Westinghouse Electric Company is reportedly in discussions with government officials regarding the deployment of ten nuclear reactors to fulfill the aims of President Donald Trump’s executive orders designed to expand the energy technology, according to Financial Times.
Westinghouse is one of the few domestic companies with the resources to design and build large reactors, and the company is reportedly eager to develop several large nuclear plants in the U.S. in the coming years, according to Financial Times. Trump’s May 23 executive orders to “usher in a nuclear renaissance” called for quadrupling the technology’s capacity by 2050, launching development of ten large reactors by 2030 and streamlining regulatory processes, all of which have sparked interest among developers and utilities.
“There are ten large nuclear reactors in the executive order and we believe that we can do them all with AP1000 reactors … Our customers, the hyperscalers, the tech firms, the suppliers are all coming together to try to figure out exactly how to deploy,” Westinghouse interim chief executive Dan Sumner told the Financial Times.
“There is active engagement with the administration, including key points of interface with the loan progra[ms] office, recogni[z]ing the importance of financing to the deployment of the model,” Sumner told the publication.
Nearly all nuclear power currently produced in the U.S. comes from reactors built between 1967 and 1990, according to the World Nuclear Association. Since the 1990s, nuclear power generation in the United States has been on the decline, and only two large nuclear reactors have been built in the last 20 years.
“The President’s recent executive orders expedite the production of nuclear energy which produces a safe and reliable energy source that will boost grid stability and address AI cost concerns,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “President Trump is restoring America’s energy dominance, protecting our national security, and powering the next generation of technologies by unleashing our mineral supply.”
Former President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan ADVANCE Act into law in 2024, a bill designed to bring down the costs of nuclear licensing, create new opportunities for old industrial sites to host reactors and allocate additional resources to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Westinghouse is “uniquely positioned” to enact Trump’s goal as it already has an approved reactor design, an operational supply chain and recent experience constructing two AP1000s in Georgia, which are large, pressurized water reactors, Sumner told the Financial Times. The AP1000s have the power to generate enough electricity for about 750,000 homes.
Sumner told the publication that the company learned how to navigate AP1000 construction difficulties they encountered during the deployment of reactors in the U.S. in China.
“The design is frozen … We are the only firm in the world that has done modular nuclear construction and we have all of [that] real life learning now embedded in our go forward delivery models,” Sumner told the Financial Times.
Small modular reactor (SMR) developers are also in talks with government officials about building multiple SMRs at one site in order to minimize construction risks and provide generation capacity equivalent to a large reactor, according to the publication.
One example is NuScale, which has an SMR design approved by federal regulators, the Financial Times reported. SMRs are a practical way forward in the nuclear energy sphere, according to energy sector experts who previously spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“For too long, America’s nuclear energy industry has been stymied by red tape and outdated government policies, but thanks to President Trump, the American nuclear renaissance is finally here,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement to the DCNF.
Westinghouse and NuScale did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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