Features

“The nuclear renaissance is real here,” said Ontario Power Generation’s Subo Sinnathamby on May 8, one year to the day after OPG secured a final investment decision to build the first of four planned BWRX-300 reactors at its Darlington nuclear power plant, and shortly after the new reactor’s foundation was lifted into place. “We got our license to construct in April and our [final investment decision] in May, and we’ve been off to the races since.”

Here is a recap of recent industry happenings:

ADVANCED REACTOR MARKETPLACE

Fluor gets X-energy contract for Dow’s Seadrift project

Fluor Corporation has signed a contract to support X-energy’s planned small modular reactor project at Dow’s UCC Seadrift Operations facility in southern Texas. Fluor’s role will initially involve delivery of front-end loading stage 2 services, including project definition, strategic planning, feasibility assessment, cost control, and risk mitigation. X-energy plans to deploy four 80-MW SMRs to replace old infrastructure and supply electricity and industrial steam for the Seadrift facility, which produces materials for such applications as food packaging, footwear, wire and cable insulation, solar cell components, and medical and pharmaceutical packaging. X-energy submitted a construction permit application for the project, which is supported by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March 2025.

Nielson

The renewed global interest in nuclear power is often framed as a policy story driven by decarbonization goals, energy security concerns, and surging electricity demand from digital infrastructure and electrification. While these forces are real and durable, they materially understate the challenge at hand. The practical constraint on nuclear deployment today is not strategic will, but execution. Specifically, the challenge lies in how nuclear projects are financed, how risk is allocated, and how investors assess credibility in a sector defined by long timelines and asymmetric downside risk.

Hash Hashemian
president@ans.org

Kindergarten classrooms, the control rooms of newly completed reactors, and the meeting rooms of ANS local sections all have one thing in common: they are only made useful once they are filled with hardworking and passionate people.

In March, I had the privilege of engaging with some of the people in these spaces: the students, regulators, lawmakers, and fellow scientists from across several states who are working to build up the nuclear industry every day. These interactions served as yet another reminder that people serve as the bedrock of our work to push nuclear energy forward.

The month began here in my home city of Oak Ridge, where I welcomed a group of kindergartners from Woodland Elementary School to tour both the headquarters of AMS and the Roane State Community College Nuclear Technology Lab.

Nicolas Stauff

Data centers power our digital lives—along with many aspects of our economy and the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence. Electricity demand is rising rapidly, with the domestic data center load projected to increase from 4 percent to 9 percent of U.S. electricity consumption by 2030. This surge is already reshaping utility planning, grid interconnection queues, and the market for reliable power nationwide.

Nuclear energy is well matched to data center needs, because it provides reliable, 24/7 electricity with stable long-term costs. Modern hyperscale data center campuses can require hundreds of megawatts for IT equipment and cooling, and many applications demand maximum uptime. At the same time, leading hyperscalers have aggressive decarbonization commitments that limit reliance on fossil generation. Data centers also require fiber connectivity, a skilled workforce, and local acceptance—yet they can deliver meaningful tax base and employment impacts, especially when coupled with a major energy project.

Before the Fukushima Daiichi accident in March 2011, nuclear power from 54 reactors provided about 30 percent of Japan’s electricity. In the wake of the disaster, Japan shut down every one of its reactors.

Recently, the country has been restarting its nuclear power plants. Among its current fleet of 33 operable reactors, fewer than half have been restarted. Nuclear power is currently providing about 8.5 percent of Japan’s electricity (with natural gas and coal accounting for more than 60 percent).

The Japanese government’s present energy plan, announced last year, calls for nuclear power to meet 20 percent of the country’s electricity needs by 2040. While the government views nuclear as a crucial asset toward meeting its goal of net zero emissions by 2050, public support for nuclear energy also continues to increase. A 2012 Pew Research poll—conducted one year after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster—indicated that 70 percent of the public opposed nuclear power. However, a 2022 poll by Nikkei Business Publications suggests that now, more than 50 percent of the public supports nuclear power—if safety can be ensured.

Contributing their expertise to these restarts in recent years are young nuclear industry professionals who were trained a decade ago in a mentorship/training program involving U.S. institutions.

This “Super Engineer Project” was sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry and Hokkaido University from 2015 to 2017. METI sponsored the project to improve the Japanese nuclear safety culture by learning from the U.S. safety culture.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

May is a month when we pause—briefly—to recognize something that too often goes unsaid: the extraordinary performance of the existing U.S. nuclear fleet. Capacity factors remain above 90 percent (with a median of 91.29 for the three-year period 2023–2025—see Nuclear News, May 2026, p. 24), an impressive figure delivered at a scale unmatched anywhere else on the globe. That level of sustained output is not an accident of design; it is a daily achievement. It reflects the discipline, professionalism, and pride of the men and women who operate and maintain these facilities, often without fanfare.

In this issue, you will also read about the important work researchers at our national laboratories are doing to extract even greater efficiency from the plants we already have. That effort deserves more attention, because it points to a fundamental truth: the fastest, most reliable way to expand nuclear generation in the United States is not solely through new builds—it is by maximizing the assets already on the grid.

Nuclear medicine has come a long way since Henri Becquerel first observed the penetrating energy of radioactive materials in 1896. Today, technetium-99m alone is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures every year—from cardiovascular imaging and bone scans to cancer detection—making it the undisputed workhorse of nuclear medicine. That single statistic tells you something important: An enormous portion of modern diagnostic medicine rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation, one built around a small number of aging research reactors that were never originally designed for continuous isotope production.

The noticeable exuberance within the nuclear community as a whole appears to have spilled over into the waste management sphere as well, judging from the 2026 Waste Management Conference, held March 8–12 in Phoenix, Ariz., and sponsored by Waste Management Symposia.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Efficient and Innovative Nuclear Materials and Technology Solutions,” and many of the scheduled panels and technical sessions revolved around how nuclear growth and technological advancements are affecting the back end of the fuel cycle, as well as how the cleanup of legacy sites is enabling new nuclear development.

For 45 years, Duane Arnold Energy Center operated in Linn County, Ia., near the town of Palo and just northwest of Cedar Rapids. The facility, owned by NextEra Energy, was the only nuclear power plant in the state.

In August 2020, a historic derecho swept across eastern Iowa with winds approaching 140 miles per hour. Damage to the plant’s cooling towers accelerated a shutdown that had already been planned, and the facility entered decommissioning soon after, with its fuel removed in October of that year. Iowa’s only nuclear plant had gone off line.

Today the national energy landscape looks very different than it did just six short years ago. Electricity demand is rising rapidly as data centers, artificial intelligence infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and electrification expand across the country. Reliable, carbon-free baseload power has become increasingly valuable. In that context, Linn County has approved the rezoning necessary to support the recommissioning and restart of Duane Arnold and is actively supporting NextEra’s efforts to secure the remaining state and federal approvals.

As part of a future consent-based approach by the federal government to site new deep geologic repositories for nuclear waste, local communities and states that are considering hosting such facilities are sure to have many questions. Currently, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is the only example of such a repository in operation, and it offers the opportunity for state and local officials to visit and judge for themselves the risks and benefits of hosting a similar facility. But its history can also provide lessons for these officials, particularly the political process leading up to the opening of WIPP, the safety of WIPP operations and transportation of waste from generator facilities to the site, and the economic impacts the project has had on the local area of Carlsbad, as well as the rest of the state of New Mexico.

U.S. nuclear capacity additions are falling short of ambitious expectations set (and then reset) in recent years. Despite construction permits submitted or approved at this writing, new commercial, utility-scale nuclear generation is still a few years away from operation.

As the United States faces surging electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence, data centers, and a push to bring manufacturing back home, Idaho National Laboratory is leading an effort to modernize and expand the nation’s nuclear power capabilities by revamping the Department of Energy’s Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program.

Last September, in the Chicago suburb of Lemont, Ill., Argonne National Laboratory hosted its first AI STEM Education Summit. More than 180 educators from high schools, community colleges, and universities; STEM administrators; and experts in various disciplines convened at “One Ecosystem, Many Pathways–Building an AI-Ready STEM Workforce” to discuss how artificial intelligence is reshaping STEM-related industries, including the implications for the nuclear engineering classroom and workforce.

Admiral William Houston

As U.S. Navy submarines surface through Arctic ice during Ice Camp 2026, they demonstrate more than operational proficiency in one of the harshest environments on Earth. They reaffirm a technological truth first proven in August 1958, when the USS Nautilus completed its submerged transit of the North Pole: nuclear power enables access anywhere, anytime.

The Arctic is unforgiving, with vast distances, extreme cold, shifting ice, and no logistical infrastructure. Conventional propulsion is constrained by fuel, air, and endurance. Nuclear propulsion removes those constraints. Only a nuclear-powered submarine can operate anywhere in the world’s oceans, including under the polar ice, undetected and at maximum capability for extended periods. Nuclear power provides sustained high speed and the endurance to reposition across the globe without refueling.

Nuclear rocket propulsion has been investigated for decades, and NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission carried out significant testing in the 1960s as part of the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application program. NERVA chased the potential of the efficiency and energy density of nuclear thermal propulsion to extend our reach to new space frontiers before the program ended in 1973.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

In this month’s issue of Nuclear News, readers will find coverage of the “other” areas where nuclear technology is pushing into new frontiers. From marine nuclear propulsion to nuclear systems that enable planetary exploration, the articles in these pages are a reminder that the influence of applied nuclear science extends far beyond the electric grid.

When many people hear the phrase “civil nuclear technology,” they still think first of power plants—an understandable association. Nuclear power has been one of the most reliable sources of large-scale electricity for decades. It is our storefront.

But nuclear technology has always been bigger than electrons.

The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.

When the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy launched the Optimizing Nuclear Waste and Advanced Reactor Disposal Systems (ONWARDS) program in 2022, it posed a challenge that the nuclear industry had never seriously confronted before: how to design waste management solutions that anticipate the coming shift to advanced reactors and not merely retrofit existing systems built for an older generation of technology. The program’s objectives were ambitious—reduce disposal footprint, enable scalable pathways for unfamiliar waste streams, and build the technical foundations for future disposal—yet also tightly grounded in the realities of emerging nuclear fuel cycles. For the nuclear community, this was a timely call. Advanced reactors were accelerating toward deployment, but the waste management systems needed to support them had not kept pace.

Hash Hashemian (president@ans.org), proud grandfather of 1-year-old Vera Rose Sizemore.

With the 2026 ANS Annual Conference right around the corner, planning is well underway, with many exceptional speakers who will explore how fusion and fission can turn breakthrough innovation into real, scalable power that drives our clean energy future. I am looking forward to seeing the nuclear community in Denver in June.

If you want to hear some of my thoughts on the current state of nuclear power before the conference, you can watch or listen to the March 3 episode of the Blockspace podcast, on which I was a guest (blockspace.media/podcast/americas-nuclear-revival-is-here-w-dr-hash-hashemian/). There, I aimed to both reach a broader audience and promote the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology.

The episode contains a wide-ranging discussion about the current state of nuclear energy in America, touching on regulatory reform, surging electricity demand, and what it will take to maintain U.S. leadership in nuclear development.