Alex Panagiotopoulos

In 1981, the Energy Department photographed a finished piece of a reactor that did not yet have a building around it. It was the closure head, the steel lid that sits on top of the reactor vessel, with ports for the control rods. By then the vessel itself had been built, the sodium pumps were in testing and the steam generators were being shipped. The next year, crews cleared 240 acres beside the Clinch River in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and leveled a ridge to make room for the plant. But on October 26, 1983, Congress ended its funding, and the hardware was left with no plant to go into. What was supposed to stand there was a breeder reactor; it's an ordinary reactor that burns uranium-235, which makes up less than one percent of natural uranium. The other 99 percent, uranium-238, goes through as waste. A breeder, cooled by liquid sodium, turns that uranium-238 into fuel as it runs, so it ends up with more fuel than it started with. With breeders, the uranium the United States has already mined, much of it sitting in spent fuel pools and enrichment tailings, would power the country for centuries without another mine being dug. The first electricity ever made from a nuclear reactor came from an experimental breeder in Idaho in 1951. Clinch River, at 350 megawatts, was meant to be the step between those experiments and a commercial fleet. Jimmy Carter's anti-nuclear turn came after the spring of 1977, when the Ford Foundation published Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, a study run by the MITRE Corporation, which recommended putting off the breeder and the recycling of spent fuel. Within weeks Carter announced exactly that. Members of the study group went into his administration to carry it out: Harold Brown as Secretary of Defense, Joseph Nye to run nonproliferation policy at the State Department, and the group’s chairman, Spurgeon Keeny, as deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Carter himself had come to the White House from the Trilateral Commission, David Rockefeller’s council of bankers and statesmen, and brought a good part of its membership with him. The theory was that if America didn’t separate plutonium, other countries would follow its example. That November he vetoed the bill that funded the project, saying he meant to “terminate construction of the Clinch River facility.” Congress kept paying for it for six more years, and President Reagan supported it. But costs kept climbing, and the General Accounting Office put the final bill at $8 billion. In 1983 the votes ran out. Other countries wisely didn't follow Carter's example. France built Superphénix. Russia connected the BN-600 breeder to its grid in 1980 and the larger BN-800 in 2016, and both are still running. India and China are building their own. However, on September 29, 2026, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued the Tennessee Valley Authority a construction permit for Clinch River Unit 1. It’s a 300-megawatt GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300, and it’s the first permit for a commercial small reactor in the country. It will sit on the same ground that was cleared for the breeder in 1982. TVA’s filings with the NRC describe that site preparation, and the site has room for more units. TVA’s earlier target for first power was 2032. The new reactor, it should be known, is not a breeder. It’s water-cooled and burns enriched uranium-235 like every other reactor in the American fleet. The site has waited forty-three years for a reactor, and it may finally get one.

Seven nuclear reactor projects moved forward this week on three continents, about 10,000 MW in all. China connected Tianwan 7 to the grid. Turkey pressure-tested Akkuyu 1. Russia set equipment in its lead-cooled BREST reactor. Poland ordered its first reactor components. The NRC's draft review recommends licensing four AP1000s in Texas.

Tianwan 7 was connected to the grid in Jiangsu on October 8. It is a Russian VVER-1200, the same reactor Rosatom is building in Turkey, Egypt and Hungary, and it was built by Chinese crews under CNNC. First concrete was poured in May 2021, so first electricity came five years and five months later. For comparison, the last two American reactors, Vogtle 3 and 4, each took over ten years from first concrete to the grid. The American fleet of the 1960s averaged under six years, and Point Beach 1 was done in three and a half. China is building today at roughly the pace the United States built at then, and Tianwan 7 is the fastest any VVER-1200 has been completed anywhere, including in Russia, where the four home units took eight to ten and a half years. The reactor design is Russian, the construction program is Chinese, and the result is better than either country has managed alone with this machine. Unit 8 is scheduled to follow next year.

Right now, 80 nuclear reactors are being built. Not planned, not proposed. Concrete is being poured, vessels set, and people in hard hats are on site this morning. Eighty-seven gigawatts of them, across seventeen nations. It's enough new capacity, once it’s running, to generate more electricity every year than Germany uses. The usual way to read that number is as a competition. China is building thirty-eight of them, and the West has to catch up, energy dominance etc. We’re not interested in that. Eighty nuclear plants are humanity’s pool of reactors. Ten of the eighty are a nation’s first reactor, ever: Turkey has never generated a nuclear watt. Neither has Egypt. Neither has Bangladesh. Four units at Akkuyu, four at El Dabaa, two at Rooppur, and three countries with a combined 300 million people join the club that started with the first reactor at Shippingport in Pennsylvania in 1957. Six of the eighty are hollow on the card. Khmelnitski 3 and 4 in Ukraine broke ground in 1986 and 1987 and have been “under construction” longer than most of the people who’d operate them have been alive. Angra 3 in Brazil, Ohma and Shimane 3 in Japan, Argentina’s little CAREM, each one a decision that was made and then unmade, a capability bought and left on the shelf. And one country isn’t on the card at all. The nation that built the first commercial reactor, that once had a hundred of them under construction at the same time, is building zero. The permits are moving again, and this week’s Federal Register carried construction-permit filings for new units at Palisades and a new plant on the Texas coast, but that doesn't count quite yet.