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.
A $200 Billion Deal with Korea Includes 8 Reactors
The White House announced that South Korea will invest $200 billion in U.S. energy projects, part of a deal under which Korea will avoid enormous tariffs. The deal includes eight large nuclear reactors: six of them Westinghouse AP1000s and two Korean APR-1400s.
How this fits in with a previous settlement between Westinghouse and the Korean reactor builders is not immediately clear, but it gives Korea a toehold in a U.S. market. The market would be huge if the U.S. achieves its goal of quadrupling nuclear energy output by mid-century.
Thus, the relationship between the American and Korean reactor builders, previously convoluted and obscure, remains uncertain.
The Korea Electric Power Corporation and a subsidiary, Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, known as KHNP, sell the Advanced Power Reactor-1400, a pressurized water reactor with two steam generators. The APR-1400 borrows from the design of the Combustion Engineering System 80+ reactor. Arizona Public Service’s Palo Verde plant, finished in the late 1980s, uses the same design. Combustion Engineering’s nuclear business was bought by Westinghouse in 2000.
The APR-1400 design was used by South Korea at the Barakah plant in the United Arab Emirates, and construction there set an international benchmark. Work started in July 2012, and the last of four units came online in September 2024. The speed of construction has made KHNP sought after for its project management skills.
Around the world, eight APR-1400 units are in operation, and a ninth is scheduled to reach commercial status this month. None have been built in the U.S., but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the APR-1400 in 2019, a major step towards marketability in this country.
There is a catch, though: the Koreans did not have permission to use Westinghouse’s intellectual property associated with the design of the 80+ reactor, and U.S. law banned re-export of U.S. technology without permission. That meant a one-time deal to get the reactors built in the United Arab Emirates.
In January 2025, Westinghouse announced a “global settlement” with the Korean companies, but kept the details confidential. According to published reports, the settlement requires Korea to pay Westinghouse royalties for each APR-1400 that Korea exports, and bars KEPCO and KHNP from North America and parts of Europe. The blog Neutron Bytes recently cataloged the public reports.
But the new deal appears to make space for the first two Korean reactors stateside. If the APR-1400 goes head-to-head with the AP1000, the Korean companies will have to pay royalties to Westinghouse. However, the APR-1400 would have to be significantly less expensive to build for the Koreans to turn a profit. Other issues include Korea’s ability to bring large numbers of experts here to manage the work. In September 2025, armed American immigration agents raided a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia and arrested 300 technicians.
Other non-nuclear aspects of the investment deal are still in question, including a natural gas pipeline in Alaska. The Trump administration’s statements about the status of the deal have been more optimistic than those of the Korean government.
Korea’s role in future large reactor orders in the United States could take several forms. In June, the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing and Westinghouse announced a partnership under which the government would offer $17.5 billion in loans to finance the long lead-time items for AP1000 models. The Energy Department is evaluating applications from several utilities.
But that hardware, for example reactor pressure vessels and steam generators, would most likely be built abroad, quite possibly in Korea. HD Hyundai Heavy Industries and Doosan Enerbility are likely candidates.
Further complicating the connections, Westinghouse is headed towards an initial public offering of stock, and Korea is considering buying a stake. The share Korea wants to procure has been reported as being between 5 and 20 percent. The U.S. government has also floated the idea of taking a “golden share” in the company, which would give it veto power over major decisions. Brookfield Asset Management, a Canadian turnaround firm that brought Westinghouse out of bankruptcy, is the majority owner. The rest is owned by Cameco, the Canadian uranium mining giant.
As Interest in New Reactors Picks Up, So Does the Job Market
New nuclear designs are hoping to establish their economic value in the energy marketplace, but a recent study finds the verdict for nuclear engineers is already clear: it pays.
A higher education research firm, the HEA Group, compared the earnings of people who graduated from college in the last decade. The average for all institutions and from over 32,000 majors was $64,500. At eleven schools with nuclear engineering programs, salaries four years after graduation ranged from $116,000 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) to $87,200 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).
The Department of Energy found at the end of last year that of more than 100 occupations in electricity generation, the median pay for three of the top five were in nuclear energy: engineers ($127,500), reactor operators ($122,600), and technicians ($104,200).
The Energy Department survey also found that among companies that manufacture materials in the nuclear industry, 63 percent found hiring was “very difficult.” Over 80 percent of utilities, nuclear construction companies, and related companies said they had “some” difficulty in hiring.
But information about good pay and job prospects does not seem to have filtered down to the undergraduate level; Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education found in its most recent survey that bachelor’s degrees in nuclear energy fell by 25 percent between 2012 and 2022. Two universities in the survey said they were phasing out the major. Master’s degrees did better, rising 20 percent in 2022 compared to 2021. PhD programs also reported higher enrollment.
Oklo Inc., which wants to build dozens of small fast reactors, recently donated $3 million to The Ohio State University to establish an undergraduate nuclear engineering major and make other improvements.
At the vocational education level, parties interested in building nuclear reactors are trying to beef up the supply chain for trained personnel. In September, New York State awarded $3.7 million to the state’s Building & Construction Trades Council to help train skilled craft workers, including pipefitters, sheet metal workers, iron workers, and others. It also provided $1.9 million to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to establish a consortium with community colleges to train welders, radiation protection workers, and others.
New York plans to invest $40 million in vocational training in preparation for adding 1 gigawatt of new nuclear capacity.
NRC Takes Another Path for an Environmental Impact Statement
Major federal actions like license approvals require an environmental impact statement published by the lead federal agency, although the applicant often hires a private contractor to do the work.
In a step that the NRC says is first of a kind, the agency has published an environmental impact statement based on a draft prepared by an applicant, Fermi America. The company has proposed to build four AP1000 reactors near Amarillo, Texas, as part of a data center complex called Project Matador. The approach “could streamline future reviews while upholding NRC’s environmental standards,” the agency said.
The NRC remains responsible for the content of the statement and is now seeking public comment.
Reactor Construction Revitalizes a Small Town But Offers Challenges
TerraPower’s Natrium reactor project has been hailed as a model, not only because it is an advanced reactor that is well-suited to a grid that must cope with intermittent renewables, but also because it offers new life to a Wyoming town, Kemmerer, which has seen declining tax revenue and layoffs of its residents as the local utility has moved away from coal-fired generation. The Natrium reactor will help meet increasing electric demand in the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West.
But Natrium construction, expected to cost $4 billion, will require housing for 1,600 workers, and the Natrium project’s lead contractor, Bechtel, has backed out. Bechtel had been looking for proposals to build the housing. The town has fewer than 2,500 residents.
The construction boom has created other growing pains; the town’s sewage treatment plant will need an upgrade, too.
Yet there are signs of growth. Kemmerer has a new Super 8 hotel, pizza parlor, and coffee roaster; the prospect of more than 1,000 well-paid workers is sure to attract other new businesses.
Nuclear Fuel Supply Chain Is Advancing
Urenco, the British-Dutch-German consortium that operates a uranium enrichment plant in New Mexico, announced that it has begun production at a new cascade of centrifuges there, its sixth. Urenco has been expanding its capacity as part of a campaign to meet the needs of new reactors.
Enrichment plants raise the proportion of uranium-235, the type that splits easily in reactors, relative to uranium-238, the dominant isotope. The output is measured in “separative work units,” known as SWU. The company, by far the largest enricher in the United States, began operating in 2010, and by 2024 had reached 4.3 SWU per year. The new cascade adds 700,000 SWU per year of capacity. A seventh is planned for late this year, and an eighth is planned for next year, for a total of 7 million SWU.
U.S. demand is for 13 to 15 million SWU per year, and most current-generation plants run on uranium enriched to about 5 percent. But most advanced reactor designs want enrichment of nearly 20 percent, so future demand could be much higher, and the United States is weaning itself off of enrichment services provided by Russia.
Centrus, a private company that traces its corporate lineage to the old Atomic Energy Commission’s enrichment plants, has a small-capacity cascade in Ohio that it is also expanding. The Energy Department announced in January a $2.7 billion program to expand uranium enrichment.
Thanks for reading!