Trump’s Westinghouse Nuclear Fiasco: Wasting Money on a Corrupt Game of Hot Potato

This blog was originally published by Nuclear Information Resource Service (NIRS) on October 30, 2025. View it in full here. Shared with permission.

On Tuesday, the White House announced an $80 billion deal with Westinghouse to finance construction of eight large new reactors in the U.S. There is not enough in the way of actual details about the deal, resulting in even more unanswered questions. But the promise of a large, direct investment in a pack of new reactors has predictably revved up talk of yet another “Nuclear Renaissance” and made it look like the DJT 2.0 administration is making good on big nuclear power goals from a group of executive orders issued in May. 

$80 billion  sure sounds like a lot! And the news that the announced $80 billion is going to come from Japanese taxpayers and not U.S. taxpayers sounds like a sweet deal!

If we were talking about just about any other energy source, it would be a lot. $80 billion could build:

  • 58,000 megawatts of solar power, or
  • 38,000 MW of wind power, or
  • 48,000 MW of wind and solar combined, or 
  • 14,000 MW of geothermal power plants.

Any of those options would produce about the same amount of electricity each year as 14-16 large-sized nuclear reactors – twice as many as the Westinghouse deal promises to build.

But $80 billion is only enough to build, at most, four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. That’s because the cost of building nuclear reactors is four to 10 times more than wind, solar, or geothermal power. Even wind and solar paired with battery storage are still several times cheaper than new nuclear reactors.  

But where would the other $80+ billion for eight reactors come from? U.S. taxpayers? Ratepayers? In this case, probably taxpayers. The reactors would probably receive low-interest loans from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) loan guarantee program, and, following construction, they would be eligible to claim the Clean Energy Investment Tax Credit, which provides a 30-50% subsidy for the cost of a new energy project. That would mean $80 billion or more in loans up front, and, later, $48-80 billion in rebates from U.S. taxpayers. 

That still means someone will have to pay the cost of $80 billion-112 billion, plus interest, for loans and/or investor returns, plus the costs of operating, fueling, decommissioning, and nuclear waste storage. Taxpayers will likely pay that cost, too. One of the projects that would probably be included in the deal is the proposed four-reactor Donald J. Trump Nuclear Power Plant (DJT NPP), which former Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s new company Fermi, Inc. has proposed. Fermi’s stock price surged on Tuesday after the Westinghouse deal was announced. The DJT NPP is to be built at the DOE’s Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Texas, to power AI data centers that Fermi also plans to build there. The reactors and data centers are likely to be categorized as “critical defense facilities”, per Executive Order 14299. Presumably, federal taxpayers would pay for the data centers and their power bills through DOE’s budget. 

Another feature of the deal is a U.S. government profit-sharing and partial ownership in Westinghouse. The company’s Canadian owners – Brookfield Renewable Partners (BRP, an equity investment firm) and uranium company Cameco – would give the U.S. government a 20% share of Westinghouse profits, after the company earns its first $17.5 billion. Then, if Westinghouse’s corporate value reaches $30 billion, Brookfield and Cameco would have to take Westinghouse public on the stock market – and give the U.S. government at least 8.3% of the company’s stock. 

This would benefit Brookfield and Cameco, but not U.S. taxpayers. Another Brookfield affiliate bought Westinghouse from Toshiba when it went bankrupt in 2017 due to soaring costs of building four AP1000 reactors for utilities in South Carolina and Georgia. The South Carolina reactors (V.C. Summer 2&3) were canceled, and the Georgia reactors (Vogtle 3&4) were completed in 2024, seven years late and $23 billion over budget. Brookfield Business Partners (BBP) was unable to sell Westinghouse after pulling it out of bankruptcy, but after countries started sanctioning Russia over its war on Ukraine, it looked like Westinghouse could replace Russia as the largest supplier of reactor fuel and services, so BBP sold the company to Brookfield Renewable Partners and Cameco. 

Westinghouse’s value hasn’t exactly seen explosive growth, so it has been seeking deals to sell AP1000 reactors in Poland, Ukraine, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and other countries, in partnership with the U.S. government, which has become increasingly convinced that it must retake global leadership in reactor construction from Russia and China. The Biden administration tried to convince states and utilities that all of the problems with Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactor had been resolved. But still, no state or utility has taken the plunge. 

By now, it is evident that no one is buying Westinghouse’s reactors, so it must be up to the U.S. government to do it. But why? Japan’s offer to pitch in $80 billion will soften the blow to U.S. taxpayers. It may even be enough to build the four reactors Rick Perry wants to name after the president. But we would still end up paying the rest of the cost of too-expensive power and never-ending nuclear waste storage, from reactors that mostly will not be providing electricity to our homes and businesses, but to data centers to power AI. Westinghouse is being passed around like a hot potato and we’ll likely be on the hook when the music stops.

New nuclear push brings old dangers back — and bigger than ever

This opinion editorial by Beyond Nuclear’s Kevin Kamps was first published in The Hill on October 6, 2025. Access the article here.

When President Trump and Keir Starmer, prime minister of the United Kingdom, signed a deal to rapidly expand nuclear power in the U.K., nuclear stock prices soared to record highs. But the boom ignores the overwhelming evidence that nuclear is a bad risk.  

The only U.S. reactors built in the last 30 years, Vogtle Units 3 and 4, cost over $35 billion, resulting in the world’s most expensive electricity. Prohibitive cost overruns also sank NuScale, the only U.S. attempt to commercialize small modular reactors. 

Notwithstanding, irrational nuclear exuberance is reaching a pitch. Spiking electricity demand, cratering nuclear regulation, reckless nuclear boosterism and federal attacks on renewables have produced a perfect storm fueling nuclear expansionism. Former regulators warn that with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission now compromised, the storm may blow us onto the rocks. 

Nuclear hubris is so extreme that NASA says it will put a reactor on the moon by 2030. But with regulatory guardrails down, we ought to worry more about preventing a nuclear moonscape on earth. 

One neon danger sign is the rise of “zombie nukes” — restarting old, disused reactors, including those previously shut down for safety reasons. It’s happening at Michigan’s Palisades nuclear plant, Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island 1 and Iowa’s Duane Arnold.

Another red flag is so-called “advanced” reactors, including small modular reactors. Contrary to the name, small modular reactors are not new, not always small and probably not modular, comprising 127 different designs that are mostly speculative and haven’t been built yet. 

Small modular reactors aren’t “walk away safe” or carbon-free. Their lower output precludes economies of scale and their construction costs aren’t proportionately smaller than conventional nuclear, so their electricity is costlier. They also produce up to 30 times the waste and leak more neutrons. They emit greenhouse gases and thermal pollution. Subsidizing them and other nuclear undermines renewables and makes climate change worse. 

Holtec, a privately held firm facing ethical questions and known for hawking (though not yet building) small modular reactors and pioneering zombie nuke restart, was tapped in the U.S.-U.K. deal to develop nuclear-powered data centers in northeast England worth $15 billion. It gained notoriety by buying moribund U.S. nuclear plants cheaply under pretense of dismantling them and then pivoting to convert them back to operations, though it has no experience as a nuclear operator. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission obliged, granting regulatory relief and safety exemptions enabling Palisades to transition from decommissioning to “operations” status.

Holtec also plans to install small modular reactors there, next to a large cache of radioactive waste. It has similar plans for decommissioned nuclear sites it owns in New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York, and it intends to go public in the next few months with an IPO potentially valued at $10 billion. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

A nuclear engineer recently warned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards that once Palisades is restarted, it could fail within six months, with “unimaginable impacts to the general public,” due to mishandled steam generator tubes or its cracked primary cooling system.

Watchdog groups in Massachusetts, where Holtec wants to install small modular reactors on the closed Pilgrim nuclear site, are decrying a pending energy bill repealing a 1982 state law requiring a permanent repository for radioactive waste, as well as voting up a referendum before any new nuclear can be built. Neither condition is met, but Gov. Maura Healy (D) is bent on small nuclear reactors and nuclear-powered AI data centers anyway. 

At New York’s Indian Point, Holtec proposes to install small modular reactors and restart old, partially dismantled reactors, despite signing an agreement that prohibits even proposing renuclearizing the site without local, county and state support, which it doesn’t have.  

Last year, Holtec sued to block a state law prohibiting it from dumping radioactive water into the Hudson River, which Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed. Then nuclear lobbyists went into high gear in Albany, including hiring former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, prompting an ethics complaint. Hochul then flipped, directing the New York Power Authority to build at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear in the state.

This about-face toward nuclear buildout is happening as the regulatory regime, never robust, is in free fall. Four former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairs (three in this article), have sounded the alarm. Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioners testified before Congress that they expect to be fired if they question unsafe reactor designs and fail to rubberstamp them. Former Department of Energy Assistant Secretary Katy Huff and colleagues wrote that making nuclear regulatory decisions “for political reasons” is “setting the U.S. on the fastest path to a nuclear accident. … This is neither hypothetical nor hyperbole.” 

From their mouths to market handicappers’ ears. Amory Lovins wrote recently that nuclear-powered AI centers “may be a trillion-dollar bubble, but it’s sellable until market realities intervene.” The same is true of the harsh realities of nuclear’s inherent dangers. Let’s hope radiological disaster doesn’t intervene before nuclear’s unacceptable risks and costs get priced back in. 
 
Kevin Kamps is the Radioactive Waste Watchdog at Beyond Nuclear.

The Next Nuclear Renaissance? Will a new wave of nuclear power projects deliver the safe and economical electricity that proponents have long predicted?

The following is an excerpt from an extensive article published recently by the CATO Institute and written by Steve Thomas, Emeritus Professor, Energy Policy, Business School, University of Greenwich and editor-in-chief of Energy Policy.

Despite a major public relations push in the media and with policymakers for new nuclear, the anticipated nuclear revival will not happen because of the fundamentals of the technology in terms of cost, construction time, and reliability. Commercial financiers will remain very reluctant to fund these projects if any of the risk falls on them. Nuclear projects also take far too long before a return on investment can begin to be earned, typically more than 15 years from investment decision to first power.

SMRs [Small Modular Reactors] will not meet their goals. For the technologies to succeed, it will not be enough for them to be cheaper than large reactors; they will have to compete with other low-carbon options such as renewables and energy efficiency measures. Gen IV designs may come along in the future, but experience suggests they are unlikely to progress to commercially available designs. Large reactor designs appear to be obsolescent. The ideas that were claimed would solve past problems were tried and failed in the previous attempted renaissance, and no new ideas to improve large reactors are emerging.

Life extension will keep nuclear capacity going for some time, although if there is an incident or accident that exposes the gap between past and current safety standards or if there is a serious equipment failure from undetected deterioration of components, the situation may change. A bigger challenge is that the older reactors get, the higher the O&M costs will tend to be. Already in the United States, life-extended reactors that are fully amortized and need only cover their O&M costs from market revenue are struggling to compete with the cheapest option, natural gas dual-cycle generation. As renewables and storage technologies continue to get cheaper, the economics of old nuclear plants will come under increased scrutiny in countries where reactors must compete in the wholesale electricity market.

Few utilities are prepared to risk their own money on new nuclear projects. In the past, investing in nuclear was not a financial risk to them because whatever costs were incurred could be passed on to consumers through regulated rates. Now, utilities that must compete in wholesale markets would be risking a large amount of their own money if they were to build new nuclear plants. New nuclear programs will have to rely on government finance, ownership, and government-imposed power purchase agreements so they are fully insulated from the wholesale electricity market. The record of utilities with nuclear experience in appraising nuclear technologies is far from good, but governments do not have the skills necessary to meet the requirements imposed by managing nuclear projects.

The mystery is why the nuclear industry retains any credibility. Throughout its history, nuclear proponents have made rosy claims about the safety and economics of the next generation of nuclear projects, but they have all gone unfulfilled. In the early years of nuclear development, claims that processes such as learning by doing, technology change, standardization, economies of scale, and economies of number would result in improved performance had an intuitive credibility. However, after repeated failures to produce the forecasted results, why are renewed claims of this type being taken seriously now? Is it simple ignorance of the past, or are there other factors that make policymakers cling to a belief in nuclear?

Why are people unwilling to consider the reason that nuclear projects fail so often is the technology itself? Instead, they fall back on old, tired excuses such as unsympathetic regulators, delays caused by local protestors, and simply not getting the right “recipe” for building nuclear power plants. In March 2025, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer claimed:

For too long, blockers have had the upper hand in legal challenges—using our court processes to frustrate growth. We’re putting an end to this challenge culture by taking on the NIMBYs and a broken system that has slowed down our progress as a nation.

Starmer has created a taskforce to streamline safety regulation, but he has offered no evidence that the delays and cost escalation suffered at Hinkley Point C are in any way attributable to opposition or obstructive regulation—and he cannot because there is none.

The problem is not so much that money will be wasted on large numbers of uneconomic facilities. Rather, it is the opportunity costs of the time and human resources that are consumed by nuclear power and not available to other, quicker, more cost-effective and less financially risky options. We appear now to be facing serious risks from climate change, and there will not be a second chance if we fail to tackle it because too many resources are being consumed by an option—new nuclear—that will not work.

Read the full paper here.