Nuclear Notes is produced by the Breakthrough Institute, and covers the policy, regulation, technology, and business of advanced nuclear energy in the United States and beyond.
Every Thursday, we track what’s really going on in the field: the new rules moving through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the advanced reactors moving from design to deployment, the companies going public and the utilities merging, and the executive orders and acts of Congress reshaping how the country builds. We explain not just what happened, but why it matters and how the pieces fit together.
Energy Department Proposes Huge Investment in Reactors That Were on the Brink
The Energy Department said it would loan up to $4.2 billion for the upgrade of four nuclear reactors, a stunning turnaround from March 2018, when the owner announced plans to shut down all four of them.
The announcement offers some insight into just what makes nuclear energy tick, and where the growth is actually occurring. In this case, the motivation is neither the price of fossil fuels nor concern about global warming, but the anticipated increase in electricity demand.
Eight years ago, the owner, then called FirstEnergy, and now Vistra, said that the problem with keeping those four nuclear assets online was low prices for natural gas. All four reactors are in the PJM interconnection, which covers all or part of thirteen states and the District of Columbia, stretching from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland (for which the market is named) through Delaware, the Virginias, North Carolina, Ohio, and parts of Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois. PJM uses an esoteric system to set prices that establishes revenue levels for generators based on the price offered by the most expensive generator needed to keep the system running. In other words, all electricity generators are competing for prices every minute of every day. In PJM, that price is set by the price of natural gas.
In 2018, the average price of a million BTU of natural gas at the Henry Hub trading center in Texas was only $3.16, up 15 cents from the previous year. Today, the price of natural gas is only slightly higher, projected at $3.43 per million BTU for the full year. We can thank fracking for these low prices. Before fracking, natural gas prices had spiked as high as $16 per million BTU.
What changed for the four nuclear reactors was electricity demand in PJM. Both total volume in megawatt-hours and the amount of power needed at the hour of peak demand increased. Sales went from 791,000 gigawatt-hours a year to 865,000 gigawatt-hours, and peak demand reached 168,000 megawatts, up from 147,000, a 9.3 percent increase. More significantly, PJM is projecting summer peak load growth of about 3.6 percent per year for the next ten years. Neighboring regions are also projecting strong growth, which will limit PJM’s imports.
The pricing system is intended to reflect that growth. A PJM computer ranks all the generators by their asking price and then tells some of them to run until there is enough generation to meet projected load. As total demand rises, the computer has to go further and further along the list to meet demand, and every generator will receive that higher price. That trickles down to what consumers pay.
That is the “why” of the deal, but what is the “how”?
The upgrades are not new construction. Building new generation, especially nuclear, takes time. A faster route is to get more output from existing plants by delaying their retirements and boosting their production levels. In this case, the reactors are Beaver Valley 1 and 2, in Shippingport, western Pennsylvania, which opened in 1976 and 1987, respectively; Davis-Besse, which opened in 1978, in Oak Harbor, Ohio; and Perry, east of Cleveland, which opened in 1987.
The DOE loans would finance “uprates,” or changes that let current plants make more electricity. The four together would gain 433 megawatts in output, which is about the size of one and a half small modular reactors. The first uprate will begin delivering power in 2031 at the Perry plant. It has been uprated before and would finish at a level 21 percent higher than its initial rating. DOE loans would pay for work needed to extend each reactor’s license by an additional 20 years.
To date, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved uprates totaling more than 8 gigawatts, the size of eight large reactors. It expects to receive applications for another 2,421 megawatts. The DOE Utility Power Reactor Incremental Scaling Effort (UPRISE) program aims to support uprate efforts adding 2.5 GW of new nuclear capacity by 2027 and 5 GW by 2029.
Does Everything Cause Cancer?
Costco is planning 47 new warehouse stores by the end of next year. Should we be expecting a wave of new cancer cases?
Of course not, unless you endorse the methodology that the Harvard School of Public Health used in December 2025, in a paper in Environmental Health, seeking to connect nuclear energy plants to cancer incidence.
A Substack post by our colleagues Deric Tilson and Adam Stein found that “no matter what landmark you use, their methodology will show an increased cancer risk and mortality.”
The Harvard papers are part of a history of attempts to link nuclear energy to health effects, but without a plausible cause. The papers do not suggest a mechanism for their cancer finding, citing only the distance from a nuclear power plant.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided in 2010 to address the concerns that the very small releases of radioactive materials from reactors could affect public health. It asked the National Academy of Sciences to study the cancer risk for surrounding populations. The idea was to update a 1990 study by the National Institutes of Health that found that cancer mortality rates did not differ in proximity to a reactor.
The Academy identified obstacles to a study, including: the need to evaluate individual health outcomes for large numbers of people because the changes in risk were likely to be small, the uneven quality of data, the problem of correcting for people moving in and out of the area over a period of years, and other risk factors. The Academy recommended seven reactor sites for a pilot study. Some of the sites no longer had an operating reactor.
But the Academy found that “It is possible that even if feasible, the nationwide study will have low statistical power to detect any excess cancer risks in populations near nuclear facilities, if they exist.” And the Commission later canceled the study because it concluded that it was unlikely to produce meaningful results.
The question is tied to another current policy debate about the use of the linear no- threshold model for determining radiation effects. In the absence of data showing that small doses have a health effect, regulators have adopted an assumption that effect is proportional to dose, with no lower threshold. This differs markedly from the standard for other materials that cause damage at high doses, where if the dose is small enough, the effect is believed to be negligible. For example, if swallowing an entire bottle of aspirin can kill you, and half a bottle can make you sick, will a single aspirin cause the death of a small number of people?
The analogy is not perfect because there is no natural background level of aspirin. Doses from nuclear energy are extremely small, especially in comparison to natural background dose and doses from manmade sources like medical diagnostics and airplane trips.
Google Wants All the Extra Nuclear Energy That Constellation Can Make
Constellation and Google announced a “long-term strategic clean energy collaboration” to create 890 megawatts of additional nuclear generating capacity through uprates at 11 reactors. The contract is a 20-year power purchase agreement.
The scale is huge, even larger than Microsoft’s purchase of the output of a restarted Three Mile Island 1 reactor. It appears that Google agreed to buy electricity from almost all of Constellation’s near-term uprate capability that wasn’t already under contract.
Google’s goal is to run all its operations on carbon-free electricity, 24/7, by 2030. This collaboration would be a step in that direction, but many of the uprates will take longer.
A predecessor company, Exelon Generation, announced plans 15 years ago to uprate many of the reactors, but dropped most of them when the wholesale price of electricity crashed as competing generators took advantage of cheap natural gas obtained by fracking. The company paid millions of dollars in penalties for the cancellations.
A Recycling Candidate Drops Out
West Virginia, which the Trump administration named late in the selection process as a candidate for a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus, has backed out, apparently changing its mind about hosting disposal of nuclear waste.
The Energy Department has asked for proposals for the campuses, which could include factories that reprocess the fuel to recover plutonium and unused uranium and fashion that into new fuel, as well as host nuclear reactors and other nuclear facilities. The department is seeking to marry waste disposal with massive investments in job-producing industries.
California Holds to Its Moratorium but Orders A Study
Governor Gavin Newsom signed two nuclear bills into law. After months of discussion, the legislature in Sacramento decided not to lift the moratorium on new reactors, which has been in place since 1976 and bars new reactor construction until the federal government approves a permanent disposal method. The bill was watered down into a law that the governor’s office said would “Develop a comprehensive assessment with public input on the potential for new nuclear power plants that could help the state achieve 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2045 and the potential role of ‘advanced’ nuclear technologies to support critical infrastructure in California.”
The second bill creates a “Fusion Research and Development Innovation Initiative” that will distribute $5 million for research and development.
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