liquid sodium, or lead, X-energy’s Xe-100 uses helium. This approach has decades of data to back it up, thanks to the earlier U.S. experiments with similar technology.
“Look, Peach Bottom and Fort St. Vrain were great opportunities to demonstrate the technology nearly 50-plus years ago. But in the ensuing 50 years, [high-temperature gas-cooled reactors] have been run in multiple countries throughout the world, and TRISO fuel has gone through extensive testing,” Taylor said. “HTGRs back in the ’70s were a technology ahead of their time. We have the opportunity to seize on all that advancement and turn it into a truly perfect commercial product that is safely operated throughout the world.”
X-energy still faces the challenge of proving that it can avoid the hiccups previous high-temperature gas-cooled units faced in operation. Water-cooled reactors run at an unrivaled 95% of their lifespans in part because operators have the most experience perfecting the art of piloting such plants.
But Taylor compared earlier versions of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors to one of the American automotive industry’s biggest flops of the mid-20th century.
“The technologies between 50 years ago and today are both nuclear reactors, but it’s an Edsel-to-a-Ferrari comparison,” he said. “In this Ferrari, we know what we need to design for to get maximum performance out of it, we know what the challenging pieces are, what the hard issues are. Will we learn things? Sure, but we have so much more knowledge than those first ones did that we’re designing out so many of the challenges they faced.”
After years of no new nuclear power construction in the U.S., both Kairos and TerraPower broke ground on reactors last month. Other projects are moving ahead too.
March 1, 2024, marked a bittersweet milestone in the American nuclear industry’s modern history.
Exactly 3,755 days after construction started on the second of two new state-of-the-art Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Southern Company’s Alvin W. Vogtle Generating Station in eastern Georgia, the facility hooked up to the grid for the first time.
It marked the completion of the first truly new large-scale nuclear project in the U.S. since the 1990s — but it also left the country without a single commercial nuclear power plant under construction for the first time in decades.
The dry spell only lasted 777 days.
Last month, Kairos Power broke ground on its Hermes 2 Demonstration Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the developer plans to start fulfilling its contract to sell Google power for its data centers through the Tennessee Valley Authority by constructing a smaller 50-megawatt version of its molten salt reactor. While the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted Kairos its construction license to start work in Tennessee, the company hasn’t yet submitted an application to certify its full-scale reactor.
Six days later, TerraPower — the Bill Gates–founded developer of liquid-sodium-cooled, 345-megawatt reactors — began construction on its first plant, located at the site of a retired coal station in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
The break in nuclear construction was even shorter if you count work to restart an idled plant. In Michigan, Holtec International is now nearly ready to switch back on the single reactor at the Palisades nuclear plant, which was the most recent one to shutter in the country. It would be the first instance of an atomic station coming back online after a permanent shutdown.
At least two more companies are now considering similar moves in Pennsylvania and Iowa, and momentum is building for Holtec to reopen its decommissioned Indian Point nuclear station north of New York City.
“The key metric for the arrival of the nuclear renaissance is shovels in the ground,” said Emmet Penney, a senior fellow who researches nuclear power at the Foundation for American Innovation. “If there are shovels in the ground for multiple projects, then it is here.”
What to watch now, he said, is the tier of upcoming projects, which he dubbed “shovels soon to meet dirt.”
In that category, he placed GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s plan to build one of its 300-megawatt BWRX-300 boiling-water reactors at the TVA’s Clinch River site. The Department of Energy awarded the American-Japanese joint venture $400 million in funding last year. Another similar project is Holtec’s plan to expand Palisades with a pair of its proprietary SMR-300 pressurized water reactors, to which the agency awarded another $400 million as part of the same program.
The two reactors are considered the leading small modular designs using existing light-water-cooled technology, which currently powers the entire U.S. nuclear fleet of 94 commercial units. Neither has yet secured full approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
While these projects are making solid progress, many of the other nuclear ventures proposed in the U.S. are lagging.
The policy advocacy group Third Way recently analyzed 11 commercial projects to build new reactors and found that only five of them have so far lined up all three of the major contracts needed to move forward — for commercial offtake, project-specific financing, and construction. TerraPower’s Kemmerer project, GE Vernova Hitachi’s TVA reactor, and Holtec’s SMR buildout at Palisades have those contracts in place, as do two ventures proposed by Amazon-backed X-energy in Texas and Washington state.
But even Kairos hasn’t announced project-specific financing, Third Way noted. Its Hermes 2 project is designed to sell power to Google once complete, but it hasn’t raised specific funding and the tech giant’s deal didn’t include payment upfront.
Oklo, the stock market darling promising to build 1.2 gigawatts of its liquid-sodium-cooled small modular reactors in Ohio, hasn’t yet unveiled its construction partner for the site, which would supply power to Meta’s data centers in the state. Three of the commercial projects Third Way assessed have not achieved any of the milestones yet. That trio includes Fermi America, the data-center startup co-founded by former Texas Gov. Rick Perry that had promised to build a giant computing complex powered by AP1000s; the company is now imploding as it battles its ousted chief executive and the stock plunges.
“The bottom line is there’s so much activity in nuclear right now, but there is a clear set of leaders distinguishing themselves and pulling away from the rest of the group,” said Rowen Price, Third Way’s senior policy adviser for nuclear energy. “If we’re really thinking about getting the industry to a point where we’re producing new commercial power as soon as we can, you have to focus your resources on the ones that are getting there faster.”
The federal government has the biggest pool of resources for moving viable projects forward. TerraPower, Kairos, and X-energy all benefited from hundreds of millions of dollars each from the Energy Department’s advanced reactor demonstration program, starting back in 2020. That helped vault the three companies ahead, while firms that received federal funding later — such as GE Vernova Hitachi and Holtec — are unsurprisingly behind, said Brett Rampal, the senior director of nuclear and power strategy at the consultancy Veriten.
But federal funds don’t always go to the most commercially viable ventures. “Even though people are breaking ground and doing stuff, some of these projects are years away from completion and generation. That means some of these projects that might not have broken ground yet might hit the grid before TerraPower or Kairos,” he said. “I wouldn’t be confident that just because you’re the only ones breaking ground now you’ll be the first over the finish line of commerciality or energy generation.”
More nuclear deals are expected in the coming weeks and months.
The Nuclear Company, a novel kind of developer that aims to construct fleets of proven designs for large-scale reactors, announced Monday a new joint venture with Brookfield Asset Management, majority owner of Westinghouse, to complete work on the aborted V.C. Summer nuclear plant in South Carolina. The abandoned AP1000 project left the utilities Santee Cooper and South Carolina Electric & Gas roughly $9 billion in the hole, much of which was foisted on ratepayers in the form of higher bills.
The NRC is also streamlining and speeding up its licensing processes for new plants, whether they’re using existing or novel designs, and for restarts and current plants applying for approval to keep running.
In February, the DOE’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing — the in-house lender formerly known as the Loan Programs Office — closed on the largest deal in its history, a $26.5 billion credit line to support Southern Company in (among other things) renovating the utility’s reactor fleet to get 6 gigawatts of additional power out of the existing units, a process known as “uprating.” The company hasn’t yet announced which plants it wants to beef up. Meanwhile, another nuclear startup called Alva Energy has pitched itself as a project developer that will focus in the near term on uprates.
“The work on these reactors is getting underway,” Penney said. “We should expect more.”
The United States has taken one of its biggest steps yet to encourage the construction of commercial microreactors — the latest move in its broader push to overhaul the country’s nuclear regulatory processes.
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Ho Nieh speaks at the annual Regulatory Information Conference in March. (U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
The United States has taken one of its biggest steps yet to encourage the construction of commercial microreactors — the latest move in its broader push to overhaul the country’s nuclear regulatory processes.
In late April, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission released its draft rule for a proposed new licensing pathway for commercial reactors. Known as Part 57, the regulation tailors the application process to account for the fundamental differences between a so-called microreactor, designed to generate 20 megawatts of electricity or less, and a behemoth traditional reactor such as a Westinghouse AP1000, which pumps out 60 times as much power. The rule, which would allow eligible projects to obtain dual permits to both construct and operate a reactor, is meant to encourage fleet-scale deployment of the technology.
While no commercial microreactors are in operation anywhere in the world today, some corners of the U.S. industry see them as a way to slash the time and money it takes to build a nuclear plant by harnessing the benefits of assembly-line production.
The proposal comes after a string of actions by the NRC to speed up the regulatory process for nuclear reactors that use different designs or technology than the country’s existing fleet of 94 large-scale light-water reactors. The regulatory changes, spurred by a Biden-era law and encouraged by the Trump administration, have been widely celebrated by the industry — but they have rankled some who fear the NRC is jeopardizing safety by moving too fast.
In March, the NRC shook up its licensing pathways for the first time in decades. Dubbed Part 53, the final rule was the first new set of regulations to address initial reactor licensing since 1989 — and the first major update to reactor licensing standards since 1956.
Part 53 is an optional alternative to two existing frameworks, Part 50 and Part 52. The former has long been developers’ preferred pathway for new reactors, but it grants only construction permits — not operating licenses. Part 52 was created to speed things up by allowing a dual construction and operating license to be obtained in one shot, but that pathway carried risks if the developer deviated even slightly from the approved design.
Neither option made much sense for the wave of advanced nuclear reactor firms that have attracted enormous amounts of funding and industry hype over the last decade. Part 53 was specifically designed to accommodate these technologies, including small modular reactors, microreactors, and those that use coolants other than water.
“With all these new and advanced technologies coming, we needed something more flexible,” said Mike King, the NRC’s executive director of operations. “That’s what Part 53 does. It provides us a framework that’s not so focused on large light-water reactors.”
Last week’s proposed Part 57, he said, “takes what we’ve done with Part 53 and scopes it appropriately for these microreactors that have a much lower risk profile for the public and could be licensed in a more streamlined fashion.”
Part 57, set to be added in the coming days to the Federal Register, won’t be operational until the rule is finalized in the next few months. But already, several microreactor developers have put out statements indicating they plan to apply for NRC licenses through the new pathway.
Central to the rule is the “risk-informed” change that Part 53 pioneered.
Rather than require the same safety protocols and infrastructure that the NRC mandates for traditional light-water reactors, Part 57 sets a target that developers are free to meet in a variety of ways.
Like Part 53 before it, the rule also limits the radiation emitted from an accident to 1 rem — the same amount of radiation from a CT scan. But while Part 53 institutes those limits for 96 hours after an accident occurs, Part 57 mandates that operators stay under that limit only throughout the duration of the accident. For some companies, meeting that standard could mean building the concrete containment vessels that house traditional light-water reactors. While certain microreactor designs — either those that are extremely small or those made of or fueled with material that cannot melt down — might be able to avoid having to build such containment domes.
Traditional reactors regulated by Part 50 are required to keep radiation emitted from an accident to 25 rems — which is the maximum recommended lifetime dose of radiation.
In that way, Part 57 is narrower than the original pathway, said Adam Stein, the director of nuclear energy innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, because “to even get into Part 57, you’d have to stay under 1 rem for the entire duration of the accident, not just 96 hours. So it’s inherently more restrictive.”
Many of the changes now underway at the NRC stem from the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2024 after the Senate, in a rare show of bipartisan zeal, almost unanimously approved the bill. The statute overhauled the NRC’s mission statement for the first time, directing the agency to consider the threat of holding back nuclear power in the U.S. in addition to the risks associated with radiation. Work on Part 57 began under the previous administration.
Last May, President Donald Trump supercharged those efforts with a series of executive orders designed to defibrillate the flatlining nuclear sector as China’s industry runs laps around the U.S., and Russia dominates exports to newcomer countries seeking to build their first atomic power stations.
Among those orders was one to restructure the NRC, requiring the agency to do more, faster, with fewer staff and more direct oversight from the president. Presidents have always been able to appoint commissioners but have historically had little influence over the agency’s day-to-day workings. The White House directive raised alarms, particularly as Trump sought to bring previously independent agencies like the NRC and Federal Communications Commission under direct control. His decision to fire a Democratic NRC commissioner a month later only deepened fears.
Career staffers at the NRC have blown the whistle over concerns that the Department of Government Efficiency, which billionaire Elon Musk established shortly after Trump’s inauguration, was wielding too much internal influence and slashing necessary parts of the regulatory apparatus.
“It’s hard to know if they are getting rid of unnecessary processes or if it’s actually reducing public safety,” one official working on reactor licensing told ProPublica last month. “And that’s just the problem with going so fast — everything just kind of gets lost in a mush.”
But Caroline DeWitte, the co-founder of Oklo, a nuclear developer favored by Silicon Valley, said skeptics of overhauling the NRC fail to recognize the extent to which the agency in its previous form was ill suited to oversee construction of new types of reactors.
The NRC official who rejected Oklo’s application in 2022 told Bloomberg last year that the company’s submission was one of the worst ever reviewed. But DeWitte, who leads the company as chief operating officer alongside her chief executive officer husband, Jake DeWitte, said the NRC couldn’t understand that Oklo’s reactor and similar designs have “inherent safety features.”
“Literally, the physics of the metal made it safe,” Caroline DeWitte told Canary Media. “So, how do you account for that? Even with passively safe features, the NRC forces you to assume that it can fail. But, like, is it reasonable to assume metal is not metal anymore? Those are the types of questions we were asking — how do we put that in a risk analysis?”
Among the more controversial regulatory changes proposed at the NRC is the move to overhaul the way radiation safety is measured altogether.
For years, the dominant rule has been for any radiation exposure to be kept as low as reasonably achievable, called ALARA. It’s based on the assumption that the more exposure someone faces, the higher the risk of cancer or other disease.
That assumption stems from the highly contested “linear no-threshold model” from the 1950s, which assumes that exposure to radiation at any level causes harm. Still, no one has yet determined a better alternative on which the country — and, more broadly, the world, which has long followed the U.S. lead on nuclear regulation — can agree.
The NRC has been treading lightly so far: Its proposed rule has been pushed back seven times already and is now due out on June 24.
Paul Dickman, who served as chief of staff to the NRC’s chair from 2006 to 2010, said he is not concerned that his former agency will approve anything that doesn’t stand up to rigorous testing.
“The NRC staff is being creative, and that’s a good thing,” he said. “Some people may worry. But I have high confidence in them. At the end of the day, you still have to prove your point on safety. That’s the bottom line.”
The strategy appears to be bearing fruit. In what NRC Chair Ho Nieh called a “milestone” that “proves we can deliver results quickly without compromising safety,” the agency just approved Duke Energy’s application to run its Robinson nuclear plant in South Carolina for 80 years. It was the fastest license renewal in the NRC’s history.
Nuclear energy is experiencing a global resurgence.
In the U.S. and Europe, a long-wary public has started to warm once again to the sector. Taiwan, which shuttered its last nuclear power plant last May, is looking to restart at least one facility in the wake of the energy crisis spurred by the Iran war. Fifteen years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan is now hoping to double its nuclear fleet over the next decade and a half.
But which countries lead the way on this source of carbon-free energy? It depends on how you look at it.
The U.S., the longtime global leader on nuclear, is still at the top of the heap in terms of pure electrical output, followed by China, according to data from think tank Ember. While France is third in terms of production, it gets the highest share of its needs met by atomic power, the result of a push in the 1970s to make the country energy independent. Russia — which completed the world’s first nuclear power plant under the Soviets in 1954 — is fourth in terms of total electricity. South Korea rounds out the top five.
As for what’s in store, China is developing new reactors at a far faster rate than any other country.
The nation has 60 nuclear reactors in operation, and it’s actively building another three dozen or so. To put it in context: Nearly half of all nuclear power plants under construction worldwide are in China. No other country is even in double digits.
That growth is evident in recent electricity-generation figures. China produced 37 more terawatt-hours from nuclear last year than it did in 2024, bringing it to a total of 488 TWh in 2025. At the rate the country is building new facilities, its reactor fleet should eclipse that of the U.S. by 2030.
Still, the U.S. is trying to kick-start its stagnant nuclear industry and retain its position at the top.
Not only is public sentiment toward nuclear on the upswing in America, but also the energy source has broad support from both parties. President Donald Trump wants the iconic nuclear firm Westinghouse to start building 10 of its AP-1000s before 2030, for example. The Biden administration, for its part, issued a loan to fund the first nuclear restart in U.S. history at the Palisades facility in Michigan, and through the Inflation Reduction Act introduced a nuclear-energy tax credit, which Trump kept in place, unlike incentives for wind and solar.
It remains to be seen whether these efforts — and many others at the federal and state levels — will amount to a wave of new nuclear construction in the U.S. No new large-scale nuclear facilities are underway in the country today.
All in all, the world generated a record amount of nuclear power in 2025 — and it’s looking like that number will only go up in the years to come.
New Jersey has become the sixth state in the last decade, and the second this year, to fully repeal its moratorium on building new nuclear power stations.
On a crisp Wednesday morning at the Hope Creek Generating Station in the southwestern corner of the state, Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed legislation lifting the de facto ban that barred construction of new reactors until the United States established a permanent solution for radioactive spent fuel. The Democrat, who campaigned last year on building new nuclear power capacity in the state, said the prohibitions had outlived any usefulness.
“For too long, outdated laws have kept us from even considering new nuclear facilities,” Sherrill said, as steam billowed from the station’s hyperboloid cooling tower behind her. “One law required any new projects to point to a method of disposal that, quite literally, does not exist. It was written in the 1970s, tied to a technological requirement that made sense then but not today.”
Located along a crook in the Delaware River, south of Wilmington, Delaware, and north of where the waterway widens into a bay, the single-reactor Hope Creek plant sits on an artificial island alongside the two-reactor Salem Nuclear Power Plant. Both stations are owned by the utility giant PSEG. Combined, the two generating facilities produce 40% of New Jersey’s electricity and 80% of its carbon-free power.
The Garden State enacted one of the nation’s earliest bans on new atomic power back in the 1970s, when the U.S. was still building out its fleet of reactors without any real plan for dealing with the long-lived radioactive waste piling up in glowing blue pools at plants around the country. At the time, state lawmakers amended the Coastal Area Facility Review Act to require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to establish methods for radioactive waste disposal before new construction permits could be issued. Sherrill called the condition “an outdated standard that cannot be met.”
In the 1980s, the federal government took possession of all nuclear waste, and it designated Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert as the first location for a permanent repository. Work finally began on the facility in the 2000s under then-President George W. Bush. But President Barack Obama then yanked support from the project shortly after taking office, in a move that the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office later determined was made for political, not technical, reasons. The U.S. effort to deal with waste has remained largely paralyzed since. The law stipulates that Yucca Mountain must be the first destination for nuclear waste, preventing the government from shifting focus to another location. But few, if any, lawmakers have mustered the political support to volunteer a site in their own states to replace it as the nation’s premier tomb for radioactive material.
Instead, federal efforts have recently pivoted toward recycling and reprocessing. Starting under the Biden administration and accelerated under Trump, a nascent industry of startups is forming around the promise to extract valuable medical isotopes from radioactive waste and turn the material into fresh reactor fuel. The Department of Energy just last week ended a contest for states to submit applications to host nuclear innovation campuses that include fuel enrichment and recycling facilities.
If banning nuclear plants made sense 49 years ago, when the environmental effects of burning fossil fuels weren’t yet fully understood, the availability of intermediate storage containers — many of which are produced in New Jersey, at manufacturer Holtec International’s factory in Camden — makes the point of the state law moot.
“It’s a textbook example of the kind of inefficient government I ran to change,” Sherrill said. “This bill requires projects to use safe, cutting-edge storage methods instead — methods that have been used thousands of times in over 35 states for the last 40 years with a 100% safety record.”
State lawmakers first tweaked the statute last year to open the door to development of small modular reactors, a type of as-yet-unbuilt machine that artificially caps the output per unit at 300 megawatts in a bid to spur developers to place bulk purchases. A failed bill first introduced in December aimed to both rescind the moratorium and establish a new tax credit for advanced nuclear power generation that would help finance construction of at least 1,100 megawatts of new capacity. That particular number matches the output from a Westinghouse AP1000, the leading U.S. reactor design and the only third-generation model in operation in the country.
The site where Hope Creek and Salem are located has room for at least one more large-scale reactor, said Samuel Roland, a research fellow who tracked New Jersey’s nuclear bill at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning Washington, D.C.–based think tank.
“My sense is that there’s a strong push toward another full AP1000-style reactor at Salem just because they already have the space cleared for it,” he said.
The structure of New Jersey’s electricity market makes building a nuclear reactor challenging. Like much of the U.S., New Jersey broke up its monopoly utilities in the late 1990s, allowing for more competition between generators within its statewide market, which is part of the nation’s largest grid operator, the 13-state PJM Interconnection. That system favors cheap, easily built power infrastructure. Unlike in the mid-20th century, when monopoly companies saw ever-expanding profits from growing electricity demand, today utilities’ balance sheets aren’t typically large enough to shoulder the risk of a multibillion-dollar reactor project. Nuclear construction flatlined in every state that liberalized its electricity market.
That makes tax credits with early or up-front payments a potential tool to encourage new reactors in New Jersey, Roland said. The risk with any major electrical infrastructure project like this, he said, is that the state’s Board of Public Utilities allows too much of the cost to be added to customers’ bills.
“The question just comes down to modeling here: What is the structure that’s most beneficial to New Jersey ratepayers?” Roland said. “Obviously, you have a lot of hyperscalers who are looking for energy and could be an anchor tenant and help pay for it.”
The bill Sherrill signed on Wednesday doesn’t answer that question. Instead, it simply eliminates the need for a permanent waste-disposal strategy to come before a new reactor. But she also signed an executive order establishing a task force to “convene leaders from government, industry, the environment, and labor” to study how to improve financing and supply chains, workforce training, permitting frameworks, and public trust.
“Safe nuclear can produce clean stable power at a predictable cost, protected from global price swings,” Sherrill said.
New Jersey isn’t alone. Across the Hudson River, New York has sought to leverage its state-owned New York Power Authority to help finance the construction of 1 gigawatt of new nuclear, part of a broader state plan to build 5 GW of reactors in the next two decades. California, which just won federal approval to keep its last nuclear station open for another two decades, is weighing a bill that would lift the state’s moratorium on building new ones. Minnesota is considering the same. While five New England states still restrict nuclear construction, all six signed a pact last month to explore the possibility.
Since 2016, five states — Wisconsin, Kentucky, Montana, West Virginia, and, most recently, in January, Illinois — have fully repealed their moratoria.
A clarification was made on April 10, 2026: This story has been updated to reflect that the New York Power Authority will help finance the construction of 1 gigawatt of new nuclear.
It’s typically depicted as green. It’s loved by some and feared by others. It had a heyday in the 1960s before drawing a political backlash that led to statewide prohibitions. Now, as it grows more popular with Americans than anytime in recent memory, state after state is changing the law to once again legalize it.
I’m talking, of course, about nuclear energy.
The United States is racing to restore the might of its once-great nuclear sector and build new reactors to meet surging electricity demand and compete with China and Russia. It’s been a rapid change: A decade ago, at least 16 states restricted construction of new nuclear power plants, a legacy of the lasting reputational damage from Three Mile Island, America’s only major civilian nuclear accident.
Five states — Wisconsin, Kentucky, Montana, West Virginia, and, most recently, Illinois — have fully lifted their moratoria since 2016. Others are loosening the reins, with Connecticut easing restrictions on small modular reactors and Rhode Island allowing utilities to buy electricity from neighboring states’ nuclear plants. Five more — California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Vermont — are now weighing legislation to overturn their bans. Oregon, meanwhile, is considering a bill that would require a feasibility study to look into nuclear power. (In Hawaii, the results of such a study concluded in December that the state should maintain its moratorium on atomic energy.)
California lawmakers introduced a bill last month to repeal the state’s 50-year ban on new nuclear power. Legislators in New Jersey, where the recently elected Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill campaigned on building a new reactor, advanced a bill earlier this month that would de facto overturn the state’s moratorium. Last week, a bipartisan band of lawmakers in Minnesota’s Statehouse vowed to legalize reactor construction again in the state “because we have to.”
The legislative push offers the most significant evidence so far that blue states that once served as bastions of anti-nuclearism are embracing atomic energy. The shift comes amid a deregulatory campaign by the Trump administration that’s meant to clear bottlenecks in the nuclear supply chain and spur a new wave of reactor projects, both big and small. Nuclear power started attracting attention again in recent years as the trade-offs of relying on wind and solar alone grew clearer and demand for electricity soared in the near term from data centers and in the long term from forecasts on electrification of vehicles, heating, and industry.
A global race is now underway that the U.S. and its allies are largely losing. On both sides of the Atlantic, the nuclear industry mostly stalled over the past few decades as flat electricity demand and cheap natural gas from the U.S. and Russia made atomic power plants seem like a 20th-century relic. But the geopolitical risk of relying on a fossil fuel that requires constant replenishing became undeniable as Russia started throttling shipments of gas to Ukraine’s allies after the war kicked off in 2022.
Now American, European, and Japanese companies are scrambling to secure funding and offtake agreements for reactor designs that, in many cases, haven’t yet been built. Soaring oil and gas prices, which the International Energy Agency warned this week will take a long time to stabilize even after the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran ends, are only expected to further drive demand for nuclear power. France’s historic buildout of nuclear reactors, after all, started in response to the 1970s oil embargo.
Meanwhile, Russia’s state-owned Rosatom dominates the nuclear export industry, actively building the first atomic power plants in newcomer countries such as Turkey, Egypt, and Bangladesh. On Monday, the Kremlin announced its latest deal to build Vietnam’s debut nuclear plant. And China is building nearly as many reactors at home as the rest of the world combined, at a relatively rapid clip.
States started banning new nuclear power plants even before the partial meltdown in 1979 at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The Atomic Energy Commission, the federal regulator in charge of both overseeing commercial reactors and promoting the industry, was increasingly seen as too cozy with the companies under its authority. An anti-war movement with limited options to slow the military’s atomic weapons race instead trained its attention on the civilian power industry, and environmentalists took issue with the relatively small but extremely long-lived volumes of radioactive waste that nuclear plants produce.
California enacted one of the nation’s first major statewide bans on building new nuclear plants in 1976, three years before Three Mile Island. Until then, states and municipalities had only minimal restrictions on nuclear power plants, which fell primarily under federal jurisdiction. But a 1974 law in California reorganized the Golden State’s bureaucracy, centralizing energy regulation for the first time in Sacramento and granting the newly established California Energy Commission powers to restrict permits for atomic energy facilities until a plan to permanently deal with nuclear waste came to fruition. Through its top cultural export, the state broadcast its skepticism of atomic energy: Released just 12 days before the Three Mile Island accident, a Hollywood thriller starring Jane Fonda, “The China Syndrome,” depicts a dangerous cover-up of a problem at a nuclear power plant.
In the years that followed, more states, including Maine and Oregon, adopted California-inspired moratoria predicated on a permanent solution for nuclear waste coming into commercial use, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Others — including Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont — effectively banned nuclear construction by making any new reactors subject to politically unattainable approval by the state legislature. A handful of states also rewrote rules to require a statewide referendum on building a new nuclear plant.
Some states enacted only partial bans. New York, for example, just barred construction of nuclear reactors on Long Island, where protesters blocked the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant from coming online and financially crippled the region’s utility, forcing a state takeover.
Attitudes toward nuclear power have since evolved. Despite a drop in support following the meltdown at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan in 2011, a majority of Americans in both political parties have come to favor an expansion of nuclear energy. Polls from the Pew Research Center and Gallup show the highest support in years.
In 2016, Wisconsin became the first state to reverse course. Lawmakers in the factory-dense state pitched legislation to repeal the ban as a way to shore up the supply of reliable, clean power for manufacturers whose shareholders increasingly demanded a lower carbon footprint.
Seeking an alternative to fossil fuels that could make use of existing transmission lines and boilers at coal-fired plants, Kentucky followed suit a year later. Montana came next, in 2021, then West Virginia in 2022.
Illinois, by far the largest user of atomic energy of any state, only partially lifted its ban at the end of 2023, legalizing construction of as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors with an output of 300 megawatts or less. While more than a dozen developers are racing to commercialize various kinds of so-called SMR designs, the promise of cheaply mass-producing identical reactors remains mostly theoretical. The only modern nuclear reactor design in operation in the U.S., the 1,100-megawatt Westinghouse AP1000, remained effectively banned in Illinois until January, when Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker fully repealed the moratorium and called for new plants.
The changing sentiment is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for more nuclear plants to start construction in the U.S. Big questions remain about how to finance projects, train workers, and establish supply chains for novel kinds of reactors.
Nuclear energy developers have historically operated by a simple principle: Go big.
Reactors cost a lot of money to build, so the logic has been that it’s easier to recoup that investment if the project produces more electricity. Of late, a new generation of companies has made waves by bucking that conventional wisdom and instead aiming to build smaller reactors that can be made cheaper through bulk orders and mass production.
But with few advanced reactors built to date, that argument remains theoretical — and a new report shared exclusively with Canary Media suggests the path to proving it out is harder than many in the industry acknowledge.
It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Next-gen nuclear startups must establish supplies of rare and legally sensitive types of fuel while also competing for a small pool of skilled workers and a limited output of valves, pumps, heat exchangers, and other equipment. Manufacturers are hesitant to ramp up production without a clear signal that advanced reactors will pan out. Investors, in turn, are leery of reactors meant for mass production that rely on unprepared supply chains.
That’s the core takeaway from the new analysis by the Nuclear Scaling Initiative, a campaign by the nonprofits Clean Air Task Force, the EFI Foundation, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. The Nuclear Scaling Initiative launched in 2024 and aims to promote fleet-scale construction of reactors in a bid to start bringing at least 50 gigawatts of atomic power capacity online worldwide every year at some point in the 2030s.
The study, conducted by the nuclear consultancy Solestiss, highlights two paths it says are promising for the industry: either sticking to proven designs or simplifying supply chains to tap into the traditional nuclear business’ existing materials and know-how.
It comes as the Trump administration pumps billions of dollars into advanced reactors while also courting developers of more conventional large-scale reactors — and amid a high-stakes debate over which approach is best.
Earlier this month, the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower won the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval to begin construction on the country’s first commercial plant with sodium-cooled fast reactors in Wyoming. In December, the decommissioner-turned-developer Holtec International won a $400 million Department of Energy grant to build its first 300-megawatt small modular reactors in Michigan, using a pressurized-water-cooled design. The DOE awarded another $400 million grant to help American-Japanese joint venture GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy build its first 300-megawatt SMR in Tennessee, based on a traditional boiling water design.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, is trying to get developers to commit to building more AP1000s — the flagship large-scale reactor from Westinghouse Electric Co. The only two nuclear reactors designed and constructed in the U.S. this century used the Westinghouse design. (A third came online in 2016 but first started construction in 1973.)
The variety of designs racing to become the nation’s fourth new reactor in decades calls into question the feasibility of rapidly scaling up production of any one model.
“We can do any one of these first projects all at once. But can we sustain a build-out of TerraPower, GE, Westinghouse, and Holtec? All the ones that are just moving forward right now? The answer to that is not yet,” said Dillon Allen, president of the advisory services division at Solestiss, who started his career working on nuclear propulsion in the U.S. Navy before moving into the utility business. “Once you’re building four to eight AP1000s and a handful of SMRs of other sizes, you start to run into smaller component bottlenecks.”
Those bottlenecks would worsen if microreactor companies succeed in their objective of securing dozens and dozens of orders for their designs.
“While small reactors have been tried before, mass-manufactured small reactors have not,” Aalo Atomics CEO Matt Loszak, whose 10-megawatt reactors also use liquid sodium as a coolant, wrote in a post on X this week. “Small is more expensive than large, if you only make one reactor. But if you make 1000s per year, small could be cheaper than large. This is what Aalo is setting out to prove.”
One major obstacle to this plan is transportation. To build something and send it without prior testing is no problem, since a reactor that hasn’t been fired up and irradiated “is just a big hunk of metal,” Allen said. But once it’s irradiated, it’s subject to different considerations.
National laboratory researchers have started to discuss a framework for a U.S.-wide transportation network with established logistics and safety standards, the report notes, but no such rules have yet materialized.
The biggest barrier for next-gen nuclear, however, is likely to be the fuel supply. Some small reactor companies have been proactive here. Aalo, for example, has opted for the most commonly used reactor fuel on the planet, low-enriched uranium, so it can tap into the existing global supply chain.
But most advanced nuclear startups are banking on what’s known as fourth-generation reactors. These designs rely on coolants other than water and mostly aim to use one of two types of fuel: high-assay low-enriched uranium, commonly known as HALEU (pronounced HAY-loo), or tristructural isotropic fuel, for which HALEU is typically an input. Tristructural isotropic fuel is also known as TRISO.
HALEU, which firms like TerraPower and microreactor developer Oklo plan to use, is only really produced at a commercial scale by Russian and Chinese state-owned companies. Efforts to bring new centrifuges online in America are slow-going. Meanwhile, the TRISO fuel that startups such as Valar Atomics or Radiant need requires not only securing HALEU but also separating that enriched uranium into ceramic-coated pellets the size of poppy seeds. Manufacturers admit that TRISO may never cost less than low-enriched uranium.
The complications don’t stop there. Because HALEU is up to four times more enriched than traditional reactor fuel, it comes with stricter regulations. On the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s security-clearance scale of category one, which allows for handling normal reactor fuel, to three, which includes military-grade enrichment levels, facilities with HALEU need to be rated at a category two. No such facilities exist in the U.S. today, though the commission just issued its debut permit for one last month.
As for traditional fuel, the existing supply of low-enriched uranium falls short of what would be required to meet the U.S. goal of quadrupling the nation’s nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050.
“The supply chain is pretty well suited to support a fleet of 100 operating reactors,” Allen said, referring to the 94 commercial reactors in service in the U.S. “But then you can have 150, then 180, and pretty soon 200 after that. If you double that demand on the LEU supply, it’s not just the enrichment” that’s a limiting factor.
It’s also, he said, the production of raw uranium and the facilities to carry out conversion, where purified uranium ore is turned into a gas, and deconversion, where it’s solidified once again.
Expanding these upstream operations may be challenging, but it isn’t impossible. In fact, Allen said he came away from writing the report with the impression that supply chains are more capable of scaling up than he previously thought. But his team’s work demonstrates the steep obstacles faced by the entire industry — not only advanced reactor firms — as it attempts to bolt into action following decades of anemic construction in America.
The biggest impression the research left on Allen, he said, is that the AP1000 has a good shot at becoming the next reactor built in the U.S. Its costs are more predictable — and thus easier to finance — thanks to the lessons learned during construction of the two units that came online at Southern Co.’s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in central Georgia in 2023 and 2024.
“I’m more bullish on the AP1000 than I was when I started this effort,” he said. “I’m broadly bullish on the supply chain.”
The DOE is considering alternatives to the AP1000 to satisfy President Donald Trump’s order to facilitate construction on at least 10 large-scale reactors by the end of the decade. In response to the news that the administration held talks with its rivals, Westinghouse said the AP1000 is“the only construction-ready, gigawatt-scale, advanced modular reactor that is fully licensed and operating in the U.S.”
The U.S. ultimately should focus on designs it can scale up rather than spreading its efforts in many different directions, said Stephen Comello, the executive director of the Nuclear Scaling Initiative. At that point, nuclear power will become cheap enough to be “boring.”
“Once you start accumulating that knowledge from repetition, nuclear construction becomes boring — just like natural gas combined-cycle plants, just like all other complex megaprojects and energy infrastructure that’s out there,” he said.
There’s little doubt that the AP1000 has a well-established supply chain and data showing it runs well, he said.
The question is, “Can you do it in a repeatable, cost-effective way? That’s where the risk lies with the AP1000,” Comello said. “It runs, the technology is great. But we have to prove to investors that we can overcome the execution risk. But here’s the thing: All reactors share execution risk to some extent. Others have a technology risk because they are still not proven at scale.”
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