The Nuclear Company takes on large-scale project management
The U.S. nuclear industry is seeing a surge in interest on the back of projected demand increases, but the project planning needed for large, gigawatt plants is lacking.
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Emerging from stealth mode in July 2024, The Nuclear Company announced plans to construct a series of large nuclear power plants in the United States and began its public relations offensive with ‘The Nuclear Frontier’ bus tour through six states, and Washington DC.
The company believes it can help build a fleet of nuclear power plants across the country through a design-once, build-many approach by strengthening coalitions among communities, regulators, and financial stakeholders.
It will concentrate on proven, licensed technology and develop standardized processes and scheduling to avoid timetable and cost overruns suffered by recent nuclear builds in the United States and Europe.
The company has been incorporated for over a year – early investors include CIV, True Ventures, Wonder Ventures, Goldcrest Capital, and MCJ Collective – but it emerged in the summer of 2024 amid a growing realization that a lot of new capacity would be needed, and soon, to feed rapidly-advancing artificial intelligence (AI) technology and data centers.
In recent years, utilities and elected and appointed officials have started making commitments to small modular reactor (SMR) Generation IV technology, but most have shied away from taking a position on larger builds using Generation III or III+ technology.
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This was until the uptick in demand from AI and data computing companies became apparent, says The Nuclear Company’s Chief Development Officer Juliann Edwards.
“While we're excited to see (SMR commitments), what we would hate to see happen is a significant bundling … when you could have solved the problem with proven technology that was already licensed and was just built,” says Edwards.
Developers must continue to progress with SMRs where the economics and demand make sense, but there are also tried-and-tested designs and multiple existing sites that can be exploited to reach new capacity goals, she says.
“We (at The Nuclear Company) are not developing technology, we're developing the infrastructure, the financing framework, and ultimately the development model that will start a fleet of projects, from point of inception to a commercial operation date.”
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that increased electricity demand from data centers, electric vehicles, and industry drives to decarbonize, mean the United States will need to nearly triple its nuclear capacity to almost 300 GW by 2050.
Some 60 to 95 GW of new capacity could potentially be installed at existing or recently retired nuclear power plants, the DOE said in a September 2024 report which examined 54 operating and 11 recently retired nuclear power plant sites across 31 states.
Existing sites per state with space for new reactors
(Click to enlarge)
Source: US Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy
Step change
The DOE ‘Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear’ report, originally released as a ‘living document’ in March 2023 and updated in September 2024, noted the new IT-connected customers were willing and able to support the investment in new nuclear generation assets.
“Combined with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) incentives, this demand has created a step change in the valuation of the existing fleet and new reactors,” the report said.
“In 2022, utilities were shutting down nuclear reactors; in 2024, they are extending reactor operations to 80 years, planning to uprate capacity, and restarting formerly closed reactors.”
The United States has built just two new reactors in the last around 30 years, Vogtle Unit 3 and Unit 4 in Georgia through Southern Company’s Georgia Power, though the reactors reached criticality seven years later than originally planned and on a budget of more than double the preliminary projected cost at over $30 billion.
The Nuclear Company is not ready to announce which reactor technology they aim to focus on, though it is assumed that Westinghouse’s AP1000, the same technology as the Vogtle units, is likely to be high on their lists for consideration.
Filling the gap
The company’s role as deal maker for the industry has been applauded as meeting a need for nuclear development coordination within the U.S. market.
“It’s nice to see The Nuclear Company coming in and saying, we're going to take the risk, package this like a project developer should, and copy and paste that project development across a large number of projects,” says Kathryn Huff Associate Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois.
The utilities only initially have appetite for one or two gigawatts and are waiting to see if anyone else will attempt to build more AP1000s, says Huff, who served as assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy from 2022 to 2024.
“The product development role is definitely missing. I always recommend being in partnership with something like a project developer. It’s a niche that certainly needs filling,” she says.
In many countries, it is the government that takes the project management role, but in the United States, utilities cannot rely on that support for multi-gigawatt projects, such as fleet-scale nuclear.
Edwards believes The Nuclear Company can fill that gap.
“We are the company that is coming in, securing debt financing, bringing the equity partners, building out the schedule, understanding what long lead equipment has to be procured, setting up the entire project management organization, and essentially running all those parallel work streams,” Edwards says.
By Paul Day