"Two designs each get $400 million to prove that smaller, cheaper reactors can work, but the funds will cover only a fraction of the development costs."
"In the race to build America’s first small modular reactors, the U.S. Department of Energy has picked its front-runners.
On Tuesday, the agency awarded a total of $800 million in grants, originally allocated under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, to two projects developing different kinds of 300-megawatt light-water reactors.
These third-generation reactors are shrunken-down, less powerful versions of the time-tested first- and second-generation designs that make up the vast majority of the nation’s fleet of 94 large-scale reactors.
Neither of the third-generation designs — nor any of the fourth-generation models, which use coolants other than water to reach higher temperatures and which the Trump administration has also invested in — has yet been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And $400 million each for the two just-selected projects is likely to cover only a sliver of their total costs. Getting the green light on a design before a reactor is built doesn’t necessarily always work. The first new large-scale reactors built from scratch in the U.S. in a generation came online as a pair over the past two years but were billions of dollars over budget, in part because construction revealed necessary tweaks to the blueprints that then took developers months to get approved by the NRC. Still, the effort is part of the Trump administration’s push to boost both generations of SMRs in a high-stakes, multibillion-dollar bid to reinforce the nation’s world-leading nuclear industry before China, with its rapid construction of new reactors, becomes the No. 1 fission user."
Alexander C. Kaufman reports for Canary Media December 5, 2025.
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