NYTimes: How long will it take for a US "nuclear renaissance?" (We have had several already. The are short-lived)
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How Long Will it Take to Build a Nuclear Power ‘Renaissance’ in the U.S.?
The Trump administration wants to sharply speed up the construction of nuclear power plants, but fixing the industry’s bottlenecks could take years.
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The Vogtle nuclear power plant in Waynesboro, Ga., last year.Credit...Mike Stewart/Associated Press
By Claire Brown
Oct. 23, 2025
Nuclear energy has emerged as a rare point of agreement between some Democrats and Republicans, and even between some climate advocates and the Trump administration. The greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear power are low, and it produces a constant hum of power, unlike solar and wind.
And public support has turned a corner in recent years: About 60 percent of U.S. adults now say they support building more nuclear power plants, up from 43 percent 2020, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.
Despite the vibe shift, the U.S. has fallen far behind China in the development of new nuclear plants, Brad Plumer and Harry Stevens report today.
“China is quickly becoming the global leader in nuclear power, with nearly as many reactors under construction as the rest of the world combined,” they write. Since 2013, the U.S. has built just two nuclear reactors. Over the same time period, China has built 13, with an additional 33 in the works.
The Trump administration has a lot of ground to make up to meet its goal of quadrupling nuclear capacity by 2050.
A big part of the problem is that building nuclear reactors in the United States has proved to be very slow and very expensive.
So how quickly could the “nuclear energy renaissance” that Energy Secretary Chris Wright has called for happen, and what would it take to speed it up?
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The timelines
Building a nuclear reactor is incredibly complicated, and in Western countries it can take a decade or more. In China, it now takes five to six years, thanks to streamlined design, predictable safety approvals and local manufacturing prowess, Plumer and Stevens reported.
Stateside, rebooting an already-built nuclear plant can take almost that long. Late last year, Microsoft and Constellation Energy announced a plan to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island, the Pennsylvania facility made infamous by a partial meltdown in 1979. Even with much of the plant’s equipment already in place, the facility is not expected to generate power until 2028.
Other tech companies, looking for ways to power their rapidly-growing data center operations, have set their sights on building more modest facilities known as small modular reactors, or S.M.R.s, which produce less energy but theoretically have lower upfront costs and are easier to get through the permit process, build and replicate. But none have been built in the U.S. yet, and most of the projects aren’t expected to produce energy until the 2030s.
Previous efforts to build S.M.R.s in the United States have stalled, in part because of out-of-control costs. An Energy Department pilot program aims to have at least three advanced nuclear reactors located outside the national labs reach the milestone of criticality by July of 2026.
Professor Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the deadlines were ambitious and were just a first step. He compared the criticality milestone with turning on the ignition on the prototype of a new car: The vehicle is technically running, but it’s years away from passing the safety tests and other hurdles before it can hit the market.
How things could speed up
The Trump administration has been explicit about its efforts to speed up the development of new nuclear facilities. One executive order calls for the industry’s safety regulator to approve applications in no more than 18 months. It also instructs the same group to revise its rules.
But Buongiorno said regulations weren’t really the biggest bottleneck holding back new nuclear plants. Money is a big issue: It costs $10 billion to build a nuclear reactor, he said.
More climate news from around the web:
- “Japan’s new prime minister Sanae Takaichi is expected to push for the accelerated revival of nuclear power to tackle inflation,” Reuters reports.
- The Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back requirements that big polluters report their greenhouse gas emissions. But some big oil and gas are pushing back, Bloomberg reports, arguing that removing the requirement would hurt their businesses.
Correction: An article about former lobbyists at the E.P.A. in the Tuesday Climate Forward newsletter misstated Andy Szabo’s position. He is a former lobbyist for the oil and chemical industries; he is not currently a lobbyist.
Claire Brown covers climate change for The Times and writes for the Climate Forward newsletter.