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Late last month, the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing issued a conditional commitment for $17.5 billion in American Nuclear Supply Chain Loans. The financing will support up to five projects, each pairing Westinghouse with a utility or energy company partner to build two AP1000 reactors, ten in total, in the USA. Those ten reactors will produce enough electricity to power nearly 10 million American homes around the clock, every day of the year. The loans will speed up the build time by up to three years in line with President Trump’s executive order of having ten new large reactors under construction by 2030.
This is what America needs right now and it is exactly what ACC has asked for.
Two weeks before this announcement, ACC President Chris Barnard and External Affairs Director Isaiah Menning laid out a federal energy framework in American Affairs built on three pillars: permitting, capital, and innovation. On the capital pillar, they wrote that “more robust public finance would also help build long-term domestic supply chains for important industries such as solar, uranium, and critical mineral production that are currently dominated by adversaries like China and Russia.” The American Nuclear Supply Chain Loans are just that very same argument with a tangible figure attached.
The AP1000 is proof that the United States knows how to design top-tier nuclear reactors and it is the only licensed large-scale advanced commercial reactor operating in the United States today. However, everything upstream from that design (the forging, the steam generators, the specialized components that take years to manufacture and deliver) has withered over decades of not building. The industry calls these “long-lead items” and right now they block the critical path to every project. Ultimately, the problem is that you cannot pour concrete around a pressure vessel that has not even been forged.
The good news is that these new loans solve that exact problem. The financing allows Westinghouse and its utility partners to procure long-lead items now, in bulk, at fixed prices. Bulk purchasing drives down the cost of the individual components while the fixed prices removes a major source of overruns that have haunted nuclear construction. Ten reactors worth of orders gives American manufacturers the demand signal they finally need to reinvest in capacity. A single AP1000 might power a million homes, but the plan to build ten revives an entire industry.
To be fair, some on the right will hear “federal loans” and reach reflexively for the subsidy objection. It’s a fair instinct, but the structure of these loans actually counters it.
These are loans, not grants, and they remain conditional on technical, legal, environmental, and financial requirements that must be satisfied before any money exchanges hands. Westinghouse and its utility partner must each commit $500 million in equity upfront and $1 billion per project before accessing DOE funds. This is a good alignment of incentives via a joint ownership between the reactor vendor and the operating utility. Seven potential partners have signed letters of intent for five available slots, which means utilities are competing for these projects rather than just being coaxed into them.
Russia and China currently dominate global nuclear exports and much of the fuel cycle. Every reactor America forgoes building is a reactor a foreign firm builds somewhere else with decades of geopolitical leverage attached to the fuel contracts and maintenance agreements that follow. Rebuilding the domestic supply chain is imperative for these ten reactors, and it matters more for every reactor to follow. Ultimately, we have to face the fact that a functioning American nuclear industrial base is the precondition for competing in the export markets previous generations abandoned.
Now, it must be acknowledged that a conditional commitment is a commitment to intent, not a closed loan. Conditions remain, agreements must be finalized, and the projects still have to be built well and on time! The template is on the table, however. All the problems we have outlined with the withered manufacturing infrastructure of reactor components applies too to uranium enrichment, critical mineral processing, and grid equipment. Remember too that capital is but one pillar of three. Good financing cannot fix a ten-year permitting timeline alone; durable NEPA reform and a bipartisan permitting reform packagge remain essential to the broader energy agenda.
The hard truth is that America stopped building reactors and the supply chain withered accordingly. Now the equity is committed, the purchase orders are structured, and American manufacturers are finally getting their demand signal back.
The orders for America’s nuclear renaissance are in.
Ryan Anderson is the Stakeholder Communications Manager at the American Conservation Coalition.