WSJ What’s News - Is the U.S. Ready for a Nuclear Energy Boom?

Episode Date: July 27, 2025

Startups are aiming for an audacious reboot of America’s nuclear energy program. With massive energy demand for data centers and recent executive orders from President Trump that aim to quadruple nuclear-power generation in the next 25 years, the industry is having a moment. What will it take to meet these goals, and is it even possible? X-energy CEO Clay Sell and WSJ reporter Jennifer Hiller discuss how small modular nuclear reactors could lower the cost of building nuclear while meeting America’s energy needs and what the electric grid of the future could look like. Alex Ossola hosts. Further Reading:  The Audacious Reboot of America’s Nuclear Energy Program Trump Wants to Expand Nuclear Power. It Won’t Be Easy New York to Build One of First U.S. Nuclear-Power Plants in Generation A Nuclear Power Plant in Your Backyard? Future Reactors Are Going Small Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey What's News listeners, it's Sunday, July 27th. I'm Alex Osolov for the Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On today's show, startups are aiming for an audacious reboot of America's nuclear energy program. The sector is receiving unprecedented private support and enthusiasm from the Trump administration.

Could the U.S. be seeing the dawn of a new nuclear age? We'll get into what this would look like and what it would take to get there. U.S. electricity consumption reached an all-time high last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And as AI continues to take off, that demand is only expected to grow. Recent executive orders from President Trump aim to quadruple nuclear power generation in the next 25 years. It's a challenging prospect. For many Americans, memories of meltdowns like Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in

2011 still linger. Due to factors like competition from cheaper energy sources, the number of new nuclear plants in the US has declined since the 1990s. And traditional nuclear plants can cost tens of billions of dollars to build. Enter small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. Though designs vary, these small reactors can be built in factories at lower costs than a whole new plant and shipped to where they're needed.

But questions remain, like what it will take to make them cost effective, and whether they will be enough to meet America's energy needs. To talk about this, I'm joined by Clay Sell, CEO of X-Energy, an SMR reactor and fuel developer, and WSJ renewable energy reporter Jennifer Hiller. Jennifer, let's get a sense of where we're at now.

How is nuclear power different today than, say, the 70s? In some ways, it's kind of like the 70s still. We have a lot of large reactors, and that's what was being built in the 70s and 80s, but there is just a lot more talk right now and what seems to be action beginning where we're looking at what could be maybe a next era of construction where we might see a variety of kinds of reactors built. And Clay, how are reactors different now on a technical level? The technology is not the same.

Fission is the same. The fissioning process is the same. But the reactors that are emerging today, including the technology we're developing at my company, X-Energy, is very different. These are reactors that are intrinsically safe. In the case of our reactor, it cannot melt down. So when you think about what happened at Three Mile Island or what happened at Chernobyl,

we have developed a technology where it's physically impossible for that to happen. And so these are very different machines that we're bringing to the marketplace and that they will be bringing online in the early 2030s. Jennifer, what do we know about the safety record of these designs? bring into the marketplace and that they will be bringing online in the early 2030s. Jennifer, what do we know about the safety record of these designs? Some of the designs are meltdown proof and the regulators are the ones that will approve those designs and some of the SMRs are going the path of doing sort of a smaller version of our existing reactors. So those would maybe have the potential,

but we haven't had a lot of accidents in the US. And so there's a fairly good safety record. It seems like nuclear is having a bit of a moment right now. What has changed to enable this? A few things have changed. If you look at maybe 10 or 15 years ago, people were talking about building a lot of reactors, and that didn't end up happening, basically, for market reasons. look at maybe 10 or 15 years ago, people were talking about building a lot of reactors and

that didn't end up happening basically for market reasons. Today there's a lot of new designs, there's a lot of tax policy support, there's a lot of government support for trying to start some new projects. So that's new and you really need some level of government support to get things off the ground essentially in this industry. And on top of that, I think one of the things that looks fundamentally different this year versus even just two years ago is that you have a customer

and that you have a customer in the tech industry potentially that is willing to help bear some of the capital risk of trying a new project. There's a lot of state interest in doing these projects, but you have an off-taker customer that is willing in some cases to put some money on the table. Clay, I'm curious which of the factors that Jennifer just talked about are making the biggest difference for your company. It is really the tremendous increase in demand for electricity that is largely and most popularly being driven by the hyperscalers and the big data center operators that have to operate

24-7. And most of the new growth in generation in the United States over the last 20 years has been in wind and solar, but they are not 24-7. And it just so happens that in the last five or 10 years, nuclear power has surged in popularity. Last March, Gallup released a poll showing that 61% of Americans favor the use of expanded nuclear energy. So nuclear is popular. The need for 24-7 clean power is clearly evident. Political support from both Republicans and Democrats has materialized in a very aggressive set of policies to promote the industry. All of those things have come together to create a very different environment for

nuclear power in 2025. Coming up, what would it take to make this nuclear future a reality? We talk through the obstacles and the possibilities after the break. We've been discussing the opportunities for nuclear power at this moment, but I wonder about the obstacles. Public opinion on nuclear power in the US has become rosier in the past few years, but there's still some wariness. Clay, what are you hearing about how communities are thinking about safety and the possibility of nuclear accidents? There's a generational change that is happening. People that are older than me, and I'm 58, they kind of have a very old and I would argue stale view of nuclear power from the last

generation. They're children of the Cold War, they saw the China Syndrome, they have views. But the younger generation, 50 and below, have a very different view. They have concerns about the health of the globe. They have concerns about climate change. They recognize that nuclear is a very safe form that makes no air emissions. And they also recognize that no technology is a 100% solution. Everything has pluses and minuses, but when you electrify things, you need more

and more electricity. And if it's coming from a coal plant that is belching carbon emissions and soot into the air versus nuclear power, which by independent data is the safest form of generation that has ever been deployed at scale. Jennifer, I'm curious what you make of this. A big portion of the people who are supporters of nuclear energy just are looking at how much wind and solar and battery can you add and that you need some sort of baseload resource to complement all of that and people landed on nuclear as this large existing asset. It's a backbone to the grid,

essentially provides this stable resource. And I think just the further away in time that you get from something like Three Mile Island in the US, opinions change a little bit. And I think these are probably not going to go into communities that don't want them. Generally, places that have nuclear plants like their nuclear plants and would probably not be opposed to adding another reactor or adding some SMRs. That said, there's always going to be some level of opposition to any projects and people who are concerned about the potential for an accident or just what happens to the waste. I don't

think that you're not going to have any opposition at all. There's going to be that for almost any kind of energy project, including this kind. Jennifer, is the grid actually able to handle the amount of power that we're talking about here? Yeah, there's a big debate about that going on because when you look at the demand projections, they're pretty startling and they would imply that we need to build a lot more of the wires and poles kind of transmission infrastructure to move power around, and also a lot of new generation. And if the demand projections are anything in the neighborhood of what is being forecast,

you're going to have to build out the grid more, and then you also have kind of an aging grid. And so a lot of equipment is also needing to be just replaced and repaired. Fundamentally, the grid will just have to handle it, but it can be a slow process in some places. And so you are already seeing instances where potential customers are being told in different parts of the country, we cannot connect you for electric service for five years, six years, seven years. There's an interesting opportunity with the grid as it relates to nuclear

power. A lot of the transmission that's been built in the United States, as difficult as it is to do, has been built to move wind power from places that people generally don't live to the load centers where they do live. And the great thing about nuclear power is the geographic flexibility to site it relatively close to the load. So, for example, the first project that we're building, we're building for Dow Chemical. It is literally behind the meter at their plant in Cedric Texas. So tell me about Xenergi's plans beyond the one that you just mentioned to scale to have reactors across the US. I understand that there aren't currently any, right? You're right. This new generation of reactors are in development. In some

places we've begun construction, but none of them are operating today. And they won't come into operation until the early 2030s. But last year, X Energy announced a major collaboration with Amazon and we agreed to work together to deploy up to five gigawatts, 5,000 megawatts of power for them in the next 15 years. We are working on a plan to build up to 12 units at a site in Washington State. That project has already begun in collaboration with

the utility energy Northwest. And Amazon is putting hundreds of millions of dollars of the project capital into that project to make it happen. And that news was a major game changer in our industry. President Trump's recent executive orders aim to quadruple nuclear power generation in the next 25 years. What will it take to hit those targets that he's laid out? So number one, we have to get started. The industry has to get moving immediately. Number two, we have to recognize that it's going to take a tremendous amount of capital.

And so the programs in place that the government is providing, loan guarantees, kind of tax support, these first of a kind programs for the nuclear sector, those are very important to reduce the capital risk. And the third thing we have to do is we have to rebuild our supply chain enterprise to build nuclear power plants. We largely got out of the business of building nuclear power plants in the United States. So that's a generation of workers that have gone away. It's plants, it's suppliers of nuclear equipment that have shut down. All of that has to be built back.

That was X Energy CEO Clay Sell and WSJ reporter Jennifer Hiller. Thank you both so much. Alex, Jennifer, great being with you. Thank you. And that's What's New Sunday for July 27th. Today's show was produced by Charlotte Gartenberg with supervising producer Michael Cosmides and deputy editor Chris Inslee. I'm Alex Osala and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. Until then, thanks for listening.