The House Appropriations Committee passed legislation last week that would provide a $9 billion boost to two existing nuclear reactor demonstration projects and the deployment of at least one small modular reactor, despite criticism from Democrats that most of the funding would be diverted from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office.
The proposal was developed by Energy-Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN), who said the funding boost would help the U.S. tap into a $740 billion international market opportunity for nuclear equipment and services over the next 10 years, citing estimates from the Commerce Department.
“To realize that, we have got to complete these nuclear demonstration projects,” he said at a meeting held to advance the legislation. “If we don’t do this, in a few short years, we will be out of the game not only with our foes but with our friends.”
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), the top Democrat on the subcommittee, said she is a strong supporter of nuclear energy but criticized the large cut to the Loan Programs Office, which supports deployment projects across a wide range of clean energy technologies.
There are currently 175 active applications requesting approximately $250 billion from the office, and the cuts would reduce at least $90 billion in available financing, including for advanced nuclear projects, Kaptur said. At the end of June, advanced nuclear projects totaling almost $65 billion had submitted loan applications or were expected to submit loan applications in the next 120 days, she said.
“Instead of setting a reasonable nondefense allocation for this bill and finding a bipartisan path that would have allowed the nuclear reactor demonstration programs to be robustly funded in their own right, my colleagues in the majority see fit to wipe out $65 billion in potential nuclear project financing … while allocating only $8 billion in funding for the reactor demonstration programs,” Kaptur said. “That does not seem like a sensible trade to me.”
The committee did not adopt Kaptur’s proposed amendment to provide $1 billion for the nuclear demonstration projects and keep the other $8 billion as loan program funding.
“Opponents say that this bill’s reprioritization of funding will hinder clean energy. But let me be clear, nuclear energy is clean energy. In fact, it is carbon-free, baseload-free energy,” Fleischmann said. “Strong American leadership in new nuclear deployment is essential for a stable domestic electrical grid.”
A portion of the funds would go to the two main projects in DOE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, TerraPower’s Natrium and X-energy’s Xe-100. To date, the program has received $2.5 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act as well as funds through the annual appropriations process.
The committee expects the new money will be sufficient to complete the projects and is necessary in light of increased construction costs. “Unfortunately, the nuclear industry has not escaped the significant inflationary pressures and supply chain issues afflicting construction projects across all sectors of the economy,” it wrote in a report accompanying the legislation.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted TerraPower’s construction permit for review in May and expects X-energy’s to be submitted within the year. Both projects were originally slated to begin operations before 2028, but Natrium faces at least a two-year delay due to a lack of commercial HALEU fuel suppliers beyond Russia.
The rest of the new funds would go towards deploying at least one small modular reactor (SMR), an ongoing goal that faced a major setback last year when the company NuScale Power terminated plans to build an SMR due to concerns over its commercial viability. The department began funding the project in 2020 and expected that it would be the first SMR licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The department is still funding a light water-cooled SMR project by Holtec Government Services through the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.
Notably, Congress created a new funding stream for SMRs in the final appropriations legislation for fiscal year 2024 by repurposing unspent funds from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The appropriation includes up to $800 million for “commercial utility deployment projects for a grid-scale Generation 3+ small modular reactor design,” $100 million for associated “design, licensing, supplier development, and site preparation,” and $50 million for university-based nuclear reactor safety training programs. DOE anticipates opening applications for the SMR funds later this year.
The House Appropriations Committee criticized DOE’s pace in the report accompanying its draft legislation for fiscal year 2025, saying the current schedule “puts at risk near-term deployment of U.S. nuclear technology domestically and internationally.” The committee proposed allocating an additional $100 million for up to two U.S. nuclear design companies to complete grid-scale design of SMRs, on top of the funds that would be repurposed from the Loan Programs Office.
Source: American Institute of Physics