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Utility Dive

Summary

Dive Brief:

• Without further aid from Congress and the White House, the prospects for the U.S. nuclear industry will dwindle in the face of cheaper resources that are getting built faster than new nuclear generators, according to a former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
• Small modular reactor developers are eyeing the potential to replace retiring coal generation and take advantage of those facilities' interconnection sites. Excepting NuScale Power, which has advanced in permitting with the NRC, the near-term potential for other small modular reactor designs to replace physical coal plants is "very low in the near future, like zero," Allison Macfarlane, who chaired the NRC during the Obama administration and now directs the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, said during a Friday webinar hosted by OurEnergyPolicy.
• Larger nuclear plants are still being built globally, in "parts of the world where electricity demand growth is significantly higher" than in the U.S., John Kotek, senior vice president of policy development and public affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), said on the panel.