** 10/28/25 - US partners with Westinghouse, Cameco and Brookfield on $80B nuclear deployment + US government backs new nuclear investment US - $80 billion plan for new Westinghouse reactors faces execution challenges
Buzz Sawyer
Oct 28, 2025
US partners with Westinghouse, Cameco and Brookfield on $80B nuclear deployment
Westinghouse AP1000 reactors will be utilized in a national deployment that will create more than 100,000 construction jobs, the companies said.
Westinghouse Electric, Cameco and Brookfield Asset Management have entered into a strategic partnership with the U.S. government to deploy $80 billion in new nuclear reactors, the companies announced Tuesday.
“Our administration is focused on ensuring the rapid development, deployment, and use of advanced nuclear technologies. This historic partnership supports our national security objectives and enhances our critical infrastructure,” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said in a statement.
The deal calls for Westinghouse AP1000 reactors to be utilized in a deployment that will create more than 100,000 construction jobs, the companies said. “The program will cement the United States as one of the world’s nuclear energy powerhouses and increase exports of Westinghouse’s nuclear power generation technology globally.”
According to the announcement, the partnership contains “profit sharing mechanisms” that allow all parties, “including the American people,” to participate in the “long-term financial and strategic value that will be created within Westinghouse by the growth of nuclear energy and advancement of investment into AI capabilities in the United States.”
Brookfield has more than half a trillion dollars invested in the critical infrastructure that underpins the U.S. economy, “and we expect to double that investment in the next decade as we deliver on building the infrastructure backbone of artificial intelligence,” Brookfield President Connor Teskey said in a statement.
The U.S. is trying to rapidly bring power resources online to meet rising demand from data centers, and interest in nuclear is growing. Following a decade of stagnant growth, U.S. electricity demand will increase at a 2.5% compound annual growth rate through 2035, according to Bank of America Institute research published in July.
“For all of the energy policy disagreements in Washington, one thing is clear: nuclear energy is the baseload electrical power source of the future,” said Thomas Ryan, the managing partner of K&L Gates’ Pittsburgh office. “Its reliability, durability and sustainability have rendered its deployment an apolitical issue.”
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect Thomas Ryan’s position as the managing partner of K&L Gates’ Pittsburgh office.
https://www.woodmac.com/blogs/energy-pulse/us-government-backs-new-nuclear-investment/
US government backs new nuclear investment
US$80 billion plan for new Westinghouse reactors faces execution challenges
Ed Crooks
Vice Chair Americas and host of Energy Gang podcast
The Trump administration showed last week that a strong relationship with the government is as important as ever for the nuclear industry. It launched a partnership worth at least US$80 billion to build new reactors in the US, with Westinghouse and the company’s co-owners, Brookfield Asset Management and Cameco, a nuclear fuel group.
One of the hallmarks of the Trump administration has been its readiness to intervene in markets to pursue its policy goals, and its nuclear strategy is another example of that approach. Chris Wright, the energy secretary, has described the race to develop advanced AI as the Manhattan Project of our times, critical to US national security, and said success will depend on delivering a steep increase in electricity generation.
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in September, he promised: “We’re doing everything we can to make it easy to build power generation and data centers in our country.” The new nuclear initiative is an ambitious attempt to make that pledge a reality.
The first new plants that result from it will come online years after President Donald Trump has left office. But they could play an important role in boosting US electricity supply in the 2030s and beyond.
There is bipartisan support in Washington for nuclear power. The Biden administration worked to keep existing plants open and to encourage the construction of new ones. But the private sector in the US has been unwilling to take on the financial risk inherent in the huge engineering projects needed to build new reactors.
The last new reactors to be built in the US were Units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle plant in Georgia, which came online in 2023 and 2024. They were completed seven years behind schedule, with a cost overrun of well over 100%. Chief executives of investor-owned utilities knew that if they had proposed committing to similar projects, they would have been sacked on the spot.
Now the new partnership with Westinghouse aims to construct at least US$80 billion worth of the same AP1000 reactors that were built at Vogtle.
The full details of the deal, including the precise allocation of financing and risk-sharing, have not been specified. But Brookfield did disclose that the partnership includes profit-sharing mechanisms that will give the US government some of the upside if the initiative succeeds.
The Washington Post reported that after the government signs the final contracts for US$80 billion of new reactors, it will be entitled to 20% of all Westinghouse’s returns over US$17.5 billion.
And if Westinghouse’s valuation goes over US$30 billion, the administration can require it to be floated on the stock market. If that happens, the government will get a 20% stake.
Japan’s government is also playing a key role. As part of the US$550 billion trade deal struck with the Trump administration, the Japanese government pledged large-scale investment in US energy, including nuclear. Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Toshiba Group, and IHI, are interested in investing up to US$100 billion in the US to support the construction of new AP1000s and small modular reactors (SMRs), the two governments said.
Other moves to add additional nuclear capacity in the US have also been announced in the past month. In the 2010s, two new AP1000 reactors were under construction at the VC Summer nuclear plant in South Carolina until the project was abandoned in 2017. Last month, Santee Cooper, the South Carolina utility, said it had selected Brookfield to work on a plan for restarting the project and completing the reactors.
Brookfield is initially working on a six-week feasibility assessment of the potential for restarting work at VC Summer, including selecting a project manager and evaluating construction companies. The six weeks will also allow for advanced discussions with possible buyers for the power from the plant.
Separately, Google last week announced a deal with NextEra Energy to reopen a 615-megawatt nuclear plant in Iowa. The Duane Arnold Energy Center was shut down in 2020, and the aim is to have it operational again by the first quarter of 2029. Google has agreed to buy a share of the plant’s output for 25 years, with the rest being used by the Central Iowa Power Cooperative, which currently has a minority stake in the facility. NextEra will be buying out the minority stakes to take its ownership of the plant from 70% to 100%.
The Wood Mackenzie view
These are exciting times for the US nuclear industry. Assuming an average cost of US$16 billion for each AP1000 – less than at Vogtle, which ended up costing about US$36 billion for the two units – the US$80 billion plan would mean five new reactors. That would be the most active new nuclear construction programme to be started in the US since the 1970s.
If economies of scale and learning-by-doing cut the cost of each reactor, or if additional funds become available, more units could be built.
Prakash Sharma, Wood Mackenzie’s head of scenarios and technologies, says the Trump administration is acting like an energy company: using its financial strength and its convening power to put together a deal that covers the entire nuclear value chain. Between them, the partners can tackle everything from uranium mining, enrichment and permitting to financing and building the reactors and finding buyers for the power.
The deal also supports a range of the administration’s objectives: not only power for AI, but also investment and job creation in US industry. The focus on AP1000s also makes it possible to rely on US-produced fuel, strengthening energy security. Most of the newer SMR designs use high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel, which is not currently produced on a large scale in the US.
However, the strategy’s ambition does not guarantee successful execution. The delays and cost overruns that dogged the Vogtle project will be real threats for this new wave of construction.
A lot was learned from the Vogtle project. Bechtel, which completed construction of the new reactors at Vogtle, said the cost of Unit 4 was already 30% lower than the cost of Unit 3. The first-of-a-kind project is usually the most expensive, and delivering multiple copies of the same reactor ought to create the conditions for a steady decline in costs.
However, with construction at Vogtle having ended last year, some of the momentum is already dissipating, and some of that hard-won knowledge may be lost. Without any other active new reactor projects in the US to move on to immediately, many of the people who worked on Vogtle will have gone into other sectors, such as LNG plants.
Wood Mackenzie’s Sharma says: “The nuclear industry has yet to either deliver or dismiss fears around cost and time overruns.” Wood Mackenzie is forecasting a near-doubling of nuclear generation capacity in the US over the next 25 years, from about 100 gigawatts today to nearly 190 GW in 2050. But even that would be a significant shortfall from President Trump’s goal of adding another 300 GW of nuclear capacity over the period.
The soaring cost of the Vogtle project forced Westinghouse into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2017. To avoid similar financial strains with this new construction programme, Westinghouse, the US government and their partners will need to show that they can manage the hard work of execution, as well as the high-profile announcements.