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Nuclear power had a strong year in 2024, but uncertainty looms for 2025

Though companies are touting aggressive timelines, no decommissioned reactor has ever been restarted in the United States, and there is no regulatory framework for the process.

From VC funding to planned reactor restarts, the U.S. nuclear industry notched wins this year. But the winning streak could end if Trump revokes government support.

By Eric Wesoff, 30 December 2024, more https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/nuclear-power-had-a-strong-year-in-2024-but-uncertainty-looms-for-2025

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.

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.

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 …

A win: VCs and tech firms back small nuclear

Traditional venture capitalists and the celebrity investor class poured more than $800 million into so-called advanced nuclear this year, returning to the sector after a dip in 2023, according to Axios Pro. The investors are anticipating venture-scale returns from the imminent AI-driven demand for power. 

Not all investors are aligned. Tyler Lancaster of Energize Capital tells Axios Pro Rata, ​“Nuclear SMRs and fusion investment will result in a massive loss of capital for venture investors and will prove to be for this generation of climate-tech what biofuels were for the last.” 

Still, plenty of investors are going all-in on advanced nuclear, and they’re not alone — the hyperscaling data-center operators are as well.

Search giant Google and startup Kairos Power signed one of the first corporate agreements to develop a fleet of SMRs. The plan is to bring Kairos’ first SMR online by 2030, followed by additional reactor construction through 2035. The NRC has issued Kairos a construction permit to build a demonstration reactor, a 35-megawatt unit using a molten fluoride salt coolant and a higher-concentration uranium fuel recipe. 

Amazon is planning to deploy SMRs of an as yet unlicensed design to power its data centers. It announced in October that it would commit $334 million to explore installing small gas-cooled reactors at Hanford in Washington state, a contaminated site where the federal government used to produce nuclear weapons. 

And microreactor startup Oklo just announced a partnership with data-center provider Switch to develop 12 gigawatts of power from its fast breeder design

Question: Is restarting reactors the cure for data-center fever?

But the data oligarchs aren’t only interested in advanced or smaller nuclear technologies. They’re also keen on big, old-school reactors. 

This was the year that the biggest players in artificial intelligence — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle — started inking deals to tap nuclear power to keep their data centers dreaming of electric sheep. Energy usage by data centers is surging and expected to continue to rise, and most of the companies driving this demand have voluntary carbon-free energy goals that they’d prefer not to completely undermine. 

The data-center hyperscalers have plans to tap existing nuclear power, develop new reactors, and even reopen shuttered reactors and plants.

Constellation Energy is planning to restart operations at its shuttered Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear power plant in 2028, thanks to a 20-year deal to sell Microsoft the revived reactor’s power. Constellation has already begun procurement of nuclear fuel and long-lead materials and equipment, like a $100 million power transformer, according to Reuters.

NextEra CEO John Ketchum said in July that his company continues to evaluate the possibility of reopening the 601-megawatt Duane Arnold nuclear power plant in Iowa amid interest from data-center companies, but added, ​“There are only a few nuclear plants that can be recommissioned in an economic way.” 

The defueled Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, while not yet contracted with a data center, is expected to be back online by the end of this year, according to Nick Culp, a spokesperson for owner and operator Holtec International. 

Though companies are touting aggressive timelines, no decommissioned reactor has ever been restarted in the United States, and there is no regulatory framework for the process.

Josh Wolfe, a VC investor at Lux Capital and the rare nuclear energy advocate who has actually made venture returns in the sector thanks to Kurion, a materials treatment startup, is not convinced that the AI revolution will be nuclearized. ​“The tech giants who built empires on weightless bits and bytes are now grappling with atoms: steel, copper, water rights, and, critically, natural gas,” he wrote in his firm’s quarterly update. ​“While we’re bullish on the seeming resurgence of nuclear power, abundant natural gas from the Texas Permian seems a wiser bet.”

A win: Restarting domestic fuel enrichment 

This year, the Biden administration, with the help of a cooperative Congress, took steps that will help nuclear reactors of all types and sizes. It’s working to reestablish a uranium-enrichment supply chain to fuel the existing nuclear reactor fleet as well as provide the more concentrated fuels needed by many of the advanced reactors in development. 

Centrus Energy, which has a corporate lineage stretching back to the Manhattan Project, resumed centrifuge manufacturing and expanded production capacity at its Oak Ridge, Tennessee, facility in November. Centrus will also invest about $60 million to support an expansion of uranium enrichment at its plant in Piketon, Ohio. 

That’s important because roughly one in 20 American homes and businesses get their power from nuclear facilities that depend on Russian uranium-enrichment services, James Krellenstein, a nuclear expert and historian, said on a recent Decouple podcast. 

A portion of the enriched uranium used in the current American reactor fleet comes from Russia’s nuclear defense and materials company, Rosatom. That fraught arrangement will stay in place until the U.S. has its own domestic enrichment program.

Although the U.S. once did have massive enrichment capacity following the second World War, those capabilities were abandoned in a series of governmental and corporate missteps. Now the U.S. is beginning the long journey back to self-sufficiency.

January 1, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment