Nuclear

Hyperscaler Google and Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear operator in the U.S., have signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) designed to support $4.3 billion of upgrades at 11 nuclear units across the PJM Interconnection, which is slated to add 890 MW of generating capacity from Constellation’s existing reactors by the end of 2032. The […]

Over 2,060 gigawatts. That is the staggering volume of generation and storage capacity currently trapped waiting in U.S. interconnection queues. According to data from RMI, the typical project now takes almost five years—stuck in administrative and transmission review before a single watt can be delivered to the grid. In 2008, it was only two years. For […]

Fusion energy company Xcimer Energy said it has finalized an agreement for up to $30.5 million in additional federal funding through the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. The new DOE award, announced October 6, is for the program’s second budget period. It brings the total DOE funding for potential Milestone payments […]

For most Americans, electricity is so woven into daily life that we rarely consider what its absence means. Hospitals depend on it to preserve medicines and operate equipment. Schools, factories, farms, and businesses depend on it to function. Reliable electricity is one of the foundations of a modern economy. COMMENTARY Yet 655 million people worldwide […]

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF) has announced a conditional loan commitment of up to $4.2 billion to finance uprates and modernization at Vistra’s Beaver Valley nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and its Davis-Besse and Perry plants in Ohio. The projects could add 433 MW of new nuclear capacity and preserve […]

Small modular reactors (SMRs) borrow steam turbine engineering from both coal-fired and nuclear plants, but the resulting “wet steam” problem, with exhaust moisture topping 15%, demands a fresh set of

At the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, hosted by Sen. Dave McCormick at Carnegie Mellon University on July 15, 2025, Westinghouse Electric Co. put a live proof of concept on display: an artificial intelligence (AI) system aimed at reducing the cost and schedule risk of building new AP1000 reactors. According to Westinghouse, the demonstration […]

On Aug. 30, workers at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Covert Township, Michigan, began loading 204 fuel assemblies into a reactor vessel that had sat empty since the plant shut down in 2022—the first time in U.S. history that a commercial reactor that had entered decommissioning began reloading fuel. Holtec International Chairman and CEO Dr. […]

Infinigen, a Puerto Rico-based independent power producer, in late August announced the closing of a $33-million tax equity investment in the Yabucoa Solar Project.

The U.S. Army has conditionally selected three private developers to negotiate long-term leases for commercial power generation at six installations in a new Strategic Capital Initiatives round that could bring battery storage, natural gas, and nuclear generation onto Army land. On Sept. 18, the Army conditionally selected Ameresco, a Massachusetts-based energy infrastructure company, for Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland […]

Nuclear plants have accumulated decades of operating experience, technical research, regulatory guidance, and other industry knowledge. Finding the right information, however, can mean searching several separate systems and then piecing the relevant material together. To address that search burden, Atomic Canyon, a company developing artificial intelligence tools for the nuclear industry, built the Nuclear Industry […]

Electric utility Georgia Power and tech giant Google said the companies have an agreement under which Google will support power uprates at two of the utility’s nuclear power plants.

The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) said the agency has closed a loan of as much as $1.9 billion to NextEra Energy to support the restart of the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa.

Nuclear energy is entering a new era. Across the United States and around the world, countries are looking to nuclear power to provide reliable electricity, strengthen energy security, and support economic growth. Advanced reactors and other innovative technologies are creating opportunities that would have been difficult to imagine when many of our current regulations were […]

The U.S. power grid is entering a period unlike any it has experienced in decades. Rapid electrification, domestic manufacturing, and the exponential growth of artificial intelligence are reshaping electricity demand. A recent report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, projects that data centers alone could account for between 9.5% […]

Japan is rebuilding its nuclear power fleet after the Fukushima disaster, with upgrades targeted toward ensuring safe operations. Japan continues work to restart its nuclear power fleet, which supplied about a

Australia Moves to Make Data Centers Bring Power. The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) has urged energy ministers to require large data centers connecting to the National Electricity Market to bring

The most consequential number in current American energy planning is one that nobody in the room where it gets made believes.

When I walk into the main office of a power plant, it’s always on the main TV screen, along with heat rate, load, and other critical numbers. I’m talking about condenser backpressure. Every power plant manager watches this number (Figure 1), and they should. A PEPSE (Performance Evaluation of Power System Efficiencies) analysis of a […]

Five advanced nuclear companies will build, own, and operate more than 20 commercial nuclear microreactors across five U.S. Army installations under the Janus Program, a milestone-based effort designed to place the first project into useful service by September 2028 and establish repeatable commercial products. In exclusive interviews, the selected companies told POWER they intend to use the […]

The U.S. Army has mobilized up to $2.2 billion for a five-year effort to build and operate more than 20 commercial nuclear microreactors across military installations, selecting five reactor developers and five initial sites for a program designed to push advanced nuclear systems beyond federal test programs and into sustained operation by a Sept. 30, […]

Westinghouse’s eVinci microreactor has completed zero-power criticality testing at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC), a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) facility at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). The company said the milestone, achieved at 10:39 a.m. PT on Aug. 24 in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Idaho National Laboratory […]

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) has selected 13 new projects across 12 companies for its Nuclear Energy Launch Pad initiative in a significant expansion of the DOE-authorization pathway that channels advanced reactor and fuel-cycle developers toward demonstration on federal and non-federal sites. The selections—spanning microreactor developers, enrichment startups, fuel fabrication […]

A new federal effort to develop nuclear “lifecycle” campuses has produced something Washington, D.C., has rarely seen: states competing for a role in managing America’s used nuclear fuel.

Blue Energy and GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GVH) have signed an agreement to launch the next phase of their collaboration on a planned 2.5-GW gas-plus-nuclear power project in Victoria, Texas, moving the closely watched data-center power concept from an announced collaboration to engineering, licensing, and safety analysis. The Aug. 13-announced agreement will advance project definition for […]

A California-based fusion energy company announced it has reached an industry milestone. Fuse Energy Technologies Corp. on August 10 published a report noting the company set a record for the highest fusion neutron yield—1.27×10¹² in a single shot—by any commercial fusion company.

Three companies at the forefront of nuclear energy technology have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to evaluate fuel technologies to support advancement of next-generation nuclear power.

California-based Deep Fission said the DOE signed off on the Nuclear Safety Design Agreement (NSDA) for its Gravity Nuclear Reactor. The group called it a major regulatory milestone that confirms Deep Fission’s reactor design warrants advancement under the DOE Reactor Pilot Program.

Oklo’s Groves Isotope Test Reactor in Lockhart, Texas, has become the fifth reactor to achieve criticality under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program (RPP), and the first under the program to do so on private land. The low-power test reactor reached criticality at 9:19 p.m. ET Aug. 5, achieving a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear […]

Growth in artificial intelligence (AI) is outpacing the world’s ability to generate enough power to sustain it. As AI adoption accelerates worldwide, it’s colliding with a power system that wasn’t built for its level of demand. Vittorio Pierangeli, senior vice president PowerGen at Rolls-Royce Power Systems (Figure 1), explains why electricity, not chips or algorithms, […]