A large investment firm and a Canadian uranium enrichment company made a big bet three years ago on nuclear power by acquiring Westinghouse, an energy company that had fallen on hard times. Now, that wager is proving prescient.
Soaring demand for electricity, driven by data centers, and renewed bipartisan and global interest in nuclear power have made Westinghouse a go-to source for nuclear power technology.
The prominence of Westinghouse in the development of new nuclear power plants gained international attention Wednesday after the Trump administration announced a broad agreement with Saudi Arabia that could enable the country to enrich its own fuel for nuclear reactors.
Officials in the Trump administration estimated that the deal would provide billions of dollars for the U.S. nuclear industry — starting with Westinghouse, which developed the technology used in the only two reactors built in the United States in the last decade, both in Georgia. A version of Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactors has also been built in China in recent years, and the AP1000 has been selected for projects in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
Westinghouse regained its footing after Brookfield Asset Management, a New York investment firm, and Cameco, a uranium enrichment company based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, acquired it in November 2023. Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy in 2017 after it failed to bring a new fleet of nuclear power plants online.
“More than half of the world’s existing nuclear reactors are based on Westinghouse technology, and today the company provides technical products and services across the global nuclear market,” Dan Sumner, the chief executive of Westinghouse, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The foundation of our turnaround has been built on the strength this operating fleet business.”
After President Trump returned to office last year, his administration began pushing all types of nuclear development, including reviving shuttered plants and constructing Westinghouse’s AP1000 and newer reactor types, as well as some that are much smaller.
Last month, Chris Wright, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary, announced that the government would lend up to $17.5 billion to help companies buy nuclear equipment that would accelerate the development of 10 large commercial nuclear reactors across the country.
Westinghouse welcomed that effort, saying it would help speed up the construction and commercial operations of new reactors by as much as three years. But neither the government nor Westinghouse has said where any of the 10 reactors will be built.
The United States leads the world in the total number of reactors and produces the largest amount of electricity from nuclear power plants. Currently there are 96 nuclear reactors at 57 plants, according to the Energy Information Administration. Nuclear power produces about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, much more than coal but about half as much as natural-gas power plants.
But the United States has produced just three new reactors since the 1990s. By contrast, China has been rapidly building reactors in recent decades and has plans for many more. It has built reactors based on domestic designs and has more than a dozen AP1000 units online or under construction.
A so-called nuclear renaissance in the early 2000s was expected to produce nearly two dozen new reactors in the United States, but rising costs and delays resulted in just two units, both AP1000 reactors.
The two units — built alongside existing nuclear reactors at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Waynesboro, Ga., near Augusta — cost its owner, Southern Company, $35 billion, more than twice the original estimates. Much of that cost was ultimately borne by individuals and businesses that are customers of Southern’s subsidiary Georgia Power.
The stunning price tag led many energy experts to dismiss prospects that the United States would build more large reactors. The focus of the nuclear energy industry turned to smaller units that power plant developers said they could design and produce almost on assembly lines. Such reactors are often referred to as small modular reactors.
The idea for such reactors was inspired by nuclear-powered submarines. But those reactors use a more highly enriched form of uranium than the kind used in larger power plants. So nuclear power plant developers, including Westinghouse and GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy, have been working for years to develop a small reactor design that they could commercialize.
Government support for nuclear energy is expected to play a critical role in getting reactors built in the United States and elsewhere. Some power plant developers that already had licenses to build reactors but hadn’t used them are looking to revive their construction plans.
Among them is the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station near Columbia. S.C. It was the only other AP1000 project in the United States that made any significant progress toward construction.
But the effort to build those units led the power company SCANA to file for bankruptcy as a result of the rising project costs. Customers of the utility were forced to pay $9 billion in construction costs, though the project was left incomplete.
