Slew of hurdles could hamper nuclear resurgence

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Despite projected rising power demand, pro-nuclear White House orders and increased investor interest, many challenges remain for a “nuclear renaissance” to take place in the United States, an expert panel said here Wednesday.

The nuclear industry has at best a “mixed” record on cost and schedule performance on nuclear power plants, said Mark Whitney, Amentum’s energy and environment president.

Amentum organized a panel discussion of government, industry and legal officials to discuss the nuclear future. Whitney moderated the event at the National Press Club.

With one 1,000-megawatt reactor being built in the United States in recent years, the nuclear supply chain has eroded and is not “in warm standby,” Whitney said.

The industry must also navigate issues involving regulatory approvals, first of a kind technology and a dwindling craft workforce. For every two craft workers joining the workforce, there seem to be five leaving it, said John Eschenberg, who heads Amentum’s Nuclear Center of Excellence in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

President Donald Trump has, through executive orders, called for development of 300 gigawatts or 300,000 megawatts of new nuclear capacity in the United States by 2050. That is an ambitious goal, the panelist agreed, especially given that the U.S. is home to less than 100,000 megawatts of nuclear power.

“There is this paper reactor and then there is” the reality of actually building one, said Westinghouse Energy Systems President Dan Lipman.

“The real challenge in my view,” Lipman said, “has to do with the “business model we have now.” The traditional model has been that commercial power reactors were built by large electric utilities, he said, adding that could be changing.

Most forecasts predict a big jump in electricity demand with the advent of artificial intelligence and the accompanying data centers.

When asked, panelists including Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army Jeff Waksman and Jeffrey Merrifield, a partner at the Pillsbury Winthrop law firm, acknowledged such forecasts were often wrong in the past.

But while current electric demand models might be too high, it is also possible the projections might be too low, said Michael Goff, deputy assistant secretary, with the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.

The Trump administration has ordered a significant overhaul of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission within 18 months. Merrifield, a former NRC commissioner himself, said the agency has made much progress in its licensing of advanced and small modular reactors.