US is looking to revive more nuclear reactors, White House adviser tells Reuters

By Valerie Volcovici

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Biden administration is working on plans to bring additional decommissioned nuclear reactors back online to help meet growing demand for emissions-free electricity, White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi said on Monday.

Two such projects are already underway, including the planned restart of the Holtec Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan and the potential restart of a unit at Constellation Energy’s Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, near the site of the worst nuclear accident in US history .

Asked if additional shuttered factories can be restarted, Zaidi said: “We are working on it in a very concrete way. There are two that I can think of.”

He declined to identify the power plants or provide further details about the effort.

Speaking at the Reuters Sustainability conference in New York, Zaidi said repowering existing dormant nuclear plants is part of a three-pronged strategy by President Joe Biden’s administration to bring more nuclear power online to fight climate change and stimulate production.

The other two components include the development of small modular reactors (SMRs) for specific applications and the continued development of next-generation advanced nuclear reactors.

Biden has called for a tripling of U.S. nuclear power capacity to fuel energy demand, which is accelerating in part because of the expansion of energy-hungry technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Last week, the Biden administration said it closed on a $1.52 billion loan to revive Michigan’s Palisades nuclear power plant, which will take two years to reopen.

Constellation and Microsoft (NASDAQ: ), meanwhile, signed an energy deal last month to help revive a unit of the Pennsylvania plant, which Constellation hopes will also receive government support.

Zaidi told the conference that the US Navy requested information on Monday to build SMRs on half a dozen bases. “SMR is a technology that is not decades away. It is one that companies in the United States are looking to implement this decade,” he said.

Zaidi also addressed issues that have plagued a separate Biden clean energy goal of bringing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity online by the end of the decade.

The administration this year suspended sales of offshore wind leases in both Oregon and the Gulf of Mexico due to low demand from companies as high costs, equipment problems and supply chain challenges plagued other projects.

Zaidi said at least half of the 30GW target is already under construction and that some of the early problems provide useful learning for future projects.

“I’m quite optimistic about the next wave of projects where we’ll have a domestic supply chain and hopefully a better cost of capital than the projects they’re dealing with now,” he said.