Nuclear Stocks Crash, With A Potential Payoff Still Years Away

By Alex Kimani - Nov 17, 2025, 7:00 PM CST

• Uranium prices have surged amid a structural supply deficit and a global policy-driven nuclear revival, but the sector faces long project timelines and mounting volatility.
• Despite major investment pledges like the U.S.–Canada $80 billion reactor partnership, nuclear and uranium stocks have plunged 15–45% in recent weeks.
• Investors confront the industry’s slow path to revenue.

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Over the past couple of years, uranium and nuclear energy markets have enjoyed a renaissance thanks to surging global power demand and the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Uranium is no longer trading on legacy sentiment, with prices moving more on fundamentals characterized by tight physical supply, underbuilt production pipelines, and a policy-driven nuclear revival that’s accelerating faster than commodity markets anticipated.

The uranium market is experiencing a structural supply deficit, creating potential challenges for nuclear operators. 

Unlike many commodities, uranium trading usually involves small volumes with specialized participants, making the nuclear fuel susceptible to significant uranium market volatility. Meanwhile, governments across the globe are repositioning nuclear as critical infrastructure rather than transitional tech. Last month, the Trump administration struck a partnership with Canada’s Cameco Corp. (NYSE:CCJ) and Brookfield Asset Management (NYSE:BAM) to build at least $80 billion in nuclear reactors.

However, the harsh reality of the long lead and construction times of nuclear facilities, coupled with the fact that some stocks in the space with zero revenues are in nosebleed territory, has sent the sector into a tailspin. Nuclear and uranium stocks have pulled back sharply from recent highs, with many seeing double-digit losses: the sector's popular benchmark, VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF (NYSEARCA:NLR) has declined -16.6% over the past 30 days, at a time when the S&P 500 has gained nearly 3%.

Meanwhile, shares of advanced fission power plant developer, Oklo Inc. (NYSE:OKLO), are down -42.0% over the past month; Centrus Energy (NYSE:LEU) -35.9%, Energy Fuels Inc. (NYSE:UUUU) -33.9%, NuScale Power Corp. (NYSE:SMR) -47.7%, Uranium Energy Corp. (NYSE:UEC) -22.9%, BWX Technologies (NYSE:BWXT) -9.6%, Cameco Corp. (NYSE:CCJ) -6.1%, Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST) -14.2% and NANO Nuclear Energy (NASDAQ:NNE) -40.2% and NexGen Energy (NYSE:NXE) -7.9%.

The market appears to be waking up to the reality that it could be up to a decade before we start to reap the benefits from the billions of dollars flowing into the sector. Whereas $80 billion can build enough reactors to power Virginia’s Data Center Alley, traditional reactors typically take 10 years or more to build. Meanwhile, the frequently touted small, modular reactors (SMRs) by the likes of NuScale Power, TerraPower and X-energy are still far from going mainstream primarily because the technology is still in early development and faces significant economic and regulatory hurdles. 

While some prototype units are operational in countries like Russia and China, most designs are still in the theoretical or early construction phases. Indeed, NuScale is the first and only U.S. company to have its SMR design certified by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. NuScale's SMR features include a factory-fabricated, modular design that is scalable from one to 12 modules, with each module producing 77 MWe of power. Key features are its passive safety systems relying on gravity and convection, flexibility for on-grid and off-grid use, redundancy through independent modules, and a smaller footprint than traditional plants. 

Amazon, on the other hand, has invested in X-energy with the goal of deploying up to 5 GW of SMRs by 2039.

Only Oklo Inc., Kairos Power and TerraPower have begun construction of their SMR plants; however, none have proven they can produce power at a commercial scale nor received regulatory approval to build a commercial system.

“There’s a lot going on, and nothing is going on,” BloombergNEF’s head nuclear analyst Chris Gadomski recently quipped.

To exacerbate matters, the markets have bid up these companies to absurd valuations despite many having no revenues to show for their troubles. To wit, Oklo’s market cap has at times exceeded $20 billion, despite the company having no operating reactors, no licenses to operate commercially, and no binding contracts to supply power. Wall Street analysts currently project Oklo will not generate significant revenue until late 2027 or 2028. Oklo’s current market cap is $15.3 billion.

Similar to Oklo, NANO Nuclear Energy currently sports a market cap of $1.6 billion with no revenue, no commercial products, and no commercial operation timeline. Its valuation is purely based on investor optimism about the future potential of nuclear energy, particularly in powering artificial intelligence data centers.

That said, the nuclear sector could see a quicker turnaround from restarting abandoned nuclear plants. Holtec International has laid out plans for its Palisades plant in Michigan to resume service early 2026 while Constellation Energy Corp. (NYSE:CEG) is on track to switch on its Three Mile Island reactor in 2027. Further, NextEra Energy Inc. (NYSE:NEE) recently announced that its Duane Arnold plant in Iowa will come back online by 2029. 

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

@GeorgiaWAND's Kim Scott on the GA PSC's election and why nuclear's high costs should make lawmakers think twice

 

 

https://nuclearcosts.org/finally-some-accountability-for-georgias-costly-nuclear-power-mistake/

Finally Some Accountability for Georgia’s Costly Nuclear Power Mistake

By Kim Scott

The story of Plant Vogtle’s two new nuclear reactors in Georgia is not a triumph of a “nuclear renaissance”; it’s a cautionary tale written in soaring electric bills and a growing political fallout. The people of Georgia are paying the price, literally, as their utility bills have skyrocketed by over 40% – and now, following last Tuesday’s Public Service Commission election in Georgia, it seems those that allowed this to happen in the first place are starting to feel the pinch as well. It’s about damn time! 

Georgia voters delivered a stunning message by unseating two Republican utility commissioners, Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson, who rubber stamped and championed the costly mistakes leading to a 41% increase in Georgians’ electric bills. This election, which saw Democrats Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard championing fair rates, affordability and renewable energy, was a clear referendum on Plant Vogtle’s enormous price tag and more importantly, nuclear power as a not so clean future power resource both here in Georgia and elsewhere. 

The stunning defeat of utility backed incumbents sends a powerful signal to utility regulators nationwide that consumers will not tolerate being forced to pay for multi-billion-dollar nuclear boondoggles. If they aren’t paying attention, Wall Street sure is, downgrading Southern Co.’s stock immediately following the election, citing the increased risk and the new difficulty the company will face in pushing through further rate hikes to pay for Plant Vogtle and other projects in their pipeline. Georgia customers will pay an additional $36 billion to $43 billion over the 60-80 year lifespan of the two Vogtle reactors compared to cheaper alternatives. 

Vogtle stands as the only new nuclear reactor built in the last 30 years, and its fallout offers a bleak prognosis for any supposed “renaissance” and its supporters in statehouses across the country. We can look back to 2017 when the main contractor, Westinghouse, filed for bankruptcy due to the extreme cost overruns at Vogtle. At that critical moment, the Georgia PSC ignored its own staff, energy experts, and public outcry, choosing to burden ratepayers with the project’s continuation.

The consequences of those decisions, subsequent rate increases and soaring electric bills are not abstract—they are impacting the most vulnerable among us and the most overlooked i.e. middle class/working class Georgians. Disconnection rates for the inability to pay have soared by 30% in 2024. For retirees on fixed incomes, the rate increases to pay for Plant Vogtle mean the difference between making ends meet and falling into destitution. This summer, when brutal heat waves descended, vulnerable Georgians had their power shut off, creating life-threatening conditions because they could no longer afford to cool their homes.

The ratepayer backlash in Georgia is also being fueled by the projected massive energy demands of AI data centers, which are forcing utilities like Southern Co. to reckon with costly new generation and transmission projects. Instead of aggressively pushing nuclear power—as evidenced by the Trump administration’s recent $80 billion deal to buy reactors from Westinghouse, the same company bankrupted by Vogtle—we must demand that elected politicians focus on fast and affordable energy solutions like solar and battery energy storage systems. 

The painful lesson learned in Georgia is that new nuclear power is simply too expensive and takes too long. The reality is that for half the cost and in less than a quarter of the time, we could have built more than twice the capacity using solar, wind, or battery storage technologies. But corruption won out and Vogtle is here for the foreseeable future. Georgians will be paying for this mistake for decades to come… I’m just glad there’s finally some accountability headed our way.

Kim Scott is Executive Director of Georgia WAND, is a native Georgian, and has a Chemical Engineering degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

Nuclear’s Costly Comeback Meets Harsh Market Reality

By Leon Stille - Nov 21, 2025, 3:00 PM CST

• Nuclear power’s “cheap, clean, and secure” promise is breaking down.
• Small modular reactors (SMRs) remain largely theoretical, with the only advanced U.S. project cancelled over high costs.
• Renewables and storage now dominate energy economics, offering faster build times, flexibility, and lower prices.

I’ve followed the promise of small modular reactors (SMRs) and next-generation nuclear in several of my earlier pieces on OilPrice. The argument is familiar: nuclear provides low-carbon baseload, ensures energy security, and will one day deliver affordable, clean power. It sounds persuasive, until you look at the numbers. New nuclear remains slow, expensive, and deeply reliant on state support. In today’s European power markets, where renewables are already driving prices to record lows or even negative territory, the idea that nuclear can deliver “cheap and secure” power no longer holds up.

Expensive power disguised as security

Let’s start with the UK. Hinkley Point C, the flagship of the country’s nuclear revival, was only made possible through a 35-year Contract for Difference guaranteeing a strike price of £92.50 per MWh (in 2012 money). That’s roughly double the current wholesale market price, indexed to inflation, and fully guaranteed by taxpayers. It isn’t market competitiveness, it’s a subsidy designed to get the project financed.

Sizewell C will take the same path under a Regulated Asset Base model, transferring part of the construction risk directly to consumers through levies on electricity bills long before a single watt is produced. When “cheap” energy requires that level of public underwriting, something is fundamentally off.

A track record written in red ink

This pattern isn’t unique to Britain. France’s Flamanville reactor, long touted as the EPR showpiece, is over a decade late and has quadrupled in cost to more than €13 billion. Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 only began commercial operations after 17 years of delays and legal disputes. In the United States, Vogtle 3 and 4 finally came online after 15 years and around $36 billion in total costs, double initial projections, with ratepayers footing much of the bill through regulated recovery.

Related: 5 Utility Stocks Outperforming The Market

The nuclear industry’s narrative of reliability is at odds with its delivery record. Projects start with optimism and end with budget blowouts, political fallout, and consumer bailouts.

The SMR Illusion

Advocates often pivot to SMRs as the saviour, the “Tesla moment” for nuclear. I explored that hype in an earlier OilPrice article, noting that SMRs were being promoted as modular, factory-built, and inherently cheaper. Yet so far, reality looks familiar.

The most advanced U.S. SMR project, NuScale’s Carbon Free Power Project in Idaho, was cancelled in 2023 after projected costs rose to $89 per MWh, far above renewables and storage. Other designs remain on paper, heavily dependent on public subsidies or guaranteed offtake. The promise of small reactors may eventually prove out, but at the moment, SMRs are an idea with a press office, not a business case.

The market reality has shifted

Europe’s electricity markets tell the other half of the story. In 2024, countries like Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands each recorded more than 450 hours of negative day-ahead prices. France saw nearly 360. Across the EU, negative or ultra-low price hours exceeded 9,000 in total.

For inflexible, capital-intensive baseload assets like nuclear, that’s disastrous. These plants can’t ramp down profitably when prices collapse. Their economics depend on constant, high utilization, and that world is disappearing. The more renewables come online, the more volatile the price pattern becomes, with long stretches of near-zero wholesale power. Nuclear simply doesn’t fit this market geometry.

Renewables and storage are doing what nuclear can’t

The contrast is striking. Renewables can be deployed modularly, financed privately, and built within 18–36 months. Utility-scale batteries, once dismissed as expensive, are now scaling at record speed. Europe installed nearly 22 GWh of new storage capacity in 2024, bringing total installed capacity above 60 GWh. Italy’s first grid-scale auction secured 10 GWh of storage at competitive prices, no decade-long delays, no multi-billion-euro risk exposure.

Each incremental gigawatt of storage turns volatile wind and solar into a more stable, dispatchable asset. In that environment, nuclear’s supposed advantage of “firm capacity” starts to look less like a virtue and more like an anchor.

Security means flexibility, not monoliths

Nuclear advocates still frame the argument in security terms, stable, domestic generation insulated from fossil-fuel geopolitics. But in modern energy systems, security no longer means “always-on baseload.” It means adaptability, diversification, and resilience.

A network built from distributed solar, wind, storage, and demand-side flexibility is inherently harder to disrupt. It can absorb shocks, balance local fluctuations, and restart quickly after failures. A multi-billion-euro single-site nuclear facility, by contrast, is a high-value target for cost escalation, technical failure, or even physical risk.

Energy security in the 2020s is about systems thinking, not megaproject symbolism.

The economics of opportunity cost

Every euro sunk into new nuclear is a euro not available for faster, cheaper solutions. A 10 billion-euro reactor might take 15 years to produce its first electrons. The same money could build tens of gigawatts of solar and wind, backed by large-scale storage, grid upgrades, and hydrogen electrolysers to absorb surplus power, all online before the nuclear project breaks ground.

The opportunity cost is immense. Renewable portfolios are now financeable at market rates; nuclear requires a bespoke government rescue package before it even begins.

A niche role, not a blueprint

To be clear, existing reactors that can be safely life-extended make sense. Extending France’s fleet, or upgrading proven units, delivers low-carbon energy at marginal cost. But that’s asset management, not a case for new construction.

Building a fresh wave of reactors on 20-year timelines, in a power market already defined by negative pricing and flexible storage, is a strategic mismatch. Nuclear can remain a niche contributor, but not the foundation of affordable or adaptable decarbonization.

Conclusion: The future has moved on

The myth of nuclear as “secure, clean, and cheap” collapses under scrutiny. It is clean once built, but rarely cheap, and often far from secure when you consider financing and policy risk. Meanwhile, renewables plus storage are delivering real, scalable, market-driven results right now.

We no longer live in a world where the problem is lack of technology. The challenge is choosing the right ones for the energy system we are actually building, a fast, flexible, decentralized grid where adaptability equals security.

Nuclear still has a role in some places. But pretending it will power a new era of cheap, secure energy is not realism, it’s nostalgia.

By Leon Stille for Oilprice.com

How Holtec International became an expanding (and controversial) nuclear power

Following its start as a producer of nuclear waste storage canisters, Holtec International has built an empire around mothballed nuclear power plants and as-yet incomplete nuclear initiatives. The firm's history of overpromising and underdelivery raises a question: Is this who we should trust with the future of nuclear energy?

On a 90-degree afternoon in July 2014, the governor, the mayor, and the local state senator gathered before 200 people at Camden, New Jersey's Broadway Terminal along the Delaware River to celebrate an impending economic miracle. A planned technology center would bring pioneering nuclear technology and hundreds of new jobs to a dismal waterfront known for its unemployment and poverty.

State Sen. Donald Norcross, among those on a stage decorated with an eight-foot-tall banner bearing the red and black logo of Holtec International, said the company behind the deal was “a titan of energy.”

Holtec CEO Krishna Singh could locate his company’s nuclear technology center anywhere, not just in the United States but in the world, Norcross said, “And he chose Camden.”

The 47-acre campus would be used to develop a new kind of nuclear reactor that “cannot under any condition go out of control,” Singh said.

Now, the promised local miracle of economic progress seems, at most, incremental. There is no nuclear power plant assembly line as initially envisioned by Singh. His promised next-generation nuclear reactors remain conceptual a decade later, so far not progressing beyond the drawing board.

Singh made public pronouncements about providing a “path out of hereditary poverty” and a “pathway to the middle class” for Camden residents. The Camden facility would employ some 2,000 laborers and 1,000 professional staff in its first five years, the company said in promotional materials. But it ultimately hired far fewer locals than initially suggested.

In a statement in response to questions for this article, Holtec said that it has exceeded every obligation outlined in its contractual agreement with the state related to its Camden site. Also, the company noted that a court had rejected the state of New Jersey's view that Holtec had fallen short of commitments, restoring funds that had been withheld based on claims of noncompliance.

New Jersey officials did, however, abandon a partnership with Holtec to build a job training center. Holtec said the state’s move “turned its back on the people of one of America's poorest cities. The company has continued to invest in workforce development initiatives and to create meaningful opportunities for residents, advancing its mission to contribute to the city's long-term economic revitalization.”

Documents filed in state and federal courts, records from regulatory agencies, and interviews with officials, activists, ex-employees, and industry analysts show that the Camden project was not a Holtec anomaly. Across its ventures, announcements of grand undertakings have been followed by under-delivery and controversy, as Holtec, a company primarily known for making concrete nuclear waste containers, succeeded in promoting itself as a high-tech leader in nuclear power generation and the decommissioning of nuclear power plants.

Since launching the Krishna P. Singh Technology Campus in Camden, Holtec has expanded aggressively into the decommissioning of shuttered nuclear power plants and a government-backed attempt to revive the largely dormant US nuclear energy sector. Holtec’s business strategy has relied in part on acquiring old nuclear plants and tapping into trust funds that plant operators had paid to the government for the eventual decommissioning of those plants. In some cases, Holtec has then reversed course and tried to restart aging reactors. Internationally, Holtec has positioned itself as spearheading US efforts to expand nuclear power generation in Ukraine and South Korea.

The stakes of that claim are higher now. In Ukraine, Holtec’s principal state partner, Energoatom, has become the focus of a sweeping corruption inquiry alleging years of inflated contracts, illicit payments and political interference in the very projects Holtec helped build at Chernobyl — prompting new scrutiny of the environment in which those projects took shape.

Although many of its projects are either unfinished or less than initially portrayed, Holtec now controls the fate of multiple nuclear power plants across the United States. The company that didn't fully deliver on initial promises about a technology center in Camden (see sidebar) has been entrusted with billions of dollars from ratepayer-funded decommissioning trust funds, responsibility for some of the nation's most hazardous nuclear sites, and permission to re-start a closed nuclear reactor—even though Holtec had never operated a nuclear power plant.

Now, Holtec plans to go public in a planned stock offering that Singh told Barron’s could value his company at $10 billion. Singh hopes to sell shares worth 20 percent of the company’s total value in a stock offering that aims to raise capital for an expansion of its oft-stated plans to build small modular reactors (SMRs), a next-generation technology that, for Holtec, remains in the design stage and has not yet been licensed.

The move to go public entrusts yet more financial and public faith in a company whose grand undertakings have often been followed by controversy and under-delivery.

Capitalizing on the failure of Yucca Mountain

In Nye County, Nevada, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, a ridge made of hardened volcanic ash is the site of a five-mile-long tunnel designed to store used nuclear power plant fuel and other nuclear waste. The site cost the US government $19 billion to study and build. That the Yucca Mountain tunnel sits empty is a testament to the passion of Nevadans' opposition to the site, manifest in meetings, petitions, and demonstrations. It represents the sense of humor of the state government, which established an exorbitant special tax district around the mountain it called “Bullfrog County.” It reflects the power of the political coalition that turned a 1987 federal policy that aimed to deposit all of America's commercial nuclear waste at the site into a permanent political quagmire.

But it's also a monument to the entrepreneurial zeal of Krishna Pal Singh, who launched a company that specialized in making concrete containers for plants to store their used nuclear fuel on site. As the challenge to Yucca Mountain stalled US efforts to create the used nuclear fuel repository authorized by the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Singh positioned his recently founded company, Holtec International, to capitalize on a growing crisis: Without that national repository, used nuclear fuel was accumulating at America's nuclear plants.

Without Yucca Mountain, nuclear power plants increasingly depended on containers to store their used fuel. As no viable alternative to Yucca Mountain has arisen, America's 54 nuclear power plants, each with tons of waste that will be radioactive for millennia, had nowhere to store it—even though the US government was legally required to provide a repository.

When spent nuclear fuel is removed from reactors, it is placed in pools of water to cool for a period that lasts at least several years. But as no national repository was built, reactor cooling pools reached capacity across the country and used fuel storage containers—many of them Holtec-made—became a common feature at nuclear plants.

​​​​Today, Singh oversees a company that has expanded far beyond building nuclear fuel storage casks. Holtec has won contracts to control nuclear plants and manage billions of dollars in federally mandated decommissioning trust funds. However, this aggressive expansion has been overshadowed by serious concerns: 24-year-old bribery allegations (see sidebar) and regulatory violations related to employee radiation exposure risk, quality control in spent fuel transportation and storage systems, and inadequate security. Activists, public officials, and nuclear experts question whether a company with no prior experience in building, operating, or maintaining nuclear power plants—one that has attracted sustained controversy—should be positioned to lead a significant part of America's nuclear future

Born in 1947 in Patna, India, Singh earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Bihar Institute of Technology (now known as the Birsa Institute of Technology Sindri) in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, in 1967 and completed his doctorate in mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972.

At the time, Singh's specialized knowledge of pressure vessels and heat exchangers made him valuable to employers. He spent the next decade designing components for nuclear power plants.

In 1986, at age 39, Singh founded Holtec International (the name combines “Holistic” and “Technologies”). It began by designing racks that allow plants to pack more nuclear waste into the cooling pools for used nuclear fuel. Next, the company turned to manufacturing large sealed canisters for longer-term radioactive waste storage.

By the 2010s, the high cost of running aging nuclear power plants relative to natural gas-fired plants and renewable energy installations led to permanent shutdowns of some nuclear power plants.

In 2018, Holtec formed a subsidiary called Holtec Decommissioning International and began acquiring shuttered nuclear plants outright. Rather than simply selling storage systems to utilities, Holtec would now buy entire reactor sites, take control of their decommissioning trust funds, and assume responsibility for dismantling the facilities and managing the radioactive waste stored there.

Each closed nuclear plant came with a substantial decommissioning trust fund—money collected from ratepayers over decades to pay for eventual cleanup. Holtec claimed it could complete the decommissioning work much faster than utilities had planned, promising 10- to 12-year timelines instead of the 60 years allowed by regulators. Also, there was a glittering prospect: Holtec could potentially keep whatever remained in the trust funds after decommissioning was complete.

“There is a public benefit to completing decommissioning in 10 years rather than waiting decades. If a company has the expertise, efficiency, and capability to do this while maintaining safety, that is a value-added proposition,” former Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) chairman Gregory Jaczko said in an interview with the Bulletin. “However, the key question remains: Do we have the regulatory authority to ensure it is done safely?”

For Jaczko and other observers skeptical of Holtec's plans, one important question centers on whether Holtec has been set up in a way that will allow it to be held accountable should things go wrong.

Singh has set up his business via a web of subsidiaries spanning 17 countries across four continents. The company has created dozens of separate entities, from Holtec Orrvilon in Hong Kong to operations in Britain and Ukraine, plus numerous limited liability companies (LLCs) clustered in New Jersey, Delaware, and Florida. These are set up in complex structures, whereby entities often own each other in nested arrangements, with one LLC either a shareholder or a subsidiary of the other.

This structure is perhaps most clearly seen in Holtec's nuclear decommissioning business. Each closed plant—the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, the Indian Point plant in New York, and the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts—exists within its own special-purpose LLC. These subsidiaries control billions of dollars in decommissioning trust funds while maintaining limited legal liability, according to state attorneys general from Massachusetts and New York.

During a 2022 congressional hearing on the decommissioning of nuclear power plants, public officials expressed alarm at the strategy of assigning responsibility for cleaning up nuclear waste sites to special-purpose LLCs with no prior business or assets other than those associated with the plant itself.

For example, Holtec International does not appear as the licensee for the Pilgrim plant that its prior owner, Entergy Nuclear Generation Company, shut down in 2019. Instead, the plant is now licensed to independent companies created expressly for this purpose.

“They (Holtec) are not the licensee at the site,” Seth Schofield, with the Massachusetts attorney general's office, testified during the hearing. “They are not legally responsible for what happens at the site. The entities that are legally responsible for what happens at the site are two LLCs. They are the licensees. And the only asset those licensees have is the trust fund. Hence, that is a big source of our risk.”

Jaczko noted that there was no corporate entity positioned to provide a financial backstop if something went wrong.

In response to questions about these concerns, the NRC said that it “conducts its work as transparently as possible, including public meetings as needed, and the agency posts its conclusions in public documents.” The commission considered requests for hearings submitted by state officials in the Pilgrim and Indian Point decommissioning license transfers but concluded an evidentiary hearing was not warranted, the NRC statement said. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s monitoring and enforcement cover the life of a plant, “ensuring adequate decommissioning funding will be available, guaranteeing the owner has ultimate responsibility to complete the work, regardless of cost overruns,” the agency said in a statement to the Bulletin.

Jaczko, however, is less sanguine.

“This structure is far less transparent and accountable than what we typically see for power plant ownership,” he said. “It appears that there is no corporate entity with sufficient resources to provide capital and cover operating expenses in the event of revenue losses, whether due to accidents or plant problems requiring extended shutdowns.”

Rather than defend the LLC setup or suggest that Holtec International would offer legal guarantees, Singh responded in US Senate testimony by offering his word. He cited a project in Ukraine, where Holtec supplied containment technology for the country's nuclear waste, as evidence that Holtec's reputation in the international marketplace was so strong that the company did not need to issue formal guarantees for commitments made by its subsidiaries.

“I will reiterate, I will reiterate, that Holtec International will stand behind the commitments made by its operating subsidiaries. The damage to us reputationally would be enormous if we walked away from a project without finishing. It is not just money. Our company has enormous goodwill and value, reputational worth in the world marketplace. We cannot afford to, for one project, maybe costing us a hundred million dollars, we will not walk away. Absolutely not,” he said. “I don't think any future CEO of the company would either. This company has an enormous value as an enterprise that is trusted around the world. We did Chernobyl, you may or may not know. We did a nuclear waste facility in Ukraine that was considered an impossible job. We finished it. We turned the key over to the Ukrainian government.”

But facts on the ground are more complex and less completely positive than this characterization of Holtec’s efforts in Ukraine suggests.

A tangled tale: Holtec in Ukraine

No nuclear power plant is more famous than Chernobyl, the site of the 1986 meltdown, explosion, and massive radiation release that killed between thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, depending on whose estimates one accepts. In Ukraine, the site remains radioactive politically for reasons unrelated to energetic particles or electromagnetic waves.

The containment work that Holtec has turned into a calling card is famous within Ukraine as ground zero for some of the country’s most notorious corruption scandals (which, to be clear, did not touch Holtec). Singh may have told the Senate committee that he “did Chernobyl.” Anti-corruption prosecutors allege officials and contractors working alongside Holtec did a number on Chernobyl. The US company’s Ukrainian partners, public official overseers, and subcontractors were caught up in public inquiries into allegations of embezzlement, fraud, bid rigging, bribery, and other alleged misconduct. Energoatom, the government agency behind the project, has denied corruption allegations and accused a parliamentary critic of “false media attacks.”

Anti-corruption officials in Ukraine in early November announced a $100 million corruption scandal that forced out the senior leadership of Energoatom, the principal state partner with Holtec at Chernobyl. The officials describe corruption and a lack of oversight at the agency—during periods that overlapped Holtec’s work. As of press time, allegations had not included Holtec itself.

Prosecutors and auditors described kickbacks of between 10 and 15 percent, inflated equipment prices, questionable subcontracting, and suspect relationships between Energoatom officials and Chernobyl exclusion zone contractors.

Holtec’s promotional materials continue to present its Ukraine record as evidence of competence and reliability. Ukrainian authorities, meanwhile, continue collecting evidence to support allegations that agencies overseeing the U.S. company were compromised.

Publicly available information does not indicate that Holtec has been formally accused of wrongdoing in the Ukrainian corruption cases. In response to questions from the Bulletin, Holtec has emphasized that it acted ethically and was not informed of any misconduct surrounding the projects. The company stated it was “not involved in the hiring, management, or payment of local contractors.”

According to Holtec’s and the Ukrainian government’s project documents, the company served as the prime contractor for what is known as the Interim Spent Nuclear Fuel Dry Storage Facility, or ISF-2, which is designed to hold spent fuel from undamaged reactors at Chernobyl, which had remained in operation until 2000. Holtec hired YUTEM-Engineeringas its principal subcontractor. That is, Holtec had a direct, if unwitting, role in hiring and managing a key local company whose owner had financial ties to what official Ukrainian investigations said was a notorious corruption network.

Holtec's Ukrainian venture began in the mid-2000s, when the country confronted a growing crisis over its nuclear waste. Each year, Ukraine paid Russia approximately $200 million to dispose of the spent fuel from its 15 reactors. American officials grew increasingly worried about this dependency, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show. In leaked cables, those officials touted Holtec as a means to pry Ukraine from Russia’s nuclear embrace. The geopolitical urgency also had a practical side: Holtec might help secure waste in the still-hazardous Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Ukraine decided to make the depopulated land around the old plant into a general-purpose nuclear waste storage site serving both the old plant and its spent fuel, as well as spent fuel from power plants elsewhere in the country.

The most visually prominent of the three separate projects is a massive arch-shaped sarcophagus that contains the old, damaged portion of the Chernobyl complex. But there are two lesser-known facilities, and that’s where Holtec supplied management, technical know-how, and equipment. Holtec was the main contractor for what was called the Interim Storage Facility-2 for spent fuel from Chernobyl reactors. And it supplied equipment and engineering support for the Centralized Spent Fuel Storage Facility, built to store nuclear waste from elsewhere.

In its prime contractor role, Holtec was to hire, manage, and pay subcontractors doing on-the-ground civil engineering work, according to records from the Chernobyl management agency, Ukraine’s public spending audit agency (hyperlined document in Ukrainian), and other documents.

Holtec’s work was supported by international heavyweights: the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The company nonetheless found itself in the company of controversial figures.

Holtec’s main local partner for the ISF-2 project was the firm YUTEM-Engineering, whose owner had ties to Maksym Mykytas, the head of a construction empire. According to official records, Holtec hired, managed, and paid YUTEM on that project.

Anti-corruption agencies have accused Mykytas of masterminding multimillion-dollar collusion and bribery schemes related to, among other things, the repository for waste from outside Chernobyl. On that centralized fuel storage project, Holtec was not responsible for hiring or managing YUTEM, which became mired in bid-rigging and bribery scandals.

Evidence connects YUTEM to a wider alleged criminal enterprise that’s been the subject of multiple high-profile investigations of alleged embezzlement, fraud, bribery, and bid-rigging. The Bulletin traced these ties via multiple records, including Mykyta’s asset declaration from 2017, when he was a member of Ukraine’s parliament, showing he received money or equity worth approximately $75,000 in a transaction with YUTEM's owner.

Mykytas was not just any politician. According to Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau, he was the alleged mastermind of a sprawling network of companies used to embezzle state funds. Investigators would eventually accuse Mykytas of orchestrating multiple schemes, including a bribery plot causing what investigators said was approximately $37 million in fraudulent overpayments for claimed work for the nationwide spent fuel storage repository.

Mykytas, for his part, was arrested and detained in 2020 while boarding a flight from Kiev to London. He turned state's evidence and revealed a network of alleged collaborators that included high-ranking officials and business associates.

Eventually, investigations into Mykytas caused progress on the nationwide storage facility to stall, though all the sites at Chernobyl eventually passed testing and licensing phases. By then, Holtec and Ukrainian officials were announcing another ambitious nuclear effort: a commitment to build 20 small modular reactors across the war-torn country. The announcement came despite Holtec having no US-approved reactor design and no experience building or running nuclear plants, and despite Russia's ongoing campaign of bombing energy infrastructure, once again pitting a grand vision against a complex and hazardous reality.

In November, Ukraine’s Energy Ministry announced it had held discussions with Holtec about building a plant for hydrogen and ammonia, the conversion of coal-fired power plants to “micro” nuclear reactors, and plans to convert Ukraine’s steel to nuclear power.

In December, Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear company, announced it was discussing with Holtec the idea of building a factory for SMR components to make Ukraine a regional center for the production and export of nuclear technologies.

In January, Energoatom announced its officials had held a video conference with Singh to discuss ideas such as a new factory for producing parts for SMRs, a joint Energoatom-Holtec engineering and training center, and “implementation of SMR-300 technology in Ukraine,” according to an agency announcement.

However, some Ukrainian nuclear power experts have expressed worry about making plans to build any type of new nuclear power plant in a country where energy infrastructure is actively targeted and where the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, Zaporizhzhia, remains under hostile military occupation.

Given the lack of operational SMR technology in the world, “In the near future, it is not a relevant issue for Ukraine,” Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Kyiv, was quoted as saying in 2022.

Holtec’s unusual strategy in Michigan. And elsewhere.

Standing beside the then-shuttered Palisades nuclear plant on the wind-whipped shore of Lake Michigan in February, Krishna Singh spoke in visionary language. “Just like what John Kennedy said in 1962: In a decade, we’re going to have a man on the moon,” he told a small gathering of state and federal officials. “It’s pretty much like that. At the end of the decade, we are going to have the first SMR operational.”

It was hardly the first time Singh had positioned himself as a nuclear pioneer.

For nearly 15 years, he has promoted a breakthrough in small reactor technology, a design Holtec called the SMR-160, and after the development of that design was suspended, the SMR-300, as the future of nuclear power.

Holtec disputes the idea that the SMR-160 was abandoned, stating that the design is “viable.” However, the company suspended its effort to get Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval for the design in 2023 and has not promoted or pursued development of that design since. Reactor efforts now focus on the newer SMR-300 design, the company said in a statement.

Small modular reactors, or SMRs, represent the nuclear industry's great hope for revival amid concerns about the economics and safety of conventional nuclear power plants. Unlike traditional nuclear facilities, SMRs are designed to be compact, typically providing under 300 megawatts of electricity compared to 1,000-plus for conventional reactors, and proponents suggest, the smaller reactors can be factory-built and shipped to sites for installation.

The concept has captured imaginations across the nuclear sector: NuScale Power has secured certification for its 50-megawatt design, TerraPower (backed by Bill Gates) and X-energy have received Department of Energy funding for small reactors, and China recently connected the world's first commercial SMR to its grid. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission views these smaller designs as key to nuclear's future, touting their enhanced passive safety features, scalability, and potential for relatively fast deployment.

But unlike some competitors who have made at least incremental progress toward deployment, Holtec's SMR vision has remained mostly notional. It wasn’t until July, when Holtec obtained an operating license for Palisades, that the company had ever obtained regulatory approval to operate a reactor.

Holtec, in a statement, said its announced plans to install SMR reactors in Michigan five years from now show that it is ahead of its competitors.

At its Camden facility, Holtec has announced plans to install a simulator to mimic the reactor conditions of its SMR. The company describes the facility as an innovation center for SMR design, employing over 600 highly skilled workers and says it will be “where the US's first SMRs will be constructed and shipped for commercial deployment in this decade.” But no reactor manufacturing has begun as the company awaits regulatory approvals for its designs.

Even so, these paper reactors have yielded concrete returns.

In September 2024, the US Department of Energy granted Holtec a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to restart the mothballed Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan. The re-commissioning of Palisades is controversial in its own right, but Holtec has also woven its still-unproven SMR program into the Palisades narrative. Though the loan formally supports the restart of an existing unit at the plant, Holtec has presented the site as a dual project: a place to both reboot old infrastructure and a site for new SMRs, making Palisades “ground zero for America's nuclear renaissance,” according to company marketing materials.

This renaissance story seems to be absent from federal records, however. The SMR-300 design does not yet have an NRC license application on file. Holtec suspended the SMR-160's licensing process in 2023 and has begun only informal pre-application discussions for the new design, according to the NRC. The target date for filing formal applications from scratch is sometime in 2026, according to a Holtec presentation to the NRC.

The idea of SMRs continues to deliver. Singh now describes Palisades as the birthplace of a nuclear revival, promising to deploy Holtec's SMR-300 design on the Michigan lakeshore by 2030. When questioned about the status of its SMR program, Holtec contrasts its approach with competitors who have “marketed unproven or exotic designs through countless marketing materials,” offering its own Mission 2030 announcement for Palisades SMRs as a “real milestone.”

This claim echoes previous pronouncements. After Holtec bought the closed Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey in 2019, it began discussing the plant as the site for a small modular reactor, according to press reports. The company also supported state legislation that would provide production tax credits worth up to $1 million per megawatt for SMRs built at former nuclear sites like Oyster Creek, potentially yielding $70 million in total state subsidies annually.

Although it lacks US certification for its SMR designs, Singh has pursued this SMR strategy internationally. In India, it envisions hundreds of reactors. The same SMR-160 design that remained theoretical in the United States became the centerpiece of agreements in Ukraine and South Korea. In Ukraine, the site of the nuclear waste storage controversies, Singh has staged press events, the latest such ceremony announcing a 2023 commitment to build 20 reactors across the war-torn country.

Similar events were held for South Korea. An April 2023 photo opportunity in Washington, D.C. captured Singh alongside Hyundai's CEO and South Korea's trade minister, all proudly holding signed agreements. These documents pledged that Korean state banks would provide financial support for SMR-160 projects worldwide.

Just months later, Holtec stopped efforts to have the US nuclear regulator approve the SMR-160 design featured in these agreements. For its claimed follow-up design, the SMR-300, Holtec remains in what regulators describe as only the “earliest pre-licensing stage.”

How decommissioning became re-commissioning

Holtec bought the Palisades nuclear plant in 2018, gaining access to a $592 million fund set aside for decommissioning.

But Holtec’s stewardship of the Palisades plant soon took a swift course change. Entergy, a large and experienced nuclear operator, had determined the plant was no longer viable. In May 2022, it shut down the lone reactor at the plant and filed paperwork declaring the plant permanently closed, a formal declaration to the NRC that the plant should never operate again.

“That's the nuclear equivalent of taking a car to the junkyard, tearing up the title, and saying to the junkyard, 'You now own it,’” Alan Blind, a former design engineering manager at Palisades, explained. “Once that happens, you no longer have any right to drive the car.”

One week after acquiring Palisades for decommissioning, Holtec submitted plans to the Energy Department for restarting the plant. Those plans only came to public light through a Freedom of Information Act request by the activist group Beyond Nuclear, published on its website in October 2023. In March 2024, Holtec secured a $1.52 billion US government loan guarantee and moved forward with an attempt to restart the nuclear reactor, despite expert assessments that the plant was no longer viable.

In a statement prepared in response to questions from the Bulletin, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission indicated Holtec had sufficient qualifications to restart the Palisades reactor. Its requirements for operating a nuclear power plant include “overall technical competence, an acceptable training program for control room operators, essential staffing requirements, and other detailed technical specifications that ensure safe operation.”

“Holtec's filings on these issues include their efforts to retain or rehire former Palisades staff and obtain assistance from more experienced members of the nuclear industry,” the NRC statement said.

“We are well aware that, although we see no real obstacles ahead, re-powering of a dormant plant such as Palisades would be a feat that has never been achieved before,” Singh said in a 2023 press announcement. In a statement the following year, the Holtec CEO said, “The repowering of Palisades will restore safe, around-the-clock generation to hundreds of thousands of households, businesses, and manufacturers. It also confers the environmental and public health benefits of emissions-free generation.”

Some activists have a different view.

“They lied about what they were going to do at Palisades. They said they were taking over ownership to decommission the plant. Little did we know, they weren't even intending to decommission,” said Kevin Kamps with Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear advocacy group. “This was a trick to get their hands on the plant.”

Over the years, experts have pointed out risks the plant could pose to the public.

In 1994, a federal inspector wrote to the NRC's chairman that the plant's onsite nuclear waste sat precariously on a relatively fragile cement slab. “The casks can either fall into Lake Michigan or be buried in the loose sand,” wrote retired NRC inspector Ross Landsman, who expressed similar concerns a decade later.

For his part, Blind, a former manager at Palisades, told an NRC panel in February that Palisades had, in the years before its shutdown, consistently failed to address safety hazards involving fire risks, seismic vulnerabilities, and the deterioration of critical cooling system insulation. These problems remained unresolved due to exemptions granted by the NRC—regulatory leniency that Blind now insists was deeply mistaken. Blind, who had helped secure these exemptions during his tenure at the plant, testified that this experience now gives him unique insight into the facility's risks.

“The NRC has no established framework for bringing a permanently closed plant back online, and Holtec is taking advantage of that,” Blind warned at the February NRC meeting.

At the same meeting, NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell acknowledged the agency's lack of experience with such restarts but stated the regulatory process would be conducted openly. “Those plans will be public to the greatest extent possible,” Burnell said.

Holtec, in a statement provided to the Bulletin in response to questions, said the company is “on the path to a restart this year.”

“We have done thousands of hours of inspections, which have led to maintenance, repairs and replacements, and upgrades to ensure the plant runs smoothly for decades to come,” the statement said. “The NRC, INPO (Institute of Nuclear Power Operations), and independent industry peers have continued to inspect, review, and recommend ensuring that our historic efforts meet all the criteria for a safe start-up later this year.”

In a statement, the NRC said its commissioner concluded a few years ago that the agency's existing licensing and oversight processes “can appropriately consider whether a permanently shut-down nuclear power plant can request permission to restart.” Holtec has submitted the proper paperwork, which the NRC is reviewing, the statement said.

The statement said the NRC “understands the urgency of the Palisades restart effort, but we have been clear we will take the time needed to ensure our decisions are technically and legally sound.” The agency “must find that the package of requests would maintain public health and safety before we will consider authorizing the plant to return to operating status,” it added.

The questions about Indian Point

Just 25 miles upriver from Manhattan, where remains of the Hudson River's industrial past fade into wooded highlands, lies the site of a once-busy amusement park, which was later a nuclear power facility and is now an idle concrete hulk.

In April 2021, following decades of environmental concerns and community opposition, Entergy Corporation shuttered what had become a money loser. With a $1.8 billion decommissioning trust fund available, Entergy sought a buyer for the Indian Point nuclear reactor that could manage the complex dismantling and cleanup process.

Holtec took control of the site in May 2021, according to NRC records. The company promised an unusually swift timeline to jackhammer the concrete, proposing to haul away tons of radioactive waste within about a dozen years instead of the allowed 60. Ordinarily, companies have been content to wait out the process of nuclear decay, so when hauling time comes, the material is less radioactive, less dangerous, and cheaper to handle.

The plan was bold, local officials and environmental groups said.

“This is a company that never operated a power plant,” Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Bulletin in February 2025. “They're moving spent nuclear fuel and cutting up radioactive components with no prior experience in those activities. It's an experiment, and the public is the guinea pig.”

Holtec, however, says that it has nearly 40 years of experience in the nuclear industry, including extensive work with spent nuclear fuel storage systems dating back to the 1980s. The company says its dry-cask storage systems are used by approximately two-thirds of US nuclear plants, and it holds dozens of licenses from nuclear regulators worldwide.

Community fears intensified in 2021 when Holtec announced plans to discharge radioactive wastewater from Indian Point into the Hudson River. State lawmakers swiftly passed legislation blocking such discharges. Holtec sued the state in April 2024, arguing the law unlawfully infringed on federal authority over nuclear safety. A federal judge ruled in favor of Holtec in September 2025, but New York is appealing the decision.

Holtec's financial disclosures raise additional concerns. In meetings with state officials, company executives admitted that project delays or unexpected costs could undermine their business model. One internal document cited by watchdogs described the company's plan to use any leftover decommissioning trust fund money provided by ratepayers and managed under NRC oversight to bankroll unrelated ventures.

A less obvious risk: At Indian Point, Holtec deployed the same LLC strategy established across its operations, a special-purpose subsidiary with limited liability would gain control of the $1.8 billion decommissioning trust fund.

According to NRC documents, Holtec's subsidiaries that own Indian Point include Holtec Indian Point 2, LLC, and Holtec Indian Point 3, LLC, with Holtec Decommissioning International, LLC (HDI) serving as the license holder and decommissioning operator. The NRC and New York State Public Service Commission reviewed and approved this structure before the license transfer.

While such a subsidiary structure is typical for large industrial companies and was approved by regulators, critics like Lyman argue it could limit financial liability. The structure could create significant legal barriers between the parent company and anyone seeking damages if something untoward happens, Lyman told the Bulletin. “They're not thinking 100 years ahead,” Lyman said. “They're thinking about the next quarterly report.”

Holtec maintains that its approach allows communities to regain use of the land decades sooner than traditional decommissioning methods, potentially creating new economic opportunities.

Vision vs. reality 

The story of Holtec often comes down to moments when soaring vision collides with terrestrial problems.

A decade after promising a Camden, New Jersey, technology campus that would pioneer new nuclear reactors and provide a “path out of hereditary poverty” for residents, the reactors remain conceptual and the economic miracle is, at best, incomplete. Such ambitious pronouncements, followed by controversy, have become a hallmark.

Holtec International capitalized on the federal government's failure to create a national nuclear waste repository, creating a captive market for concrete casks now on-site at power plants across America. From this foundation, CEO Krishna Singh launched a more audacious expansion into decommissioning, acquiring shuttered nuclear plants outright. The company took control of billions in ratepayer-funded decommissioning trust funds, promising to clean up sites in a fraction of the time planned by utilities, with the glittering prospect of keeping any leftover money.

This aggressive growth, however, relies on financial and operational strategies that have drawn unflattering scrutiny. Holtec structures its decommissioning projects through a web of special-purpose corporations (LLCs), which own the plants and control their trust funds, potentially leaving no backstop if a project encounters costly problems. Instead of legal guarantees, Singh has offered his word and his company’s reputation.

Now, Holtec is asking the public and investors for even greater faith as it plans a multibillion-dollar initial public stock offering. The capital raised is intended to fund another expansive promise. Yet, like the future of high-tech jobs once promised for Camden, these SMRs remain in the concept stage. The company has built an empire on mothballed plants and sidelined projects while selling a vision of a nuclear renaissance. Its history leaves a question for regulators and potential investors: Is this who the world should trust with a large portion of the future of nuclear energy?

https://connect.thebulletin.org/index.php?action=social&chash=5c572eca050594c7bc3c36e7e8ab9550.669&s=81a6ad45577a5ef1dac9123f1e362b84

November 20, 2025 The Palisades nuclear power plant on the shore of Lake Michigan. The reactor was shut down for decommissioning in May 2022. But Holtec International, which took over the plant from Entergy Corp., has applied for federal and state grants to restart the facility. Holtec spent fuel storage containers can be seen in the center left of the image. (Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Alamy) How Holtec International became an expanding (and controversial) nuclear power Following its start as a producer of nuclear waste storage canisters, Holtec International has built an empire around mothballed nuclear power plants and incomplete nuclear initiatives. The firm's history of overpromising and underdelivery raises a question: Is this who we should trust with the future of nuclear energy? Matt Smith investigates. Read more. Post-truth disasters: We're not ready for nuclear war on social media Risks of a serious crisis are rising, and the information environment has never been worse. "Diminishing the practical capacity of the government and the reputational credibility of institutions responsible for rapid response can only evaporate trust and lead to citizens looking to alternative sources for critical information, even without the distortions present on social media platforms," writes Andrew Facini. Read more.

WHAT'S NEW The Bulletin welcomes Kronos Quartet as its inaugural Artist-in-Residence The Bulletin is proud to announce the appointment of Kronos Quartet as its first ever Doomsday Clock Artist-in-Residence. The ensemble has an expansive discography, including three Grammy-winning albums, and their music has featured prominently in a number of films. Kronos has sold over four million albums—more than any other string quartet in history. Read more. BULLETIN VIDEO Kronos Quartet at the Nobel Laureate Assembly Declaration for the Prevention of Nuclear War This summer, Kronos Quartet participated in and performed at the Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The full concert is now available on YouTube. Watch here.

PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH AMC Conference – Call for Proposals The Alva Myrdal Centre Multidisciplinary Conference gathers researchers and practitioners passionate about nuclear disarmament. AMC now invites proposals for the 9–10 June 2026 conference 'Building Blocks for Disarmament' in Uppsala, Sweden and online.   Read more.

US to Own Nuclear Reactors Stemming From Japan’s $550 Billion Pledge

Story by Ari Natter and Will Wade • 3 min read

A cooling tower at a nuclear station in Scriba, New York.© Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- The US government plans to buy and own as many as 10 new, large nuclear reactors that could be paid for using Japan’s $550 billion funding pledge, part of a push to meet surging demand for electricity.

The new details of the unusual arrangement were outlined Wednesday by Carl Coe, the Energy Department’s chief of staff, about the non-binding commitment made by Japan in October to fund $550 billion in US projects, including as much as $80 billion for the construction of new reactors made by Westinghouse Electric Co.

“The role of having the government involved in private markets is sacrosanct — you just don’t do it,” Coe said at an energy conference hosted by the Tennessee Advanced Energy Business Council. “But this is a national emergency.”

The Trump administration has sounded alarms bells about a shortage of electricity needed for energy-hungry data centers that power artificial intelligence and for a potential resurgence of domestic manufacturing.. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump declared an energy emergency, unlocking new domestic powers to fast-track pipelines, expand power grids and save struggling coal plants. 

It has been more than a decade since the US last broke ground on a large-scale nuclear power plant that came online. Most of America’s energy industry wrote off for dead the notoriously expensive projects after Southern Co., the last utility to build a new plant, went $16 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule building its Vogtle project.
Related video: America's $35 Billion New Nuclear Power Plant (MegaBuilds)

MegaBuilds
America's $35 Billion New Nuclear Power Plant

Still, the AI boom has created new life for the big plants. Earlier this year, Xcel Chief Executive Officer Bob Frenzel raised the idea that the projects could come back in vogue.

It is still unclear whether the funding commitments made by Japan, announced last month as part of a trade deal framework with the US, will come to fruition. In all, Japan has agreed to invest some $332 billion for energy projects in the United States, according to the White House. That pledge, in addition to Westinghouse’s new AP1000 reactors, include a new breed of smaller nuclear reactors, as well new power plants, electric transmission projects and pipelines. 

The Trump administration’s energy ambitions include orders aimed at accelerating the construction of nuclear power plants and government funds to support the restart of shuttered nuclear plants. An executive order aims to get 10 large, conventional reactors under construction by 2030, a target the industry has said will be challenging, but possible.

Shares of Oklo Inc., a US developer of small modular reactors, rose on Wednesday following Coe’s statement. Its stock was up 6% at 1:57 pm in New York. Shares in Canadian uranium miner Cameco Corp. rose as much as 5.7% and were up 3.3% at 1:57 pm in New York. 

The Energy Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for more details. Coe, in his remarks at the conference, said lots of details remained to be decided, but expressed confidence the nuclear reactors would come through. 

“We’re trying to decide where to put them,” Coe said.

Democratic Wisconsin lawmakers propose legislation capping utility bills

Wausau resident Jill Sexton and her husband are both in their 60s. Sexton says she’s on disability and her husband is on Social Security. 

Sexton said she had to take a part-time job to cover rising utility costs, but it’s still tough to make ends meet.

“Each month, we choose between paying the electric bill and heat bill or filling our prescriptions,” she said at a recent news conference. “Some months, I don’t buy the medication. Some months, we stretch food until the very last day.”

Democratic state lawmakers are proposing a bill that they say would address the issue.

At a Nov. 11 press conference, state Reps. Darrin Madison of Milwaukee, Francesca Hong of Madison and Ryan Spaude of Ashwaubenon announced legislation that would essentially cap residential energy bills in Wisconsin at 2 percent of household income.

The bill would require the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin to create a percentage of income payment program that would provide relief to energy burdened or severely energy burdened households.

The legislation defines energy burdened households as those spending between 2 and 4 percent of their household income on electricity and gas bills, and severely energy burdened households as those spending 4 percent or more.

Spaude said the bill is “all about affordability.”

“Folks in my district and around the state are on a knife’s edge,” he said. “Many of them are just barely getting by. This bill is going to do something. It’s going to keep more money in their pockets.”

The Wisconsin Utilities Association declined to comment on the proposal.

Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Wisconsin, said his organization hasn’t taken a position on the bill yet but said he appreciates that it shines a light on rising energy costs.

“At this time of the session, there are a lot of bills that are introduced for messaging rather than for enactment,” he said.

Democrats nationally are trying to make affordability and cost of living issues a central campaign issue. Democratic candidates who won elections this month in New York, New Jersey and Virginia all made affordability a core component of their messaging.

The Democratic bill would need bipartisan support to reach Gov. Tony Evers’ desk.

“Given that the Republicans control the state Legislature by a good margin, and that this is a Democratic bill, I would say it strikes me as unlikely to become law unless there are some Republican co-sponsors,” said Michael Kraft, an emeritus professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Electricity prices expected to continue rising through 2026

Nationally, retail electricity prices have outpaced inflation since 2022, and are expected to continue rising through 2026, according to a May 2025 analysis from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“Right now, we’re in a period where electricity prices are actually the ones, I think, driving inflation,” Content said. “For all the attention that egg prices got last year, the price of power is what is really taking hold this year.”

Increases in average monthly residential electric bills in Wisconsin stayed below inflation from 2014 to 2024, the most recent year with available data, according to federal data. During that period, average monthly bills rose from $94.88 to $110.87. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator shows $94.88 in December 2014 money had the same buying power as $127.53 in December 2024.

During the same period, the average price per kilowatt-hour — the cost of one kilowatt of electricity used for one hour — in Wisconsin has risen by nearly 26 percent, federal data shows. The average price per kilowatt-hour rose from 13.67 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2014 to about 17.18 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2024.

Electric bills can also vary by utility. For example, We Energies’ average electric bills in 2014 and 2024 were slightly above the statewide average, while Wisconsin Public Service bills were slightly lower than average, according to data from the Citizens Utility Board of Wisconsin.

We Energies’ average monthly residential electric bill was $99.65 in 2014 and $127.29 in 2024, while Wisconsin Public Service’s average residential electric bill was $83.94 in 2014 and $105.13 in 2024, according to the Citizens Utility Board of Wisconsin.

Brendan Conway, a spokesperson for the parent company of We Energies and WPS, said in an email that the company’s typical customer bills are below the national average and in line with other utilities across the Midwest. 

“Our rates since 2020 have increased below the rate of inflation and we work every day to keep bills as low as possible,” Conway said. “Just this fall we returned nearly $70 million to customers through bills credits for fuel cost adjustments.”

Maria Beltran, a We Energies customer who lives in Milwaukee, said at the press conference that she struggled with energy bills when she was raising her children. She said her family often had to endure months without electricity and heat.

“The help that exists is slow, confusing and hard to access when you are already juggling with rent and shut off notices,” she said. “There is so much red tape (and) so many barriers that keep people in poverty oppressed. That is not right.”

Cost-conscious utilities resist Trump’s push for nuclear revival

By Brian Dabbs, Francisco "A.J." Camacho | 11/18/2025 06:52 AM EST

The administration has yet to convince major utilities to commit to building large reactors again.

The Trump administration wants to churn dirt on a bevy of new nuclear power plants.

Electric utilities that power America have different plans.

Despite forecasts for spiking electricity use and pledges from the Department of Energy to bolster nuclear power, utilities aren’t inking contracts to build new plants with the large-scale, light-water reactors that have fueled American homes and businesses for decades.

“I wouldn’t build a nuclear plant,” Exelon CEO Calvin Butler told CNBC last week. “What I could do is lean in on combined-cycle gas turbines. What I could do is build community solar. What I could do is own battery storage.”

Duke Energy, a major utility in the Southeast, is now hedging after laying out loose plans in October to produce more than a gigawatt of new nuclear power by 2037.

“We still need to figure out what we’re going to do with cost overrun protection and how we’re going to protect our investors and our customers from overruns,” Duke CEO Harry Sideris said on an earnings call earlier this month. “Nothing going forward until we have those other items resolved.”

That hesitation is throttling Trump administration plans to reassert U.S. nuclear leadership globally — and to ensure there is enough power in the U.S. to win the artificial intelligence race with China. Experts say new builds are important drivers of industry advancement that will cut costs and boost innovation. They’re also needed to keep powering America with nuclear energy, as many of the 94 reactors in the U.S. near retirement.

“There’s not a single company out there talking about a brand new light water reactor, and that’s where the administration gets frustrated,” an energy lobbyist, who has close ties to administration and was granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO’s E&E News. “The administration is a little tone deaf in understanding the trepidations from a Wall Street standpoint.”

The utility sector is grappling with a laundry list of nuclear concerns. It’s worried about high costs, hits to balance sheets and the availability of enriched uranium in the U.S. following a cut-off from Russian imports in 2028. Utility CEOs are also skeptical that the capital-intensive power will be needed if demand forecasts contract.

Nuclear construction is one of many areas of discord between the White House and utility sector.

Meanwhile, nuclear power is taking off elsewhere around the globe. China is building dozens of new large-scale reactors and dramatically cutting costs to build plants, according to recent academic research out of Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University and other institutions.

Federal support

Late last month, the Trump administration and reactor developer Westinghouse announced a “strategic partnership” to build large nuclear plants. The agreement gives the government the option to invest $80 billion into building new U.S. Westinghouse reactors in exchange for profit sharing,

While critical details remain unclear, like which utilities will purchase the power, the investment pledge is the culmination of months of rhetorical boosts for nuclear power.

“I’ve heard about the nuclear renaissance for 20 years,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the Foundation for American Innovation’s gala last week, according to POLITICO. “We are all in to make it happen, and with all of your help, we will make it happen.”

Meanwhile, DOE is looking for ways to help finance domestic uranium enrichment. And the administration has called for reform and expedited approvals from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is tasked with ensuring nuclear safety.

In a statement, DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich said the administration has “taken historic action to accelerate next-generation nuclear deployment,” pointing in part to a DOE loan to restart the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. That financing was initially approved by the Biden administration.

Some other new nuclear activity is afoot in the U.S. utility world. In September, the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned utility, signed an agreement with ENTRA1 Energy, a developer of small modular reactors. Meanwhile, other companies are signaling interest in restarting shuttered plants and completing work on partially-constructed ones. Last month, Santee Cooper approved a nonbinding letter of intent to finish construction at the VC Summer nuclear station in South Carolina.

High cost, high risk

The sector remains traumatized and skittish after sky-high cost overruns tied to construction of the Vogtle nuclear expansion in Georgia, completed in 2024 at roughly double the anticipated price tag. In 2017, South Carolina’s Santee Cooper and a project partner also abandoned two Westinghouse reactors at VC Summer after sinking $9 billion into the project.

“They don’t want to get caught the way that the Vogtle utilities and developers were,” said Advait Arun, senior associate for capital markets at the Center for Public Enterprise. “They’re weighing the odds.”

The Vogtle cost overruns sent Westinghouse into bankruptcy and created a public relations nightmare for Southern Co., the parent company of Georgia Power, which purchases power from Vogtle.

Dale Klein, a former NRC chair, said that utilities remain cautious.

“Utilities, by nature, are going to be conservative, and they’ll do what’s cheap, reliable, and quick,” Klein said. “There are a lot of memoranda of understanding that are being signed today, and MOUs are only worth the paper they’re written on. It just means they’re going to agree to work and think about things.”

He said the decision to contract a new nuclear plant could deliver a blow to the stock price of the company.

“If a publicly traded utility was to announce that they’re going to build a new large, conventional nuclear reactor, it’s very likely that their stock price would drop because Wall Street would be worried about the risk,” Klein said.

A nuclear fiasco akin to Vogtle could upend the balance sheet for a small or moderate-sized utility, experts said.

Overruns didn’t upend Southern Co.’s balance sheet because the utility was able to pass upfront costs onto ratepayers. Now, other states are aiming to get laws on the books, known as construction work-in-progress rules, that allow their utilities to do the same. A bill in North Carolina attempts to do that. A recently passed bill in Missouri allows utilities to pass on costs, but only for new gas projects.

“[Utilities] have to consider what’s right for the ratepayers, and that’s going to be the first big question,” said Rowen Price, a policy adviser at the center-left think tank Third Way.

But with electricity prices rising nationwide, the public utility commissioners that regulate the utility sector could thwart plans for rate hikes.

“If a utility wants to build nuclear, they have to be very careful in how they approach PUCs,” Arun said. “In light of broader concerns about affordability, we shouldn’t assume approval of rate hikes as granted, at least not to the degree that they could finance nuclear.”

Critics of nuclear power are relishing the inaction among utilities.

“We’ve seen these so-called nuclear renaissance efforts declared in the past,” said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste watchdog at the nonprofit Beyond Nuclear. “It’s such a horrendous recent experience, no wonder the utilities aren’t gung-ho to jump in if any of their own skin is in the game.”

Demand spike uncertainty

The United States faces an electricity demand surge unseen in a generation. But some experts think the forecasts may be overblown. Data center developers are logging potential projects in multiple locations across the country, and that’s added uncertainty to the infrastructure build-out. Moreover, data centers could become more efficient and the pace of the tech industry could slow.

Experts compare the current demand scenario with the dot-com era, when dramatic electricity demand spikes were projected but never materialized.

“If there is a sharp contraction in demand, the projects that will go first are the largest capital investments with the least flexibility value in the future,” Arun said. “You’re going to see a lot more investment in cheaper gas, solar and storage and batteries, and wind — these kinds of technologies.”

Moreover, the highest confidence for skyrocketing power demand forecasts is in the next few years.

“When you look at that demand that you have to meet right now, that means natural gas is about your only choice for 24/7 operation,” Klein said. “They’re building these data centers now. They need electricity now. Nuclear takes longer.”

Still, Klein was hopeful that utilities will invest in nuclear projects today to meet long-term forecasts, which still predict continued growth. That could help provide investment confidence.

“If the data centers come in with money up front and say, ‘I will guarantee I’m going to buy this electricity for the long term, and I’m willing to be risk-sharing,’ then I think you’ll see some plants being built,” Klein continued.

Edison Electric Institute, the main lobbying group for for-profit utilities, says it supports nuclear.

“Nuclear energy is essential to delivering as many electrons to the grid and providing more reliable energy to the American people as affordably as possible,” EEI CEO Drew Maloney said in a statement. “We welcome the Trump administration’s focus on revitalizing this sector and look forward to working together to power America’s future.”

But to boost nuclear energy, utilities will need to move beyond rhetoric. Experts say the Trump administration’s $80 billion pledge is merely pomp until utilities get involved.

“It’s all kind of holographic until someone actually buys a reactor,” said the energy lobbyist granted anonymity to speak freely. “Who’s going to buy the reactor? Until your acme utility actually signs a contract, it’s irrelevant.”