For years, Utah’s grid was the planned destination for the first electrons from the United States’ debut commercial small modular reactor project. But in November 2023, as inflation sent prices soaring, NuScale Power’s deal to sell electricity to the public utility Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems collapsed.
Now the Beehive State is betting on a new company to revive its SMR ambitions, Latitude Media has learned.
Today, Utah plans to announce a deal with nuclear developer Holtec International to develop a permanent regional hub in the state for training workers and developing projects to deploy a fleet of its proprietary SMR-300 reactors across the Mountain West.
“We’re not just meeting our state’s growing energy needs — we’re also strengthening national security and powering the next generation of innovation,” Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams said in a statement first shared with Latitude. “This is the Utah dream in action — energy independence that keeps America strong.”
After decades of decline in the atomic energy industry, skilled workers remain one of the biggest bottlenecks to building and operating more reactors in the U.S. The training facility, slated to open in 2028, aims to work with Utah’s universities, technical colleges and trade schools to establish a pipeline of employees “for both the existing U.S. reactor fleet and next-generation SMR technology,” Holtec said.
The Florida-based company also said it would make Utah “the preferred destination for a western manufacturing location” for its SMR-300 reactors. Within the next decade, Holtec said it plans to build 4 gigawatts — equal to more than a baker’s dozen of its 300-megawatt SMR design — across the country but “primarily focused in Utah and Wyoming.”
“We are not just delivering nuclear reactors,” said Rick Springman, Holtec’s president of global clean energy opportunities. “We have put together a plan to deliver the entire nuclear ecosystem to Utah and the surrounding region.”
The company — which is already working with South Korea-based Hyundai E&C and the Japanese Mitsubishi Electric to develop its reactors — named the Kennewick, Washington-based nuclear services provider Hi-Tech Solutions as its regional partner in the Mountain West, and said the two companies would develop the training and deployment facility together.
Holtec’s SMR embrace
Long considered the nuclear industry’s undertaker, Holtec spent decades honing its business manufacturing of vessels to store radioactive spent fuel waste and decommissioning shuttered atomic power stations. In 2019, however, the company recast itself as the industry’s comeback story; for the first time, Holtec bought a closed power plant as part of a new strategy to eventually restore stations it was disassembling with its own reactors.
Unlike some next-generation designs that use coolants other than water — such as the plant Bill Gates’ TerraPower is developing in Wyoming — Holtec ultimately settled on a pressurized water reactor that essentially functions as a smaller, lower-output version of the machines that make up most of the traditional U.S. fleet.
Holtec jumpstarted its plans to become an active nuclear operator last year when the company won $1.5 billion from the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office to bring the single reactor at its shuttered Palisades plant in western Michigan back online in what would be the first-ever revival of a permanently closed atomic station in U.S. history. In March, Holtec expanded its vision for the Michigan plant by cementing plans to build its first two SMR-300 reactors at Palisades.
(Also in March, that project received the second confirmed LPO disbursement since the Trump administration took the reins at DOE in January, to the tune of nearly $57 million.)
Holtec’s SMR-300 has yet to secure NRC approval. But Holtec has wagered that its history of dealing with the NRC as a decommissioning company, plus its early engagement with regulators on the design, should speed up the approval process.
That said, regulators’ green light is no guarantee that a project succeeds; NuScale’s design remains the only SMR to win the NRC’s approval so far, and the company’s project with UAMPS still went under. But momentum for new nuclear technology has grown since 2023 as projections of new electricity demand from the data centers powering artificial intelligence software has skyrocketed and officials in Washington and state capitals recognize how far behind China the U.S. has fallen in reactor construction.
The Trump administration’s cuts to key programs that benefit the nuclear industry threaten to slow the revival that started under the Biden administration. But the nearly $900 million SMR demonstration program at the Energy Department is likely to survive, Reuters reported Monday. Last week Holtec submitted its application for funding from the program.
Utah’s push
Regardless of the federal shifts, Utah has made building its first nuclear power plant a top priority.
The University of Utah has for 50 years operated a small test reactor, but the machine is used for researching medical isotopes, not producing electricity. But last fall, Governor Spencer Cox (R) announced Operation Gigawatt, a strategy to double the state’s power generation over the next 10 years by “enhancing Utah’s policies to enable clean, reliable energy like nuclear and geothermal.”
“As we thoughtfully explore adding nuclear to Utah’s energy mix, we look forward to developing efforts that support the workforce and investment necessary to realize the goals of Gov. Spencer Cox’s Operation Gigawatt,” Emy Lesofski, director of the Utah Office of Energy Development, said in a statement. “The deployment of clean, scalable and reliable energy resources will protect quality of life for all Utahns.”
In January, the state filed a lawsuit with both Texas and the microreactor developer Last Energy to challenge the NRC’s regulatory purview over some particularly small and low-powered nuclear generators.
Since then, local utilities have begun considering sites for nuclear plants. On Monday, the municipally-owned Intermountain Power Agency announced a deal with the state to study whether its coal-fired station in Delta, Utah, could be redeveloped into an atomic power station.
