The Senate voted nearly unanimously Tuesday evening to pass major legislation designed to reverse the American nuclear industry’s decades-long decline and launch a reactor-building spree to meet surging demand for green electricity at home and to catch up with booming rivals overseas.
It is widely considered the most significant clean-energy legislation to pass since the president’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.recognize the development of new nuclear technologies is critical to America’s energy security and our environment,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito , the bill’s lead sponsor, said on the Senate floor Tuesday evening. “Today, nuclear power provides about 20% of our nation’s electricity. Importantly, it’s emissions-free electricity that is 24/7, 365 days a year.
Cooling Towers 4 and 3 are shown on May 31 at the nuclear reactor facility at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Waynesboro, Georgia.The timing could hardly have been worse. After completing the first reactor, the second one cost far less and came online faster. But the disastrous launch dissuaded any other utilities from investing in a third reactor, which economists say would take even less time and money now that the supply chains, design and workforce are established.
“This bipartisan policy creates the framework for companies to start building that order book for a second project and a third project and ultimately get the NRC ready to license dozens per year,” said Nicholas McMurray, the managing director of international and nuclear policy at energy policy group ClearPath.
The legislation marks the biggest change Congress has made to U.S. nuclear regulations since then-President Richard Nixon signed the 1974 law establishing the NRC and disbanding the Atomic Energy Commission, which was seen as too promotional of the industry it oversaw.A law enacted in 1982 set the groundwork for how the U.S. deals with nuclear waste. A 2005 statute added new security measures and pumped money into researching reactors.