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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.
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.
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.’”
For press releases, policy changes, and promises to build new nuclear power, 2025 was a gangbusters year. For actually adding new reactors to the grid, not so much.
In fact, around the world, more gigawatts’ worth of nuclear reactors were retired than turned on this year, according to new data from the consultancy BloombergNEF.
In the 11 months leading up to Dec. 1, only two new reactors came online, totaling 1.8 GW. Meanwhile, seven reactors totaling 2.8 GW of capacity were permanently shuttered. The net effect? Global nuclear operating capacity declined by just over 1 GW. Overall, the world had 417 reactors in operation churning out 337 GW of power as of the start of this month.
Belgium led the retreat, shuttering two reactors this year, even as the country’s lawmakers voted in May to repeal a 2003 law that required the country to phase out nuclear power entirely.
Taiwan also contributed to the decline when it closed the last reactor at its Maanshan plant on the island’s southern tip, completing the country’s long-awaited exit from atomic energy. Russia will round out the closures by decommissioning three 12-megawatt units at a plant in the Arctic by the end of this month.
The shutdowns are the result of a yearslong pullback on nuclear power across much of the world, with China and Russia being the key exceptions.
But they also come at what may be a turning point for that global retreat from nuclear. Around the world, new technologies are racing toward maturity, shuttered reactors are being revived, and dealmakers are seeking to shore up the future supply of clean electricity by investing in new nuclear power. Next year is the first time in at least 15 years that zero reactors worldwide are slated to shut down. While closures will pick up again in 2027, new capacity is projected to dramatically outpace shutdowns through 2029.
The West and its allies have struggled to build and maintain reactors, and recent developments affecting South Korea, one of the more efficient nuclear developers, will not make matters easier.
The country’s state-owned nuclear companies have managed to avoid the sluggish build-outs that have plagued other developers. In June, however, South Korean voters returned to power the center-left Democratic Party, which tried to phase out the industry entirely the last time it held the Blue House. Further, an intellectual-property dispute between the American nuclear champion Westinghouse and Korea’s state-owned companies — Korea Electric Power Corp. and its subsidiary Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. — came to a close this year with a settlement that bars Seoul’s firms from competing for projects in North America, most of the European Union, Britain, Japan, and Ukraine.
On top of that, according to Chris Gadomski, the lead nuclear analyst at BloombergNEF, “there’s a lot of hesitation among countries in the world to do business with the Chinese,” who are currently building reactors at a far faster rate than any other country.
That makes President Donald Trump’s efforts to revive nuclear construction at home and sell more reactors abroad particularly impactful for the industry’s future in the West and among its allies, especially countries in Africa and Asia building nuclear plants for the first time.
“The No. 1 question is how effective Trump’s pushing and shoving will be,” said Gadomski, who authored the market overview report published last week. “He’s really trying to reestablish American nuclear dominance.”
Unlike buying solar panels or batteries from China, nuclear reactors are century-long commitments between the construction, operation, and eventual decommissioning of the plant. Each of those steps is traditionally carried out by the vendor country.
“People are just concerned, so there is an opening for U.S. technology to be exported overseas,” Gadomski said. “People are dying to get U.S. technology.”
But right now, he warned, the small modular reactors attracting most of the attention have yet to be proven. And the only new reactor the U.S. has built from scratch on its own turf since the 1990s is the Westinghouse AP1000 at Southern Co.’s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. The two new units there ran billions of dollars over budget.
Estimates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggest that the next AP1000 will come in significantly cheaper than even the shrunken-down small modular reactors currently under consideration, since the supply chain and design are now cemented. Indeed, Vogtle Unit 4 came in roughly 30% cheaper than Vogtle Unit 3, the first AP1000 to be built in the U.S.
Washington is working to expand the AP1000’s footprint. Both the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. and the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. have expressed interest in financing the construction of Poland’s first nuclear plant, made up of three AP1000s. In October, the Department of Commerce announced a deal with Japan to furnish Westinghouse with at least $80 billion to build 10 AP1000s in the U.S.
But Gadomski cautioned that the willingness to make such big investments largely hinges on the rising demand for power from data centers providing artificial intelligence software.
“If the AI boom collapses, we won’t need so much energy,” he said. “We’ve got tons of cheap natural gas, and there are technical and social risks to building out nuclear.”
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.”
The Trump administration is bankrolling the restart of two shuttered nuclear plants in hopes of reviving the industry. Those endeavors are moving along — but without federal funding, plans to build new large nuclear reactors haven’t made much progress yet.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office announced that it had both offered — and finalized — a $1 billion loan to help Constellation Energy restart Unit 1 at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
While Three Mile Island may make you think of nuclear disaster due to the partial meltdown of the plant’s Unit 2 back in 1979, that part of the facility has been dormant ever since. Unit 1, meanwhile, operated for decades without any major incident before it was shut down in 2019 for economic reasons. Constellation said in July 2024 that the unit remained in “pretty good shape” and was “technically feasible” to restart.
Just a few months later, Constellation got its chance to do so. Microsoft announced an agreement with Constellation to buy power from Unit 1, with hopes of getting the newly renamed Crane Clean Energy Center operating again by 2028. At the time, Constellation said it would likely spend $1.6 billion on the restart. This new federal loan will put a big dent in that cost.
The Loan Programs Office is also supporting the restart of Michigan’s Palisades Nuclear Plant, which shuttered in 2022. The $1.5 billion loan was initiated under the Biden administration, and President Donald Trump’s DOE has continued paying it out this year. The plant received its first delivery of fuel in October and aims to start generating power before the year ends.
While large nuclear restarts are rolling along, new construction doesn’t have much progress to show. Construction of the last major nuclear project in the U.S. — Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle — went billions of dollars over budget and took years longer than expected. It’s become a cautionary tale for risk-averse utilities, who have yet to answer Trump’s call for a nuclear buildout, E&E News reports.
Still, the Trump administration is trying to will that nuclear renaissance into existence: This week it reaffirmed its commitment to an $80 billion plan to finance the construction of up to 10 new large nuclear reactors, first announced in late October.
It’s an ambitious goal that could create the nuclear expansion the Trump administration says it wants. But it still faces a big barrier: the administration itself. Trump officials have spent the last year undermining trust in federal financing by reneging on billions of dollars in grants, loans, and even permits for clean-energy projects. Those moves could make it difficult to convince companies to commit to expensive, years-long construction projects that will surely span administrations.
Ohio county takes on renewables ban
Ohio is a hot spot for local renewable-energy bans, but one county may pave the way for change.
A state law allows Ohio counties to bar significant solar and wind development in all or some of their townships. More than three dozen counties have done so, and Richland County is among them, with commissioners moving this summer to ban projects in 11 of its 18 townships.
Richland County residents started pushing back almost immediately, Canary Media’s Kathiann M. Kowalski reports. Gathering more than 3,300 valid signatures, they’ve ensured a referendum on the ban will be on the ballot this May, allowing every voter to weigh in on the future of clean energy in their backyard.
As COP30 closes, final deal remains unsettled
The United Nations’ COP30 conference comes to a close today, but participating nations still haven’t reached a final agreement to scale up their climate commitments. On Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the eventual deal must be “concrete on funding and adaptation, credible on emission cuts, and bankable on finance.”
As they do at every COP, nations disagreed over how far to take the conference-ending agreement. Climate-adaptation funding became a top issue, as countries on the front lines of climate change pushed to triple an annual adaptation fund $120 billion. More than 80 countries also called for the COP30 deal to include a road map for transitioning off coal, oil, and natural gas, scaling up 2023’s nonbinding agreement that nations begin moving away from fossil fuels.
Electrification crunch: Canary Media’s Alison F. Takemura rounded up last-minute ways to tap federal tax credits for clean and efficient home improvements before the incentives expire at the end of the year. (Canary Media)
Speeding toward global warming: Trump’s fossil-fuel-expansion agenda will throttle emissions cuts and drive more than 1 million additional temperature-related deaths around the globe from 2035 through 2115, a new analysis finds. (ProPublica/The Guardian)
The EV cliff is here: U.S. EV sales fell 49% from September to October after federal tax credits expired on Sept. 30. (Cox Automotive)
Drilling down: The Trump administration proposes opening more than 1 billion acres off the Gulf and Pacific coasts for oil drilling, drawing rebukes from Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Florida Republicans. (Associated Press, E&E News)
Gridly exaggerated: Utilities are using the data-center boom to justify investments in gas plants, but a new Grid Strategies report finds those demand-growth projections are likely overblown. (Canary Media)
Curbing climate action: Pennsylvania’s withdrawal from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative raises fears that Democratic officials may continue to sideline climate action, even after winning statewide races on the promise of reining in energy prices. (E&E News)
Solar defies the odds: First Solar announces plans to invest $330 million building a South Carolina factory to manufacture solar modules, with commercial operations set to begin in late 2026. (Electrek)
Chattanooga charges up: Chattanooga, Tennessee’s municipal utility has built a small network of battery projects that are helping curb rising prices and avoid power outages, with plans for more energy storage ahead. (Canary Media)
Teeing up clean heat: A former St. Paul, Minnesota, golf course will host one of the country’s first large-scale thermal energy storage systems to use an underground aquifer, which will be combined with electric heat pumps and solar panels to heat and cool buildings. (Inside Climate News)
Commonwealth Fusion Systems just raised $863 million in additional funding as the company works to achieve the decades-old dream of commercializing nuclear fusion.
On Thursday, CFS said that, with its Series B2 funding round, the startup has raised about $3 billion in capital since it was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. That’s just under one-third of the $9.8 billion in total funding for fusion companies globally.
Seemingly every type of investor showed up for CFS’ latest funding round as the world’s interest in the long-promised, highly speculative technology continues to soar. Over three dozen names appear in the startup’s new announcement, including those of venture capitalists, sovereign wealth funds, private equity firms, individual investors, industrial firms, hedge funds, pension funds, and private banks.
CFS has ambitious plans to begin supplying one of its big-name investors — Google — with power in the next few years from a plant in Virginia.
“This funding recognizes CFS’ leadership role in developing a new technology that promises to be a reliable source of clean, almost limitless energy,” Bob Mumgaard, CEO and cofounder of CFS, said in an Aug. 28 press release. He said the company “will enable investors to have the opportunity to capitalize on the birth of a new global industry.”
To oversimplify, nuclear fusion — the source of the sun’s energy — involves converting hydrogen into plasma, which is then compressed and confined in a process that releases massive amounts of energy. Proponents say that fusion power plants could offer the best of nuclear energy — carbon-free electricity supplied around the clock — without the drawbacks of today’s nuclear fission plants, including the risk of catastrophic meltdowns and evergrowing stockpiles of radioactive waste.
Despite decades of research and billions of dollars in funding, fusion energy remains on the extremely early end of the technology-development curve. Yet a handful of recent engineering breakthroughs are giving fusion scientists and their deep-pocketed investors fresh hope that commercial fusion power could finally come to fruition.
Other startups such as Avalanche Energy, General Fusion, Helion Energy, TAE Technologies, Xcimer Energy, and Zap Energy have also raised jaw-dropping funding rounds in recent years from billionaires and investment funds. The Fusion Industry Association lists more than 50 companies working in the field, which together raised $2.64 billion in private and public funding in the past year — nearly three times more than in the previous year.
This growing fleet of fusion startups is pursuing a variety of technologies, such as systems using mighty laser beams or extremely high voltages. CFS is taking a magnetic approach.
At its site in Devens, Massachusetts, CFS is building a donut-shaped device called a tokamak that uses high-temperature superconducting magnets to contain and stabilize plasma during the nuclear reaction. The startup said it aims to have its SPARC reactor running by 2026 and to achieve another crucial milestone the following year: producing more energy in its reactor than is needed to power the machine.
CFS is also advancing its plans to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia, with the goal of putting power on the grid in the early 2030s. In June, Google agreed to buy half of the carbon-free electricity produced at the facility, which will go on a site owned by the utility Dominion Energy. Last week, Chesterfield County’s planning commission unanimously approved a conditional use permit for the 400-megawatt plant.
“We’re excited to make this longer-term bet on a technology with transformative potential to meet the world’s future energy demand, and support CFS in their efforts to reach the scientific and engineering milestones needed to get there,” Michael Terrell, head of advanced energy at Google, said in a June 30 press release.
Now all that’s left for CFS to do is prove its technology can work as promised.
The starting gun for the long-promised U.S. nuclear renaissance might have just gone off.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced late last week that it has granted several key approvals that Holtec International needs to restart Michigan’s 800-megawatt Palisades Nuclear Plant three years after the facility shut down. Although the project still needs to clear some federal hurdles, the NRC’s action signals its intention to give Holtec the full go-ahead.
If Holtec succeeds in bringing Palisades back online this year as promised, it would be the first nuclear plant in the U.S. to restart after being closed down. Remarkably, it would be just the second or third reactor to come back online in the global history of civilian nuclear power.
Holtec President Kelly Trice praised the NRC’s move in a statement, calling it “an unprecedented milestone in U.S. nuclear energy.” The company expects the plant to come back online before the end of the year — an extremely ambitious target given the uncharted regulatory territory of a reactor restart and the industry’s history of construction delays.
Located on Lake Michigan and a two-hour drive from Chicago, the Palisades plant started producing electricity on New Year’s Eve 1971 and was shuttered a half-century later in May 2022 by utility Entergy because of cost issues. It was America’s eighth-oldest nuclear plant at the time of its closing, with a troubled history of temporary shutdowns due to equipment failures. Although its performance improved in the later years of the plant’s operation, Palisades closed 11 days ahead of its scheduled shutdown because of a reliability issue.
Holtec — whose main lines of business are decommissioning reactors and managing nuclear waste — bought the plant in June 2022. But just weeks into the decommissioning process, it made the surprise revelation that it intended to revive the plant instead. Up until that point, Holtec had no experience in constructing, operating, or restarting a nuclear power plant.
Despite that lack of experience, the relatively speedy NRC approval means that Holtec can now reinstall uranium fuel in the reactor as soon as August and begin the work of restarting the complex nuclear facility. About 600 full-time workers are currently employed at the plant.
Palisades is not the only shuttered reactor that’s being considered for reopening as part of the U.S. strategy to jump-start its flatlined nuclear industry. Last year, Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar plan with plant operator Constellation Energy to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania by 2028; it had been decommissioned in 2019 because of poor economics. Power provider NextEra Energy is also weighing reanimating Iowa’s only nuclear plant, the 50-year-old reactor at the Duane Arnold Energy Center, which closed in 2020 because of storm damage and cost issues.
Nuclear power has newfound social license in the U.S. Citizen support has climbed in recent years. The U.S., along with more than 20 other countries, vowed to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050 during the COP28 global climate conference in 2023.
Nuclear is now viewed by many as crucial to meeting the soaring electricity demand that’s being driven by an AI-spurred data-center frenzy along with the electrification of transportation and industry. Tech giants in particular are hungry for the clean, firm, 24/7 power that nuclear plants can provide, as their data centers crave round-the-clock electricity.
Aside from renaming post offices, bolstering nuclear power is the rare type of policy that can gain bipartisan agreement — the Biden administration initiated this atomic energy rally, and the Trump admin is maintaining its momentum.
Trump’s recent set of executive orders on nuclear power sped up the licensing process and minimized regulatory burdens, all in the service of fostering American “energy dominance.”
So it’s a good time to be a nuclear plant operator. Notoriously expensive nuclear reactors can now claim a bundle of incentives and subsidies. Consider all the goodies Holtec will be able to take advantage of.
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the Palisades reactor restart.
Kevin Kamps of anti-nuclear organization Beyond Nuclear told Canary Media that the NRC is “under tremendous pressure” and “bowing to Holtec’s schedule” as it “pushes the envelope on risk.”
He wrote in a statement, “The zombie reactor restart scheme is unneeded, insanely expensive for the public, and extremely high risk for health, safety, security, and the environment.”
The advocacy organization claims that Holtec “neglected critical safety maintenance from 2022 to 2024.” Beyond Nuclear is particularly worried about the impact of corrosion on a massive, expensive, and critical part of the reactor: the steam generator.
There are thousands of steam generator tubes in a pressurized water reactor like Palisades. In instances of corrosion, they are routinely re-sleeved or plugged, but Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear engineer and whistleblower, has testified in NRC proceedings that “the failure of a single tube would result in a release of radioactivity to the environment” and “a cascading failure of tubes could cause a reactor core meltdown and catastrophic release of hazardous radioactivity.”
Beyond Nuclear intends to appeal the NRC’s green light for restart once it’s finalized.
Unfortunately, restarting a few vintage plants would contribute little toward the broader goal of building hundreds of gigawatts of low-cost nuclear power. There just aren’t enough eligible decommissioned nuclear plants to make much of a difference.
Nuclear enthusiasts rave about the prospects for small modular reactors and other advanced reactors, with their novel designs, coolants, and fuels. But while those technologies are engineering marvels, they won’t do anything to drive down costs in the next few years.
A more direct solution to growing the U.S. nuclear fleet (and keeping up with a surging China) would be to build tried and tested models of big, traditional nuclear plants over and over again. Venture capital-funded consortia such as The Nuclear Co. and other parties are planning to do just that: deploy fleets of full-scale, licensed, and standardized reactor designs on sites with existing construction and operating licenses. It’s a strategy to avoid the first-of-a-kind shock of building a newer generation of reactor like Georgia’s Vogtle 3, which was years late and billions over budget.
Meanwhile, the NRC’s forthcoming approval of the Palisades recommissioning is a morale booster for the U.S. nuclear industry, which has needed to put some wins and megawatts on the board.
A correction was made on July 30, 2025: This story originally misstated which federal tax credits the Palisades plant would be eligible for if it restarted. The plant would be eligible for the 45Y production tax credit for new nuclear, not the 45U production tax credit for existing nuclear.
Since its founding back in 2010, Shine Technologies has raised nearly $800 million to deliver on the potential of generating cheap, abundant energy from fusion.
Like the dozens of other startups at work in this field, Shine Technologies has yet to crack the code on fusion, an energy source that has been 40 years away from commercialization for 50 years. But unlike those competitors, Shine is already generating real revenue — not by producing electricity but by essentially selling neutrons from the fusion reaction to industrial imaging and materials testing companies.
Governments, venture capitalists, tech billionaires, and other private investors around the world have pumped more than $7.1 billion into fusion companies, according to a July 2024 report by the Fusion Industry Association.
But despite almost a century of research since fusion’s discovery, engineers have been unable to achieve its holy grail: continuously generating more power than was used to create a fusion reaction in the first place. The fusion world uses a metric called the fusion energy gain factor, also known simply as Q, to measure that ratio. If a project was to achieve a Q greater than 1, it would achieve the much-sought-after energy-breakeven point.
But Shine has a different benchmark — at least for right now.
“If you talk to almost every fusion company on Earth, they’ll say, ‘We’re shooting for Q greater than 1.’ But we have a different Q — our Q is economic. It’s generating more dollars out than dollars in. That’s how you scale a company,” Greg Piefer, Shine’s CEO, said.
The fusion reaction is the primordial alchemical trick that powers our sun, propels spacecraft in science-fiction novels and, if the visionaries and true believers are correct, could meet humanity’s voracious energy needs in the centuries to come.
The reaction occurs in plasma, the fourth state of matter. The sun creates plasma by compressing and heating hydrogen to tens of millions of degrees, and it performs the miracle of fusion by confining that hydrogen, along with its variants, with its mammoth gravity.
Humans hoping to recreate the conditions of the sun on Earth have to rely on exotic magnets, Brobdingnagian laser-beam arrays, or other maximalist techniques.
These complex and expensive fusion machines compress and confine plasma in an attempt to bring two nuclei close enough to overcome their repellant electrostatic forces and fuse together. A successful, sustained fusion reaction would heat up a material surrounding the reactor, allowing it to boil water and drive the same sort of conventional steam turbine you’d find in a coal, gas, or traditional nuclear (fission) power plant.
Most of the fusion startups Canary Media has covered — such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies, Avalanche Energy, and Zap Energy — plan to take this steam-turbine approach to producing fusion power. Each company has its own (unproven) method for controlling the plasma and wringing out the heat. Some firms use a tokamak design, a very big, hollow donut-shaped hall in which the plasma circulates, or a twisted variant called a stellarator. Some aspirants confine the plasma with magnetic forces while others use high electrical currents or lasers to tame the atomic-particle soup.
So, which technology and approach is Shine using to solve the fusion riddle?
“I’m going to say something really trippy. As a fusion company, when it comes to energy production — I don’t know yet. … We have our own internal technological approach. I don’t think it’s any more likely than any other technological approach to prevail,” Piefer admitted. “You won’t hear that from any other fusion CEO in the whole world. But the truth is, it’s early innings, and we don’t know which fusion approach is going to be the most cost-effective.”
And while today’s cadre of fusion startups aims to provide power to the electrical grid in the 2030s or 2040s, Shine is following a different path to market.
“Fusion-energy people are trying to go from fusion not really having ever been used commercially for anything to it being the most reliable, cheapest form of generating energy,” said Piefer. “Everyone’s chasing the energy.”
Instead, Shine’s CEO wants his firm to scale the way historic deep-tech companies like semiconductor makers have done: “You start small with a market where you can make money right away, and then you iterate over time — and through that virtuous cycle of providing value and reinvesting a portion of it to make the technology better, you continue to access bigger and bigger markets.”
The market where Shine is making money now is the sale of neutrons for use in industrial imaging and materials testing. Piefer estimates that this will generate “on the order of $50 million of revenue in 2025.”
Shine will next move into medical-isotope production, then recycling spent nuclear fuel, and, ultimately, Piefer said, electrical power generation.
Producing medical isotopes requires fewer sustained reactions than producing power, and while net power is a ways away, the technology for isotope production is already available.
Medical isotopes are currently produced via nuclear fission, but if they can be produced via fusion, that would eliminate the need to use highly enriched uranium. And it could be a lucrative line of business: The global market for medical isotopes is about $6 billion a year.
“If you make a kilowatt-hour of fusion energy, you can sell that kilowatt-hour for maybe 5 cents,” he said. “But you can sell the other product of [deuterium-tritium] fusion reactions, neutrons, for as much as $100,000 per kilowatt-hour in certain markets.”
The prospect of getting a foot in that market drove Shine to break ground on a new facility in Wisconsin, which has already been licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It will be the largest isotope-production factory in the world when it comes online in a few years, according to Piefer. He claims that his firm is the only one that has successfully shepherded a new nuclear technology through the NRC process since the agency’s inception in 1974. The firm has also received tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to support its isotope-production plans, including $32 million last summer.
Unlike the rest of the fusion-startup cohort, “we’re actually selling fusion,” the CEO said. “That’s an important differentiation because it means we get to practice fusion, which is ultimately what’s going to drive it to be cheaper” — and potentially pave the way for it to become a power source in the decades to come.
Correction: This article has been updated to correct the total amount of money Shine Technologies has raised to date.
A Michigan nuclear plant is looking to make history not once but twice over: First by restarting a reactor shuttered in 2022 and second with newly solidified plans to build the nation’s first small modular reactors.
Holtec International — the nuclear company best known for decommissioning shuttered plants and manufacturing the canisters that store spent fuel — bought the Palisades nuclear plant on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan a month after utility giant Entergy took the financially troubled single-reactor facility offline.
Last year, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office finalized a deal to give Holtec $1.52 billion to bring the 55-year-old, 800-megawatt pressurized water reactor back online. The company wants to plug the facility back into the grid by the end of this year.
Now Holtec plans to nearly double the electricity output from Palisades by building two of its own small modular reactors, or SMRs, at the site.
On Tuesday, top executives gathered at the facility in Covert Township, Michigan, to unveil blueprints for adding a pair of its proprietary SMR-300s and announce Hyundai Engineering and Construction Co. — the South Korean firm already working with the Florida-based Holtec to develop its 300-MW units internationally — as its partner in the debut U.S. project. Completing the reactor would be a first not just for the country but the company. While Holtec has disassembled reactors, it has yet to build one, much less its own design.
“If we can’t do it, I don’t know who else is going to do it,” Rick Springman, the president of Holtec’s Global Clean Energy Opportunities division, told Canary Media ahead of the event. “I really think we can be the horse America can ride to a clean-energy future and to enable AI and everything else we want to do in this global competition.”
First, Holtec will need the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval of its reactor design.
So far, the U.S. federal regulator has only approved one SMR, Oregon-based NuScale Power’s 50 MW unit. The first plant designed around NuScale’s reactors, a 720 MW station built on property owned by the Idaho National Laboratory to provide power to ratepayers in Utah, was scrapped in November 2023 amid rising costs.
2024 marked a breakout year for nuclear power in the U.S., as Congress passed new legislation to streamline reactor regulations, Microsoft put up $16 billion to reopen the mothballed unit at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, and SMR developers lined up major deals with Amazon and Google.
Yet no SMR developer got the green light from the NRC to become the nation’s second certified design.
“Most of our competitors are essentially offering the technology but don’t want to take any risk,” Springman said.
In other words, those developers will design and license the technology and make money off the intellectual property, he said, but utilities and construction firms must provide the financing, time, and materials.
“You have this stagnation where no one wants to stand behind the project,” Springman said. “Enter Holtec. We can manufacture the parts, build the plant, and arrange the financing for the project. We can also manage the spent fuel … and we can decommission the plant at end of life. We can do the entire spectrum of the project. There’s no U.S. company that can offer all of that.”
Holtec is betting its decades of manufacturing know-how, experience managing complex nuclear projects, and early engagement with federal regulators will secure approval fast enough to construct both its SMRs in the next five years — a breakneck speed by the standards of reactor construction.
The only two new reactors built from scratch in the U.S. in decades were completed at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in northern Georgia last spring. The pair of 1,100 MW Westinghouse AP1000s followed the NRC’s part 52 combined licensing pathway, which granted approval to build and operate the reactors. While the approach was meant to get the units online faster than the traditional licensing process, the design tweaks that needed to be made during the first-of-a-kind build required repeatedly going back to the NRC for approvals that delayed the project and helped drive it billions of dollars over budget.
Instead, Holtec said it would follow the traditional part 50 process, which requires the company to obtain the construction and operating licenses separately.
“We prefer part 50 because we believe on a first-of-a-kind project, there’s less regulatory risk and more flexibility in that process to allow for learnings during construction,” Springman said.
Holtec started talks with the NRC five years ago and “over the last three years really stepped up engagement” by submitting white papers and topical reports, he said.
The company said it plans to submit the first part of its construction permit application in the first quarter of 2026 and the second part in the second quarter of 2027, then apply for an operating license in the first three months of 2029.
Thanks to conversations already underway, Springman said, Holtec will have incorporated the NRC’s feedback into its application by the time it submits paperwork. “They know it’s coming, and we have reduced risk from a regulatory perspective,” he said.
Already, Holtec updated the design of its SMR, nearly doubling the output of the proposed machine from 160 MW to the 300 MW model the company is now planning to build. Research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests the cheapest reactor to build in the U.S. next, however, would be another AP1000, since the design is settled and the size allows power-plant owners to benefit from economies of scale.
“I love the idea of restoring nuclear operation to sites that have lost it, and I love even more building new reactors where we had fewer,” said Mark Nelson, a nuclear engineer and founder of the consultancy Radiant Energy Group. “It’ll be interesting to see whether the right size of reactor is smaller or larger in the future.”
Despite some pushback from antinuclear groups, the project is gaining local political backing. In December, the board of commissioners in Michigan’s Van Buren County voted to support construction of the SMRs.
“I’m thrilled — it’d be historic,” said Shawn Connors, 69, a retired technical publisher who grew up in Kalamazoo, owns a condo in South Haven, about five miles north of the Palisades plant, and now volunteers as an advocate for nuclear power. “Palisades might become the focus of the world because this is where you can have the old [pressurized water reactor] operating and two new SMRs operating right next to it. You’ve got the old and the new right there together.”
NUCLEAR: Eight current or former coal plant sites in Indiana could potentially host small modular nuclear reactors and help the state meet its growing energy demand, according to a new Purdue University study. (Indiana Capital Chronicle)
PIPELINES: Minnesota regulators rescind a permit to rebuild a petroleum pipeline near a culturally significant site to tribes and will require the company to conduct an archeology study after pushback from several tribal nations. (Sahan Journal)
CLIMATE: A U.S. Senate committee is expected to next week consider Trump’s interior secretary nominee Doug Burgum, who championed carbon capture and storage while governor of North Dakota. (Washington Post)
SOLAR:
EMISSIONS: Coal and natural gas plants represent more than two-thirds of the facilities that release the most greenhouse gases across several Midwest states, according to an analysis of federal data. (WFYI)
UTILITIES:
BATTERIES: Western Michigan county officials pass a resolution withdrawing support for a large proposed battery manufacturing plant, citing public opposition to the plan. (WOOD-TV8)
POLITICS: Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan takes the stand during his federal corruption trial, insisting he never traded his public office for private gain, including for former associates who allegedly got jobs at ComEd in exchange for favorable legislation. (Chicago Sun-Times)
WIND: President-elect Trump promises that “no new windmills” will be built in the U.S. once he takes office, despite the industry’s growth in GOP-leaning states like Iowa and his inability to control private-sector investments. (New York Times)
EFFICIENCY: Wisconsin starts rolling out programs for homeowners to secure energy efficiency rebates through the Inflation Reduction Act. (WCCO)
COMMENTARY:
NUCLEAR: Maryland-based Constellation Energy signs a $1 billion deal to provide nuclear power and energy efficiency services to 13 federal agencies, marking the first time the U.S. has used a major energy purchase to support nuclear power as a clean energy source. (Reuters)
ALSO: An energy company threatens to sue federal regulators for denying its proposal to expand an Amazon data center located at a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. (E&E News, subscription)
CLIMATE:
OFFSHORE WIND:
EFFICIENCY: Massachusetts’ newest energy efficiency plan targets rental properties, covering the entire cost of weatherization in some cities and protecting tenants against rent hikes intended to pay for more efficient heating equipment. (Boston Globe)
SOLAR:
FRACKING: Scientists find contamination in freshwater mussels consistent with the chemical signatures of wastewater produced by fracking in western Pennsylvania. (Inside Climate News)
TRANSPORTATION: A New Jersey judge agrees to hear a request for a last-minute restraining order against New York’s plan to impose a congestion price on cars entering parts of Manhattan starting this weekend. (4 New York)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Hearing from building owners concerned about the risk of fire from indoor e-bike charging, New York City expands an initiative allowing multifamily buildings to apply for sidewalk space to install charging cabinets. (Streetsblog)
CLEAN ENERGY: A University of Maryland researcher receives $7.8 million to develop and test a system that uses fermented ocean microbes to power marine sensing devices for scientific or national security applications. (Maryland Today)
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