Small nuke reactors are really coming online by next year, US energy secretary insists

That's optimistic based on progress so far

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright believes that the country will have at least one small nuclear rector up and running by July 2026, despite the fact that not a single one has been built to date, after multiple failed attempts.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Monday, Wright said that the US would have at least one reactor online "before July 4th of next year," with several others coming online over the rest of 2026. 

"It's not the back-end electricity production, but the whole nuclear system running, demonstrating how it will work," Wright added. "I think this will expedite final permitting and sales and commercialization of the reactors."

That's a lot of optimism given that small nuclear reactors (SMRs), which promise the best of nuclear energy – no carbon emissions, constant and readily available power, and high output – without the possibility of apocalyptic meltdowns, have been hyped up for years but so far failed to materialize. 

The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission has only approved two SMR designs for commercial construction in the US, and both are actually iterations of the same design from NuScale, one able to produce 50 MW of energy and an upgraded 77 MW model. For reference, a typical datacenter uses between 5 and 10 MW, but the mega-datacenters favored by hyperscalers can require up to 100MW.

Approval doesn't mean much if you can't get one built, however, and that's been NuScale's biggest problem so far. The company partnered with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems to build its first-ever grid-connected plant, but those efforts were abandoned in late 2023 due to cost overruns and a lack of interest from subscribers. 

Along with being the only certified SMR designs in the US, NuScale's reactors also have a leg up thanks to their use of low-enriched uranium fuel - the same type used in the large-scale reactors of the prior nuclear age.

Other designs face an even more daunting challenge because they hope to use high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which offers more active fissile isotopes, but is very scarce in the US. There's just a single company in the United States actively producing HALEU: Centrus Energy, and it's not exactly scaled up to provide fuel for a significant number of SMRs. Centrus said in June that it had achieved its milestone of producing 900 kilograms of HALEU in a year, but it knows that won't be enough. 

"While the country is expected to need a much larger quantity of HALEU in the future, Centrus' existing production should be enormously valuable to the Department in helping to meet some of its earliest needs," a Centrus spokesperson told us. 

The company also noted that 900 kilograms is only enough for around one or two small reactors, though we're told Centrus' full-scale HALEU production cascades could produce around six metric tons per year – a production level the company previously said would likely take a few years to reach. 

What Wright's reactor dreams might look like

Wright may also be talking about an even smaller class of nuclear power plants known as microreactors, which are designed to produce just a few megawatts of electricity. 

In 2024, the DoE broke ground on a microreactor at the Idaho National Laboratory that it said "could become one of the first advanced reactors to operate in the US as early as 2026." The Energy Department has since added two additional trailer-sized micro reactor designs to its Idaho test plans. 

Wright's statement on Mondayisn't the first time he's plugged his dream of multiple SMRs coming online by 2026 – he said much the same when speaking to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee about the White House's proposed 2026 DoE budget.

The Energy Secretary pointed to a Trump executive order from May that gave the DoE authority to bypass the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and approve reactor designs. 

"We want to use that authority, because our fear is with the old way it worked, five years from now we will still be talking about 'soon, we're going to have SMRs,'" Wright said. "Some of them can be built quickly." 

Trump signed another order the same day that ordered the DoE to get at least one advanced nuclear reactor built and fired up "no later than 30 months" later. That would give DoE until November 2026 to get at least one SMR or other new-age nuclear reactor built and running - a bit more time than the Independence Day deadline Wright set for himself, but no less daunting given the fact the US has yet to build a single working advanced nuclear reactor, SMR or otherwise.

The Department of Energy didn't provide responses before publication. ®