By Kennedy Maize
The Trump administration and its Department of Energy have made Canada, who many Americans other than Donald Trump consider our closest ally and good friend, happy.
Last week (June 23), DOE’s loan office, renamed with disingenuous grandiosity the “Office of Energy Dominance Financing,” announced a $17.5 billion dollar loan program to subsidize building five as yet unidentified, two-unit 1,000-MW, nuclear power plant stations. These are designed to be “supply chain loans” to get the projects off the ground.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that “these conditional loans will play an important role in reviving the supply chain needed for America to once again build large-scale commercial reactors.”
Westinghouse makes the only licensed reactor that matches DOE’s desires, the AP-1000. The DOE news release said, “Westinghouse will partner with up to five eligible utilities and energy companies nationwide to procure the long-lead items at a fixed price. Each project will be jointly owned by Westinghouse and a utility or energy company partner. Both Westinghouse and the partner are required to fully commit their project equity, $500 million each ($1 billion total per project), upfront prior to accessing DOE loan funds.” 
DOE says it intends that the low interest federal loans be used to buy long-lead items, “complex components of a nuclear power plant that require the longest time for manufacturing and delivery.”
Unstated is that Westinghouse is a Canadian company. It is jointly owned by Cameco (49%) and Brookfield Renewable Partners (51%), both traded on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges. Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse has not been a U.S. company since 1998, when it was sold to Britain’s nuclear company BNFL, then to Japan’s Toshiba in 2005, went into bankruptcy in 2017, and ended up in the Cameco-Brookfield consortium in 2023.
If and when those projects go on line, their nuclear fuel will be provided by Cameco, whose main business is uranium mining, another boon for Canada.
From its headquarters in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Cameco welcomed the DOE loan announcement. CEO Tim Gitzel said, ““We are pleased to see the US government make this additional commitment to expanding nuclear power capacity using the proven AP1000 reactor technology….The expansion of nuclear power in the United States is expected to create significant opportunities for Westinghouse and Cameco, accelerating growth in Westinghouse’s energy systems segment during the procurement and subsequent construction phase.”
Brookfield also has deep and abiding Canadian roots. One of the company’s early chief executives was a Canadian economist named Mark Carney. He’s now the Liberal Party prime minister of Canada.
The DOE move to prop up the nuclear big iron also prompts a recollection of the words of the great American philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Alternatively, “Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.”
Some 20 years ago, facing a 30-year decline in the U.S. nuclear power business (no reactor ordered after 1974 got built), the George W. Bush administration threw $8 billion in 2005 dollars each to two, two-unit AP-1000 reactor projects.
Georgia Power got funds for two new units at its existing two-unit Vogtle nuclear station, ultimately totalling $12 billion in taxpayer dollars. Construction began in 2009 with the estimated cost of $14 billion. The two new units came into service in 2023 and 2024 at a cost of over $36 billion. The rate backlash of the overpriced reactors led to two Democrats ousting two entrenched Republicans in a statewide election to The Peach State’s Public Service Commission last November, leaving three surviving Republicans on the commission. Those seats were not on the ballot.
In South Carolina, a partnership of investor-owned Scana Corp. (South Carolina Electric and Gas) and state-owned Santee Cooper got $8 billion (ultimately $9 billion) also for two AP-1000 units. The project collapsed in 2017 (the same year Westinghouse went into bankruptcy, partly as a result of the Summer and Vogtle projects). Ultimately some Westinghouse executives faced criminal charges. Scana Corp, which bet the company on the Summer project, lost its bet and was gobbled up by Virginia’s Dominion Energy.
Efforts, so far still in the planning stage, are underway in South Carolina to resurrect V.C. Summer’s two unfinished AP-1000s.
DOE’s pledged $17.5 billion sounds like a lot of money (and it is for most folks). But spread over 10 units, that’s a modest $1.75 billion each. Is that significant for projects that are likely to cost upward of $20 billion each?
The new DOE push for big reactors raises questions about the fate of the agency’s previously aggressive program for advanced small modular reactors. The Westinghouse reactors, unlike the SMRs, actually exist. The DOE AP-1000 announcement preceded a nosedive of the stock of SMR high-flyer Oklo, with a paper reactor design and no revenue.
The Motley Fool online investment site commented, “The Trump Administration remains very bullish on nuclear power and committed to helping build a nuclear renaissance in the U.S. — that’s the good news. The bad news is that, financially speaking, much of the administration’s support is being thrown behind big nuclear reactors.”
Overall, as OilPrice.com reports, SMRs have significant hurdles to deployment. The energy news service commented, “While SMRs are likely to play a major role in the nuclear industry’s future, severe delays and funding gaps have slowed deployment. The United States is currently playing catch-up with China and Russia, while Europe and other regions of the world could still be several years behind in commercial SMR deployment.” 
In an ironic twist, Canada seems to be well ahead of the U.S. in the SMR world. In April Ontario Power Generation, the utility owned by the province, began major construction at its Darlington nuclear site of the first of four GE Vernova 300-MW BWRX-300 advanced boiling water reactors. Operation is targeted for 2030.
A massive crawler crane lowered a 953-tonne steel and concrete slab onto a 35-meter deep shaft, completing the 2.1 million pound reactor basemat. Oil Price commented, “Construction has begun on the Western world’s first grid-scale Small Modular Reactor (SMR), though small is not what comes to mind, considering that the machine will fit on two soccer fields.”
The Quad Report, covering energy policy and politics