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.
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