Yesterday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it has received an application from Westinghouse to renew and update the design certification (DC) for its AP1000 reactor. This application seeks to formally incorporate the lessons learned from the construction of Vogtle-3 and -4 into the design control document (DCD) of the AP1000.

This long-expected submittal builds on previous plans at both the NRC and Westinghouse for the future of gigawatt-scale light water reactor deployments in the United States.

Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe, Poland’s state-owned utility, has formally submitted an application for a construction license to build a nuclear power plant at the Lubiatowo-Kopalino site in Pomerania. The country’s first nuclear power plant will consist of three Westinghouse AP1000 units with a total installed capacity of 3,750 MWe. The construction and engineering contractor for the project is a U.S.-based consortium of Westinghouse and Bechtel.

During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.

In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released a notice of intent to conduct a scoping process and prepare an environmental impact statement to evaluate Fermi America’s plan to construct and operate four AP1000 reactors at its Project Matador Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus in Texas.

While that announcement may seem routine, the process envisioned is not. As part of the company’s combined license (COL) application with the NRC, it has agreed to participate in an accelerated environmental review pilot program under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Under this pilot, the applicant(s) develop a draft EIS under NRC supervision.

March has put Westinghouse front and center in multiple news stories, from its role in Japan’s investment in U.S. nuclear energy to the economic impact that 10 potential AP1000 reactors could bring to the United States.

Westinghouse Electric Company’s plans to deploy its AP1000 reactor in Poland have taken an important step forward with a credit agreement between the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) and Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe (PEJ). The agreement represents the first phase of financing to support the initial engineering and environmental site work needed before construction can begin on Poland’s first nuclear power plant, at the Lubiatowo-Kopalino site in the Choczewo municipality of Pomerania.

Westinghouse Electric Company will collaborate with Tetra Tech Canada to explore the possible development and deployment of Westinghouse’s nuclear power reactors in Ontario, Canada, under a memorandum of understanding signed by the companies on January 28.

Building Poland’s nuclear program from the ground up is progressing with the country's first nuclear power plant project: three AP1000 reactors at the Choczewo site in the voivodeship of Pomerania.

Polish state-owned utility Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe has announced some recent developments over the past few months, including turbine island procurement and strengthened engagement with domestic financial institutions, in addition to new data from the country’s Energy Ministry showing record‑high public acceptance, which demonstrates growing nuclear momentum in the country.

Santee Cooper, South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility, recently announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Brookfield Asset Management.

The Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were the subject of two different announcements yesterday about new nuclear developments.

David Garcia

If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.

But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.

Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.

For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”

In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.

Less than a week after the news of Fermi America’s first collaboration for its Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus being built in partnership with Texas Tech University, the company has announced three more industry partners: Parkhill, Lee Lewis Construction, and Westinghouse.

Texas Tech University and Fermi America shared plans on June 26 to build “the world’s largest advanced energy and artificial intelligence campus” in Amarillo, Texas, near the Pantex nuclear weapons plant. Fermi America is a company cofounded by former Texas governor and energy secretary Rick Perry and his son, Griffin Perry, a cofounder and past senior advisor at Grey Rock Investment Partners. The announcement—a first press release from relative newcomer Fermi America—says the company “proudly answers President Donald J. Trump’s call to deliver global energy and AI dominance.”

As trade negotiations are in the works between the United States and China, Washington, D.C., has the advantage in semiconductors but nuclear power is a different story, according to a June 9 article in the Hong Kong–based South China Morning Post.

Santee Cooper is satisfied with the response generated by its initial request for proposals to buy what remains of the Summer-2 and -3 nuclear power plant project in South Carolina. The RFP was issued in January and the application window closed May 5.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is holding an in-person open house on Thursday, May 15, to discuss the 2024 safety performance of the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia.

Dozens of Westinghouse employees and supply chain partners descended on Washington, D.C., last week to build legislative support for new nuclear projects.

South Carolina public utility Santee Cooper and its partner South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G) called a halt to the Summer-2 and -3 AP1000 construction project in July 2017, citing costly delays and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse. The well-chronicled legal fallout included indictments and settlements, and ultimately left Santee Cooper with the ownership of nonnuclear assets at the construction site in Jenkinsville, S.C.

BWXT Canada, a subsidiary of BWX Technologies, is partnering with Westinghouse Electric Company to build new nuclear projects in Canada and globally.

The Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear report that was released in March 2023 by the Department of Energy called for five to 10 signed reactor contracts for at least one reactor design by 2025. Now, 18 months have passed, and despite the word “resurgence” in media reports on the U.S. nuclear power industry, 2025 is fast approaching with no contracts signed.