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 Replacement for Yucca?
The Trump administration is circulating draft legislative language that would radically amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. Rather than the government accepting used fuel and burying it at Yucca Mountain, which is still technically the law of the land, the work would shift to the “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses.”
In 1987, NWPA amendments designated Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, as the sole location that the DOE could continue to study for a federal repository. The Trump Administration’s draft amendments to the NWPA would allow the DOE to look beyond Yucca to other “willing states” for waste storage and disposal.
The draft language, as reported by Politico, is a follow-up to an announcement in January that the DOE would seek volunteers to host the campuses. Under partnerships between the federal government and the host states, private companies would carry on such activities as reprocessing spent fuel to recover valuable materials, enrich uranium, fabricate new fuel, and possibly operate advanced reactors. They could also dispose of the wastes, although the federal government would retain legal responsibility.
The campuses, according to the DOE, will “advance manufacturing and regional economic growth, enhance national energy security and build a coherent end-to-end nuclear strategy for the country.’’ To realize the Trump Administration’s goal of having 400 gigawatts of nuclear capacity online by 2050, the nation would need hundreds more reactors, and a vastly expanded fuel infrastructure.
With the prospect of thousands of jobs, 28 states have expressed interest in hosting the campuses, according to the DOE. In July, the Department signed memoranda of Understanding with five states, making them the top candidates: Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Idaho.
Spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in secure pools of water or in dry casks at the places where it was used, a solution that is safe for many decades to come, but creates three prominent problems.
One is financial: Under the 1982 act, utilities were forced to sign contracts with the DOE and pay a fee of one tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour that their reactors produced, in exchange for a promise from the department to begin picking up the fuel in 1998. When the Yucca program stalled, the utilities sued, and the courts found the government liable for the extra costs of storage, which now run about $800 million a year. A second issue is that the program is so delayed that some of the fuel is now sitting in locations where the reactor has been retired, decommissioned, and demolished, but the dry casks still require inspection and security. And the third is that it is a talking point for nuclear opponents who would like to block new reactors.
The draft legislation would make it the policy of the United States to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, to the extent practical, through the private sector. The energy potential of the used fuel had been written off under the 1982 law because President Gerald Ford decided that the United States would be setting a bad example by recovering materials from the fuel, which is one route to nuclear proliferation. President Jimmy Carter, who followed him, took the same position. Reagan then changed the policy, but not the practice. Now, the Trump administration would like the country to start reprocessing, partly because advanced reactors can readily use the plutonium as fuel.
As added inducement, the draft bill would make the Nuclear Waste Fund available for use and reinstate a fee on nuclear generators. Payments by the utilities were halted in 2014 in a court case brought by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s main trade association, which argued that if the fee was meant to fund the development of Yucca, and the Obama administration had frozen the work there, utilities should not have to pay. With the money paid in thus far, plus accrued interest, the Fund is approaching $50 billion.
Dr. Adam Stein, the Director of Nuclear Energy Innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, pointed out that in addition to reserving the money for Yucca, current law also prevents the government from evaluating any other site. “Parts of this bill are simply necessary,” he said.
The draft bill maintains federal authority, stating that “Nothing in this Act shall affect the responsibility of the Federal Government to provide for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste resulting from either governmental or private sector activities”, and that the DOE “shall give priority to facilities and activities located at the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus in carrying out this responsibility.”
Some experts are calling out that selecting five potential hosts for the fuel cycle campuses is only a preliminary step. “Five signed memoranda are not five host communities,” wrote Vincent Ialenti, who formerly worked at the Department of Energy managing the “Consent-Based Siting Consortia,” an effort under which twelve teams around the country sat down with communities that could host a repository to talk about the costs and benefits.
Ialenti, writing in an opinion column in The Hill, said that “No final host agreement has been signed, no construction funds awarded and the states have agreed only to continue negotiations. That is a real beginning, but it is not a victory. Treating it as one risks repeating the cycle of overpromising and disappointment that has paralyzed American nuclear waste policy for four decades.”
An Ambitious Fusion Groundbreaking
California-based start-up Pacific Fusion has broken ground in New Mexico on a fusion demonstration that it says will cost $1 billion and be running by 2030. If successful, the plant would still be far short of a commercial model, but it would achieve a first, releasing more energy from fusion than it takes to power the plant.
Lawrence Livermore National Lab made headlines in 2022 by using a fusion machine, originally built for weapons research, to make as much energy as was applied to the fuel. But it did not actually create energy overall. Lawrence Livermore counted the energy of the lasers used to squeeze the fuel, but not the energy needed to make the laser beams, which was considerably larger.
Pacific Fusion has a different concept, using electric current to make a magnetic field. The field compresses and heats the fuel to the extreme temperatures required for fusion. The company says its hardware and materials are less expensive and consume less energy. If that approach works, the company will still need to solve the challenge of repeating the procedure promptly without having to wait for the equipment to cool, among other problems.
The Albuquerque apparatus will be able to create several fusion events per day, the chief technical officer told TechCrunch. Lawrence Livermore created about one event per day. But a commercial plant would need to do that much more often, perhaps once per second.
Whatever the technical challenges, the investors seem convinced. The company, founded in 2023, has raised more than $1 billion, led by a venture capital firm, General Catalyst, that has invested in a variety of companies involved in power production and transmission. The funds are released as the company reaches technical milestones.
According to the Fusion Industry Association, total investments in the field have reached over $14 billion.
It’s Official: Nuclear Energy Is an Element of National Security
The Trump administration has listed nuclear energy as part of its National Security Science and Technology Strategy, and told federal agencies to prioritize its use as one of several “key enabling technologies.”
Among other steps, it calls for facilitating partnerships between community colleges and other educational institutions to develop a workforce to build and operate reactors. It also calls for public/private partnerships to advance nuclear technology, both fission and fusion, and for microgrids using advanced reactors.
The Army Drafts Five Reactors
The U.S. Army has chosen five sites for micro-reactors, and five suppliers to each deliver one, with the first scheduled to be in service by September 2028. It expects to spend $2.2 billion.
“Everything that we do—from communications to radar—requires constant energy,” said Dr. Jeff Waksman, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment, in a statement. “And when you think about where things are going in the future with drones and energy weapons, there’s just more demand for electricity.”
The Army also has a program to demonstrate a transportable reactor. The five proposed reactors in the recently-announced program are intended to operate in a single spot for years.
The Army appears to be hedging its bets, with a variety of suppliers and reactor models, all first-of-a-kind. The cohort includes three companies with extensive nuclear experience and two start-ups.
Westinghouse will install a reactor at Fort Drum, in New York, although it will not resemble the big Westinghouse reactors that have been operating on the grid for decades. BWX Technologies, which builds reactor cores for the Navy, will build a reactor at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. General Atomics, which has built dozens of research reactors, will build a microreactor at Fort Hood, Texas. The two start-ups are Antares Nuclear, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Radiant Industries, at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Six and Counting
Westinghouse’s eVinci microreactor has achieved initial criticality, the sixth model to do so this year, at the Nevada National Security Site.
Westinghouse is not a start-up; its pressurized water design dominates the industry. But eVinci uses TRISO fuel, particles of fissile material wrapped in concentric layers of heat-resistant materials. The reactor has “a compact architecture designed to provide resilient energy in remote and challenging environments, such as defense applications and space,” the company said. It is meant to go eight years without refueling.
The Canadian province of Saskatchewan is providing $59 million for a demonstration of the technology, which is well-suited for remote communities in the far north. Other entities are pursuing use of the reactor in ships and on the moon.
At TMI, an Expensive U-Turn Nears Completion
A specially built transformer, weighing half a million pounds, has arrived from South Korea at the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor, a key step in restarting the plant, which is now called the Crane Clean Energy Center.
Constellation shut the plant in 2019, because of low electricity prices and to cut expenses. In 2024 Microsoft signed a 20 year contract with Constellation to restart the plant, reportedly at an above-market price.
In decommissioning, Constellation drained the oil out of the old transformer and then destroyed it. The new transformer is one of three that the plant will need, and it cost nearly $10 million, shipping not included. The total cost of the re-start is about $1.6 billion.
Re-start was originally scheduled for 2028, but with the opportunity for revenue from a strong electricity market, the company hopes to have it in service next year.
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