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In the race to build America’s first small modular reactors, the U.S. Department of Energy has picked its front-runners.
On Tuesday, the agency awarded a total of $800 million in grants, originally allocated under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, to two projects developing different kinds of 300-megawatt light-water reactors.
These third-generation reactors are shrunken-down, less powerful versions of the time-tested first- and second-generation designs that make up the vast majority of the nation’s fleet of 94 large-scale reactors.
Neither of the third-generation designs — nor any of the fourth-generation models, which use coolants other than water to reach higher temperatures and which the Trump administration has also invested in — has yet been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And $400 million each for the two just-selected projects is likely to cover only a sliver of their total costs. Getting the green light on a design before a reactor is built doesn’t necessarily always work. The first new large-scale reactors built from scratch in the U.S. in a generation came online as a pair over the past two years but were billions of dollars over budget, in part because construction revealed necessary tweaks to the blueprints that then took developers months to get approved by the NRC. Still, the effort is part of the Trump administration’s push to boost both generations of SMRs in a high-stakes, multibillion-dollar bid to reinforce the nation’s world-leading nuclear industry before China, with its rapid construction of new reactors, becomes the No. 1 fission user.
The federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority will get $400 million to build the first BWRX-300, the reactor designed by a joint venture between the U.S. energy behemoth GE Vernova and the Japanese industrial heavyweight Hitachi. Over the past three years, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s design has emerged as a leader in America’s SMR race, thanks to GE and Hitachi’s long history of successfully building large-scale boiling-water reactors.
In May, Ontario Power Generation, the state-owned utility in Canada’s most populous province, finalized plans to build what’s likely to be the first SMR in North America, one of four BWRX-300 to eventually be built at its Darlington nuclear plant.
Piggybacking off OPG’s effort, the TVA — among the few entities in the U.S. that mirror Canada’s government-owned utility model — plans to construct America’s first BWRX-300 at its Clinch River site, just south of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Estimates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggest the reactor will cost significantly more than the far more powerful large-scale Westinghouse AP1000 reactor, which the U.S. finally completed two of at Southern Company’s Alvin W. Vogtle Generation Electric Generating Plant in northern Georgia over the past two years. But the theory with SMRs is that less powerful machines will require a higher quantity of reactors, and that the identical design will bring down costs. The Energy Department grant is meant to discount the price tag of that second-of-a-kind unit.
The other half of the DOE funding has been awarded to Holtec International, which established itself in nuclear power over the last three decades as the industry’s undertaker. The Florida-based manufacturer designed and deployed droves of concrete dry casks meant to keep spent reactor fuel safely stored on-site at nuclear plants until the U.S. government comes up with a solution for radioactive waste. A few years ago, the company entered into the decommissioning business, buying a handful of defunct nuclear plants with the goal of taking them apart. Recently, however, it has looked to become an operator.
Last year, the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office — recently renamed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing — finalized a $1.5 billion loan to finance the restart of one of Holtec’s plants. The single-reactor Palisades nuclear plant in western Michigan had been the most recent U.S. atomic station to shut down earlier than needed as competition with cheap natural gas and renewables made the facility’s upkeep too costly for its owner, utility giant Entergy. The company sold the plant to Holtec for disassembly in 2022. But as demand for nuclear power has surged in recent years, Holtec proposed reopening the station.
Then, in February, Holtec unveiled fresh plans to expand Palisades with a pair of its SMR-300s. The 300-megawatt reactors are also based on a design used for decades: the pressurized-water reactor, which is even more common than the boiling-water reactor that GE specialized in during the heyday of reactor construction in the mid-20th century.
In a statement, Kris Singh, Holtec’s chief executive officer and chair, called the grant an “essential enabler” of the company’s plans to build the SMR-300, and pointed to Holtec’s exclusive partnership with the South Korean industrial giant Hyundai Engineering and Construction as evidence that the reactor’s design is “marinated with four decades of practical corporate experience.”
“Holtec realizes the future of nuclear energy as a source of reliable baseload electricity to power the economy of the future is realized only if we, in the industry, make the reactors predictably cost competitive,” Singh said. “We consider it our duty to lead the industry in building, owning, and operating the first SMR-300 plant in the United States.”
The Energy Department funding doesn’t guarantee that either project will be completed. NuScale, a fellow third-generation nuclear developer, received $583 million from the Energy Department to fund what was supposed to be the nation’s first SMR plant in Idaho on behalf of Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, a collection of public utilities in the Beehive State. But the project still went under amid rising costs in November 2023.
The theory that smaller, less powerful reactors will yield lower costs has yet to be proved. So far, only one major SMR has entered into service worldwide, in Russia, where it’s operating on a floating barge in Siberia. The Kremlin-owned Rosatom, the world’s No. 1 exporter of civilian nuclear technology, hasn’t filled its order books for more SMRs and has instead concentrated on large-scale reactors. Likewise, the country building the most nuclear reactors, China, is working toward completing its first third-generation SMR on Hainan. However, the unit is largely seen as destined for export to countries with less demand for large-scale reactors, while China’s two biggest state-owned nuclear utilities have continued focusing on building gigawatt-size units.
The U.S., too, has come around to large-scale reactors. In October, the Trump administration announced a deal to spend $80 billion on 10 new AP1000s, in a move that E&E News suggested made Westinghouse America the new “national champion” in nuclear.
But in a statement, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright suggested there’s room for multiple kinds of reactors.
“President Trump has made clear that America is going to build more energy, not less, and nuclear is central to that mission,” Wright said. “Advanced light-water SMRs will give our nation the reliable, round-the-clock power we need to fuel the President’s manufacturing boom, support data centers and AI growth, and reinforce a stronger, more secure electric grid. These awards ensure we can deploy these reactors as soon as possible.”
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