The Trump Department of Energy will issue $17.5 billion in loans to help fund 10 new nuclear power reactors nationwide, administration officials said Tuesday. [some emphasis, links added]
The loans, provided by the agency’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing—the Trump administration’s renamed Energy Department loan program—will back the construction of reactors manufactured by the American nuclear power firm Westinghouse.
According to the Energy Department, seven utility companies have entered into letters of intent with Westinghouse; the agency will select just five that will ultimately receive funding to construct two reactors each.
“We want to get things moving again,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told reporters. “We are doing everything we can at the Department of Energy to add dispatchable, reliable, secure energy to the United States, to lower electricity prices and power a reindustrialization of our country.”
In December, the Washington Free Beacon first reported that the Department of Energy would finance 10 reactors.
Wright told the Free Beacon at the time that the move would provide a “nudge” to an industry that has struggled for decades to get new projects up and running.
The action is a remarkable vote of confidence for an industry that has struggled to develop new projects in recent decades, due in part to longstanding public superstition and safety concerns going back to the 1980s.
And it signals that the Trump administration is confident that nuclear power is a viable source for meeting the rapidly increasing energy demands in the United States from artificial intelligence, data centers, and manufacturing.
The Energy Department loans will fund a single type of reactor, Westinghouse’s AP1000 units. Each of the 10 reactors will generate 1.1 gigawatts of power, enough to power roughly a million homes, and Tuesday’s announcement will kickstart projects that could power 10 million homes altogether.
While the timing of the projects remains undetermined, the announcement is part of President Donald Trump’s goal to begin construction of 10 new nuclear reactors by 2030.
Read rest at Free Beacon
It’s a start, but $175B should be allocated to build 100 plants…
“…longstanding public superstition and safety concerns going back to the 1980s.”
Beaumont, California, late 80’s. Westinghouse wanted to build a storage building for low grade ‘waste’. The city council meeting when that was discussed was packed, most locals ‘against’. The license the company had was for less “radioactive material” than the local hospital.
The facility was built. I worked there one summer. The only time I’ve worked with liquid nitrogen – used to cool some of the sensors. ‘Safety’ was paramount. Never had a problem.
When I was in the Navy from 10/72 to 3/81 I learned electronics and the nuclear power where I was a reactor operator on two different submarines. I have no fear of nuclear power and understand the how these reactors operate to generate steam for propulsion and electricity. The methods used by the vast majority of nuclear plants in the US (and around the world) were pressurized water reactors just like we use in the Navy. The biggest difference is that commercial plants use low enrichment U-235 while the Navy’s reactors are highly enriched. This means the current reactor cores in the Navy can last decades while commercial plants do minor refueling around once a year while doing other maintenance.
The new reactors that are being designed use many different technologies. Another thing that is being considered is seeding the reactor fuel with Thorium-232 which when it absorbs a neutron it will decay in short order U-233, the only other isotope of Uranium that is fissile. Thorium is abundant and the only naturally occurring isotope is Th-232. This as opposed to Uranium where well over 99% of natural Uranium is U-238.