Matthew Wald tells us about a big milestone in the nascent SMR industry. Matt spent more than three decades at The New York Times, much of that covering energy, transportation, and nuclear issues, and then spent six years at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the principal U.S. trade association for nuclear utilities, where he worked as a policy analyst and communications adviser.
Yesterday he told us that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has issued the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) a construction permit for a GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300, at a site called Clinch River, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The TVA has been eager to build on the 935-acre site for years; in 2019 it became the first utility in the country to get pre-approval for a reactor there, without specifying what kind."
HERE'S THE NRC's APPROVAL NEWS RELEASE: https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/news-releases/2026/26-079
Key thing here, according to Matt? "The NRC issued the permit very fast by nuclear standards, in 14 months, four months ahead of schedule, demonstrating increased efficiency at the agency. The license decision follows faster-than-expected action on several other applications."
We'll see where this goes. SMRs have received a lot of hype and a whole lot of capital for the past few years, but the first serious entrant out of the gate, NuScale, ate more money than the Cookie Monster eats cookies, then crashed and went away. The NRC says "TVA plans to build a 300-megawatt GE Vernova Hitachi boiling-water reactor to help meet growing regional power demand. Before loading fuel and starting operations, TVA will need a separate operating license from the NRC."
Here's my brief overview of what's been going on in the SMR world over the last few years:
TVA’s Clinch River BWRX-300 is genuinely a major milestone for a utility. The NRC issued the construction permit on September 29, 2026, for the first U.S. utility SMR construction project, although TVA still needs an operating license. Tennessee Valley Authority’s NuScale was the cautionary tale: after more than $400 million of DOE support for development and another $1.36 billion DOE cost-share award for UAMPS’s Idaho project, NuScale actually became the first U.S. SMR design certified by the NRC in 2023; but its 462-MW UAMPS project collapsed in November 2023 because participating utilities had not subscribed enough offtake, and NRC suspended the project review.
NuScale subsequently got its uprated 77-MWe/module design approved in 2025, but still has no U.S. plant under construction. DOE has celebrated other SMR efforts that went nowhere include B&W mPower, which received roughly $226 million from DOE before being abandoned; Holtec’s SMR-160, whose NRC pre-application work was suspended in 2023; and numerous earlier concepts including Westinghouse’s SMR, Toshiba 4S, Gen4 Energy’s G4M, PBMR and others reached NRC/DOE planning stages but never produced a commercial plant. Up to around $10 billion (very rough estimate) of public and private capital has been poured into the leading U.S. advanced/SMR designs and demonstration projects over the past 15–20 years;
NuScale alone represents well over $1.5 billion of identifiable federal/project support, while DOE's ARDP committed billions more to TerraPower and X-energy. Two other designs to be watched are TerraPower’s Natrium, and Kairos Power’s fluoride-salt reactor, whose Hermes test reactor received its construction permit in 2023.
https://www.nuclearnotes.org/p/the-nrc-issues-its-first-smr-construction