Just months after the US Senate passed the ADVANCED Act, a landmark legislation designed to ease the permitting process for nuclear reactors and reduce costs and construction times (see our previous report), various US administrations are moving fast on the nuclear topic.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) indeed exempted Kairos Power from a full environmental impact statement for its proposed Hermes 2 test reactor project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, considering that the environmental impact statement provided for the adjacent Hermes 1 test reactor (permitted in December 2023) was sufficient. Also, the NRC took less than one year to assess Hermes 2’s environmental impact, compared with two years for Hermes 1, suggesting it will reach a much faster decision on the permit application.
This means that the NRC has quickly amended its processes in accordance with the new law, which makes it easier to build multiple reactors at the same site by lowering regulatory requirements on the second, third and fourth units, notably by easing the environmental review.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy identified new sites to install or increase nuclear capacity and estimated that 41 nuclear plants, including some retired ones, are suitable and that up to 145 coal sites (operating or retired) could be converted to nuclear. Overall, the DoE estimates that these nuclear and coal power plant sites could host up to 269 GW of additional nuclear power generation, well above its previous 260 GW forecast.
This environment suggests that new nuclear generation could be operational much earlier than expected, which is obviously a positive for uranium names in the long term and, in the shorter term, for nuclear engineering companies (BWX Tech, Bilfinger, Curtiss-Wright…) that can expect their order books to balloon as soon as construction permits are delivered.
