Nuclear power will receive most money from DOE loans, Chris Wright says
Cooling towers at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, October 30, 2024.
Danielle DeVries | CNBC
Nuclear energy will get most of the money from the Energy Department’s loan office as the Trump administration tries to quickly break ground on new reactors, Secretary Chris Wright said Monday.
“We have significant lending authority in the loan program office,” the Energy Secretary told a conference hosted by the American Nuclear Association in Washington, DC. “The biggest use of these dollars will be for nuclear power plants to enable the construction of the first facilities.”
President Trump signed administrative order In May, the United States was called for to break ground on 10 major nuclear reactors by 2030. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms And Microsoft They are investing billions of dollars to restart old nuclear power plants, refurbish existing ones, and introduce new reactor technology to meet electricity demand from AI data centers.
Wright said he expects electricity demand from AI to attract billions of dollars of equity capital to build new nuclear capacity from “very reliable providers.” He said he could match those private dollars at a four-to-one ratio with low-cost debt financing from the Department of Energy’s loan office.
“When we leave office in three years and three months, I hope to see dozens of nuclear power plants under construction,” Wright said.
Westinghouse deal
The Trump administration last month struck a deal with the owners of Westinghouse to invest $80 billion to build nuclear power plants across the United States. Westinghouse is owned by a uranium miner. cameco and Brookfield Asset Management.
Westinghouse has designed a modern reactor called AP1000 that could power more than 750,000 homes. CEO Dan Sumner said in July that Westinghouse would meet Trump’s call to build major new facilities 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 of Westinghouse reactors, including the Department of Energy’s loan office.
“We’re confident there will be significant interest in this minimum $80 billion investment to get the process started,” Isaac told investors on Cameco’s third-quarter earnings call.
Under the terms of the October deal, Westinghouse could operate as a separate, publicly traded company with a U.S. government as its shareholder.
But Westinghouse has struggled in the past to build the AP1000 on time and on budget. It went bankrupt in 2017 due to cost overruns on major nuclear projects in Georgia and South Carolina.
Two AP1000 reactors entered service at the Vogtle Plant in Georgia in 2023 and 2024; this was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. The South Carolina project was cancelled.
