TerraPower plans to begin construction this summer at the site of what’s now expected to be the United States’ first commercial advanced nuclear power facility near a coal-fired power plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
Though TerraPower’s reactor isn’t expected to begin operations until 2030, Wyoming began laying the groundwork for TerraPower in March 2020, when Gov. Mark Gordon, R, signed a bill allowing small modular reactor capacity to replace coal generation capacity. State laws streamlining advanced reactor deployment and enabling up to $150 million in matching funds for a range of energy technology deployments followed in 2022 and 2023.
“Wyoming has done a terrific job” to support advanced nuclear deployment, David Terry, president of the National Association of State Energy Officials, said in an interview.
Wyoming was an early mover on advanced nuclear, but industry experts say other states are catching up. State legislatures considered about 200 nuclear-friendly energy bills in 2023 and have already looked at about 130 this year, said Christine Csizmadia, senior director for state governmental affairs and advocacy at the Nuclear Energy Institute.
“It used to be maybe five to ten [state] bills each year that would even mention nuclear,” Csizmadia said in an interview.
In addition to Wyoming, Michigan and Virginia stand at the forefront of resurgent state interest in nuclear energy. Michigan put $150 million last year toward Holtec’s potential restart of the recently shuttered Palisades generating station, which subsequently received a $1.5 billion conditional loan commitment from the U.S. Department of Energy. Virginia’s recent pro-nuclear moves include state funding for an energy “career cluster” and a state-supported energy lab that could enable deployment of advanced nuclear reactors near former coal mines.
These states’ efforts point the way for policymakers elsewhere to attract emerging nuclear technologies and the skilled workers they need to operate, Terry said.
“There are no regional voters, only state and local voters” he said. “So states need to [enact state-specific policies] that bring jobs and attract investment” within their borders.
Four pathways for state nuclear policy
State nuclear policy generally takes one of four complementary forms, Csizmadia said:
Moratoria repeal and advanced nuclear regulation
Six state legislatures have lifted freezes on new nuclear facilities since 2016, leaving 10 states with bans still on the books. Hawaii and Rhode Island could lift their nuclear bans this year, Csizmadia said. State legislatures may also need to update regulations to allow specific advanced nuclear demonstration projects to proceed as proposed, said Betsy Smith, policy specialist for environment, energy and transportation at the National Council of State Legislatures, in an email to Utility Dive.
Including nuclear in clean energy standards
Several states have recently enacted or expanded clean energy standards that incorporate nuclear energy, rather than remaining silent on nuclear or specifically excluding it, Csizmadia said. They include Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina and Utah, according to NEI’s state policy tracker.
Exploring nuclear development
This is the broadest and most active category at the moment, encompassing technology feasibility studies, working groups and stakeholder councils commissioned and funded by state governments, Csizmadia said. Recent and ongoing examples include Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and South Dakota, among other states. “Some of these states lack existing commercial nuclear power facilities and want to see if it’s feasible for them,” Csizmadia said.
Financial support or incentives
Some states have committed significant funding to nuclear energy beyond the relatively modest cost of nuclear feasibility studies, Csizmadia said. At $150 million, Michigan’s commitment to support Palisades’ restart was the most significant toward a single nuclear project in the past several years. But other states, including Virginia (up to $10 million), Tennessee ($50 million) and Wyoming (up to $150 million in matching funds for a broad range of technologies that includes nuclear) have recently enacted or proposed sizable financial commitments for nuclear.
States can lay the groundwork for new or revitalized nuclear industries by including nuclear in clean energy standards and repealing bans, NASEO’s Terry said.
But even with tangible financial commitments from elected and appointed officials, pro-nuclear state policies’ payoff can take years to arrive, Virginia Department of Energy Director Glenn Davis said in an interview.
Virginia began its “moonshot” journey with the creation of the Virginia Nuclear Energy Consortium’s predecessor organization in 2013, gained momentum with a flurry of pro-nuclear laws passed last year and now aims to have its first SMR online in 2032 while “leading the nation in new nuclear development,” Davis said.
The role of energy communities and industrial sites
TerraPower’s first commercial reactor will sit a mile or two from the Naughton coal-fired power plant in a community with a “high energy IQ,” TerraPower Director of External Affairs Jeff Navin said in an interview earlier this month.
It’s the first commercial advanced nuclear project to take advantage of what the DOE believes is a tremendous opportunity to transition coal communities toward nuclear and other low-carbon energy technologies — a key focus for Wyoming and other states. The DOE predicts that a larger coal-to-nuclear project could directly create over 100 additional jobs at the plant and indirectly support several hundred more, a lifeline for energy communities in a decarbonized future.
However, David Eskelsen, spokesperson for Rocky Mountain Power, which partnered with TerraPower on the Kemmerer reactor, cautioned that the utility’s consideration of other coal-to-nuclear conversions is “in the very early stages of feasibility study and not certain at this point.” Eskelsen noted that Rocky Mountain Power’s resource planning process “does not pick specific projects, but rather a portfolio of resource types over a 20-year planning horizon.”
Still, with declining coal revenues and volatile oil and gas prices, Wyoming is adopting an “everything we have” mentality around energy, Wyoming Energy Authority Executive Director Rob Creager said in an interview..
“We are a strong coal state that has seen challenges with the coal markets,” Creager said.
Wyoming is also working to support nuclear suppliers and upstream businesses in and around fossil-dependent communities, with the mindset of “‘How can we get [nuclear] done from cradle to grave,” he added.
In August, the Wyoming Energy Authority earmarked $10 million in state matching funds to support potential partnerships between nuclear fuel and components supplier BWXT Technologies and two Wyoming companies, including Gillette-based heavy equipment manufacturer L&H Industrial.
Using nuclear as an economic revitalization tool is a priority for other historically fossil-dependent states, such as Virginia, where the southwestern coal patch is a focus of advanced nuclear efforts.
The Virginia Department of Energy’s Davis pointed to the recently announced Microsoft-Google-Nucor 24/7 clean electricity RFI as an opportunity for advanced nuclear power in southwestern Virginia, where a state-funded feasibility study last year identified seven promising SMR sites on or near decommissioned mine lands and the state-supported Energy DELTA Lab will “deploy innovative and clean energy technologies,” including nuclear, that could support hyperscale data center and low-carbon hydrogen production clusters.
By supporting clean local and behind-the-meter generation, the lab’s work could help reduce the need for new transmission lines in the already-congested PJM Interconnection region, Davis said.
“That challenge is easier to solve with behind-the-meter energy generation,” he said.
Building a nuclear workforce
Workforce development is an important piece of pro-nuclear state policy, experts and officials say. In part, due to the unique skills and sometimes extensive training required for key nuclear roles, there’s “healthy competition between states to set up these early [advanced nuclear] projects” as states work to attract existing nuclear-industry workers and train new ones at local colleges and universities, Creager said.
“I joke with my friends in other governors’ offices that I’ll tell you what we’ve done [in Wyoming], but I’m not sure I’ll tell you what we’re going to do next,” he added.
Even places like Virginia, with BWXT’s world headquarters, several commercial nuclear generating stations, a world-class nuclear engineering program at Virginia Tech and “40 [naval] reactors sitting off the coast,” need to invest in nuclear workforce development, Davis said.
He cited the state legislature’s move in 2019 to create an “energy career cluster” that includes nuclear and the Virginia Nuclear Innovation Hub’s expected partnerships with the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University and Liberty University. The Nuclear Innovation Alliance expects the cluster to “support the next generation of engineers, experts and technologists.”
States can turn to the federal government for help on skilled workforce development, NASEO’s Terry said. The DOE’s Nuclear Energy University Program supports “higher-skill areas” like nuclear engineering, while the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act include funding for nuclear higher education, he noted.
By contrast, state energy offices tend to take the lead on establishing technician-type roles, Terry said.
In states farther along in the process of attracting advanced nuclear generation, workforce development can happen in partnership with — or even at the initiative of — the operators themselves. TerraPower is “moving as fast as possible” to stand up nuclear education programs at the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources and several community colleges across the state, Creager said.
TerraPower hopes to retain at least some of the Naughton workforce to staff its Kemmerer reactor, Navin said last month. More than existing transmission infrastructure and water rights, the presence of skilled workers who understand the energy business was a key factor in TerraPower’s siting decision, he added.
The workforce synergies between prior and potential future site operations are even stronger in southwest Michigan, where the Palisades nuclear facility’s closure affected nearly 600 employees, said Kara Cook, chief of staff of the Michigan Department of Energy, Great Lakes and Environment.
Many Palisades employees left the area after the plant closed in 2022, in some cases to find work at other nuclear facilities, Cook said. But now that the decommissioning process is on hold, some are returning or even coming out of retirement to help with worker retraining, she added.
Like TerraPower in Wyoming, Holtec is taking the lead on workforce development at Palisades, conducting training exercises in “an amazing simulator that is an exact replica of their operations room,” Cook said.
“Every state is different”
Wyoming, Michigan and Virginia have each made progress in establishing, expanding or revitalizing their nuclear industries, but the examples they set may not apply everywhere.
In some states, policymakers remain ambivalent about nuclear energy. A legislative proposal to repeal Oregon’s nuclear moratorium failed last year amid grassroots opposition, while a Colorado Energy Office official expressed skepticism about a proposed coal-to-nuclear conversion at the Comanche 3 coal-fired generator in Pueblo, which is set to retire in 2031.
“Current evidence suggests the high costs of nuclear makes it unlikely to be a major contributor to generation in Colorado any time soon,” Colorado Energy Office Communications Manager Ari Rosenblum said in an email. Rosenblum cited a recent analysis showing Colorado’s least-cost grid decarbonization pathway to be “significant wind, solar and storage and using gas generation as a reliability and capacity resource.”
North Dakota policymakers and utility officials, meanwhile, are looking to stand up a $1.4 billion carbon capture and sequestration project to curtail emissions at the state’s third-largest coal-fired power plant as soon as 2028 — before TerraPower’s Kemmerer reactor is expected to come online.
“We looked at carbon capture [rather than coal-to-nuclear] because we have better resources for it here in North Dakota than anywhere else,” including favorable local geology and seismic stability, Ben Fladhammer, communications manager for plant operator Minnkota Power Cooperative, said in an interview.
“Every state is different and they deserve the right to choose,” NEI’s Csizmadia said. But for states that are serious about supporting next-generation nuclear, she has some straightforward advice for policymakers: “Start planning today.”
“If you commit to a reactor today, it’ll take eight to ten years to happen,” she said.
