Congressional representatives looked into the growing momentum for building new U.S. nuclear capacity during a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Energy.
“The importance of successful growth of the American nuclear energy cannot be understated,” Subcommittee Chair Bob Latta (R-Ohio) said during the Jan. 7 hearing. “What we need in this country is more energy. We need firm, reliable power, versatile power, and more of it.”
New power supply is needed for the artificial intelligence race and to meet demand from homes and other sources, Latta added. Nuclear Energy Institute CEO Maria Korsnick agreed that nuclear power is a good match for AI and its need for around-the-clock power.
“Nuclear plant owners are planning to add more than 8 GW of capacity through generation upgrades and plant restarts, and more than 23 GW of new nuclear by 2040,” Korsnick said. “These figures do not include substantial additional capacity being pursued by developers and other companies. The task now is to turn this momentum into deployment at scale.”
Members of both parties cited how the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act (S 870), passed during the most recent Congressional session, is helping the industry, while Republicans said executive orders from President Donald Trump would help expand an industry that saw its last “renaissance” aborted. (See Trump Orders Nuclear Regulatory Acceleration, Streamlining.)
“For too long, Republicans have supported nuclear power in theory but failed to follow through as soon as nuclear power starts to compete with fossil fuels,” Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) said. “For example, in the House’s version of the big, ugly bill passed out of this committee last year, every Republican on this committee voted to cut back the tax credit to support existing nuclear plants, and Republicans ultimately rescinded billions of dollars to support the Loan Programs Office.”
DOE’s Loan Programs Office is under its third temporary leader in a year, and President Trump has yet to nominate a permanent head, she added. The office has lost more than half of its professional staff due to voluntary resignations and cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency, Castor said.
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) criticized how the Trump administration has impinged on the independence of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, firing a former chair without cause while two current members say they could be fired at any time for making a decision the White House does not support.
“Unfortunately, that’s not all. The Trump administration issued an executive order demanding that all rulemakings from the NRC passed through the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for approval, putting Trump’s hand-picked lackeys over independent commissioners confirmed by the United States Senate,” Pallone said. “And this requirement has shadowed the transparency that historically has given the American people assurance that the NRC’s rules are strong and effective.”
While other climate solutions have seen an end to federal support over the past year, nuclear still has bipartisan support, and that should help in regard to policy certainty across election cycles, said Nuclear Innovation Alliance CEO Judi Greenwald.
“As commercialization efforts accelerate, how we deploy and scale nuclear energy must reinforce this credibility,” Greenwald said. “This means safeguarding regulatory integrity, transparency and public trust in the NRC. It also means adequate funding and staffing, as well as timely and effective implementation of the portfolio of nuclear commercialization policies and programs at the Department of Energy and across the federal government.”
‘Decades of Inactivity’
The NRC has a long history of being relatively insulated from politics, but the Trump administration’s actions are changing that. An executive order requires the agency’s rulemakings to be approved by OIRA.
“That process introduces several rule-making steps that mean that the public and the stakeholders won’t see certain processes that normally, in the past, we’ve seen as the rules go through the NRC, so we won’t see things that get to the commission, and we won’t see various steps,” Greenwald said. “We think that it would be much better if we maintain transparency.”
DOE’s loan guarantees, reactor demonstrations and fuels programs merit especially high priority, Greenwald said.
Support from DOE’s LPO and other federal tax incentives helped Southern Co. build the only recent nuclear reactors at its Plant Vogtle site in Georgia, said company Senior Vice President John Williams.
“Those are all things that would bring down the initial capital investment that’s required,” Williams said. “The second item is, as we expend that capital over the long construction period, we need to do things to protect the credit rating of the developer during that period of time. So, the ability to transfer those tax credits provides the cash flow necessary.”
The Vogtle project had major cost overruns, but it faced some major setbacks, such as the regulatory response after the tsunami hit the Fukushima plant in Japan in 2011, the bankruptcy of its contractor Westinghouse Electric, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Each of these macroeconomic events exacerbated the fact that the domestic nuclear development industry was already suffering from decades of inactivity,” Williams said.
Still, Southern did bring two new reactors online, and it saved 20% from applying lessons learned from Unit 3 to Unit 4, with most of the savings coming from the electrical installation process.
“We laser-mapped the rooms and essentially replicated those installations on Unit 4,” Williams said. “That was how we did that. We have all of that information, and we’re sharing that with anyone who wants to build new nuclear both in the United States and abroad, to make sure that they get all the lessons that we learned so that they can have a leg up in terms of their construction.”
