2024 was a breakout year for the U.S. nuclear power sector — at least on paper.
There’s more government, industry, and civilian support for nuclear energy than there has been in decades. There aren’t enough retired nuclear plants to keep up with the newfound desire to plug mothballed facilities back into the grid. Advanced reactor companies continue to raise a lot of money, both private and public. Congress managed to pass a bipartisan law to support domestic nuclear development.
But this ostensible U.S. nuclear renaissance will come to a screeching halt without continued federal support, especially from two of the Biden administration’s marquee policies, the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. While the first Trump administration funded billion-dollar nuclear demonstration programs and loans, it’s the Biden-era programs that have been pumping the most funding into the nuclear industry — and that are most at risk when Donald Trump takes office next year.
So, at the end of this momentous year for nuclear, the industry is left not only with some wins but also with some major questions. Let’s review.
The big question: What will Trump do on nuclear?
So far, Trump has been sending mixed signals about nuclear power policy, and no one in government, in industry, or on the social network formerly known as Twitter can yet divine his true leanings.
The first Trump administration provided crucial billions in loan guarantees to complete construction of Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia. Trump signed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which opened up a new technology-agnostic advanced reactor licensing pathway, expected to be finalized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by 2027. He also oversaw the Department of Energy’s launch of the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.
But Trump has pledged to repeal the IRA tax credits for lower-carbon energy sources, which could potentially include funding for existing reactors and new advanced reactors. It’s very possible that the second Trump administration won’t continue the Biden administration’s “massive appropriations” to the nuclear sector, John Starkey, director of public policy at the American Nuclear Society, told Utility Dive.
Searching for clarity, we are compelled to cite a recent Joe Rogan podcast, where the president-elect expressed some doubt about large nuclear projects like Vogtle, which he said “get too big and too complex and too expensive.”
But a few months earlier, Trump vowed, “Starting on day one, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants, new reactors.”
The bottom line is that without federal tax credits — or other government support as a backstop in the likely event of cost overruns — utilities and utility commissions won’t proceed with new reactor construction during the second Trump term, regardless of the memorandums of understanding and letters of intent now being signed.
A win: Vogtle 4 online in 2024
The nuclear industry will take its wins where it can get them, even when they’re expensive and bruising — a description that fits the finally completed buildout of Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear facility. After years of delays and billions in cost overruns, the Vogtle Unit 3 reactor entered commercial operation on July 31 of last year and the fourth and final unit came online on April 29, 2024.
With the two additional reactors, Vogtle is now the largest nuclear power plant in the U.S., with a total generating capacity of 4.7 gigawatts. Units 3 and 4 alone support 800 permanent full-time jobs.
These reactors are the first newly constructed nuclear units built in the U.S. in more than three decades and the first U.S. deployment of the Westinghouse AP1000 Generation III+ reactor design.
With these AP1000 projects complete, America now has familiarity with a modern reactor design and a trained workforce that knows how to build these reactors. There are plenty of potential places to build similar power plants — the NRC has approved licenses or is considering applications for new reactors at 17 sites across the U.S.
The U.S. could be at the start of a nuclear cost-curve decline and workforce revival — providing it continues to commit to this known reactor design and builds a multiple-unit order book.
A small win: Advancing a nuclear pledge at COP29
At last year’s United Nations climate conference, COP28, the U.S. and two dozen other countries signed a pledge to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050.
We saw a tad more progress at this year’s conference, COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan, as six additional countries signed onto that pledge. And the Biden administration unveiled its plan for getting the U.S. from nearly 100 gigawatts of nuclear power capacity to 300 gigawatts by mid-century, including adding 35 gigawatts by 2035, through the construction of new reactors, plant restarts, and upgrades to existing facilities.
Of course, Trump plans to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement (again), so he can’t be counted on to follow through on Biden’s pledges.
Question: Will the U.S. commit to big reactors or chase small ones?
If the U.S. were to try to meet Biden’s goal for expanding nuclear in the U.S., companies would need to place orders ASAP for many of the same model of big reactors — like, say, a bunch of AP1000s — according to the September update to the U.S. Department of Energy’s report Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear.
The report suggests that the path to a U.S. nuclear renaissance runs not through small modular reactors (SMRs) or fusion machines, but through the iterative construction of already licensed, large-scale, light-water reactors and the development of an order book and stakeholder consortium.
This focus on large-scale reactors marks a departure from the years of conventional wisdom that SMRs are the cure for America’s nuclear malaise — a wisdom that has yet to result in a single grid-connected reactor. But many investors have not gotten the memo, hence …
