FILE - Carbon dioxide and other pollutants billows from stacks at the Naughton Power Plant, near where Bill Gates company, TerraPower plans to build an advanced, nontraditional nuclear reactor, on Jan. 12, 2022, in Kemmerer, Wyo. A major economic bill headed to the president has game-changing incentives for the nuclear energy industry, experts say, and those tax credits are even more substantial if a facility is sited in a community where a coal plant is closing.
A design by NuScale Power is the first to be fully certified in the United States and the company is planning to begin operating a small modular reactor in 2029 at the Idaho National Laboratory. The company's chief financial officer, Chris Colbert, said former coal plants are ideal locations for advanced nuclear technology, in part because transmission lines are already in place.
The bill also has $700 million to produce the uranium fuel in the United States that many advanced reactors need. And there's a tax credit for existing nuclear plants worth up to $15 per megawatt hour from 2024 to 2032. That's enough of a boost that it's highly likely no nuclear plants will close during that period for economic reasons, Crozat said. There are expanded options for how the credit can be used, with direct payments for certain owners, such as municipal utilities.