Cooling towers at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, October 30, 2024.
Daniel DeVries | CNBC
Secretary Chris Wright said Monday that nuclear power will receive most of its funding from the Department of Energy’s financing office as the Trump administration pushes to get new reactors started quickly.
“We have significant lending authority in the Loan Program Office,” the Secretary of Energy said at a conference hosted by the American Nuclear Association in Washington, D.C. “The biggest use of these funds so far will be to build nuclear power plants, the first power plants.”
In May, President Trump signed an executive order requiring the United States to begin construction of 10 large nuclear reactors by 2030. alphabet, Amazon, meta platform and microsoft We are investing billions of dollars to restart older nuclear power plants, upgrade existing nuclear power plants, and introduce new reactor technology to meet the power demands from artificial intelligence data centers.
Wright said he expects the demand for electricity from AI will attract billions of dollars in equity capital from “very creditworthy suppliers” to build new nuclear facilities. He said the Department of Energy could cover such private financing at a ratio of up to 4:1 with low-cost debt financing from lending offices.
“When we leave office in three years and three months, we’d like to see, if possible, dozens of nuclear power plants under construction,” Wright said.
Contract with Westinghouse
Last month, the Trump administration signed a deal with the owners of Westinghouse, which is owned by a uranium mining company, to invest $80 billion to build nuclear power plants across the United States. Cameco and Brookfield Asset Management.
Westinghouse has designed a modern nuclear reactor called the AP1000 that can power more than 750,000 homes. Chief Executive Officer Dan Sumner said in July that Westinghouse would respond to President Trump’s call to build a major new factory with the AP1000 design.
Cameco Chief Operating Officer Grant Isaac said last week that the U.S. government has a number of options to facilitate financing for Westinghouse reactors, including the Department of Energy’s financing office.
“We are confident that there will be a lot of interest in this minimum $80 billion investment to start the process,” Isaac told investors during Cameco’s third-quarter earnings call.
Under the terms of the October agreement, Westinghouse could be spun out as a separate publicly traded company with the U.S. government as a shareholder.
However, Westinghouse has struggled to produce the AP1000 on time and on budget. It filed for bankruptcy in 2017 due to cost overruns on large nuclear projects in Georgia and South Carolina.
The two AP1000 reactors were due to start operating at Georgia’s Vogtle plant in 2023 and 2024, but were years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. The South Carolina project was canceled.
