Virginia is not directly involved, but with our nuclear industrial base, a pending federal lawsuit over the authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is crucial for our energy future. At the end of last year, Texas and Utah and small nuclear startup LAST Energy filed a claim in the Eastern District of Texas that the NRC is unlawfully impeding progress in the industry.
The two states and LAST Energy allege that the NRC was formed to govern only large reactors, like those in central station power plants of one gigawatt (GW) or larger, with no authority at all to regulate small ones. LAST Energy is building old technology 20 megawatt (MW) pressurized water nuclear fission reactors (PWRs). The state universities in Texas and Utah own units that are much smaller still, which aren’t designed to produce electricity, but rathermostly for training purposes.
The plaintiffs claim that it is a case of regulatory creep on steroids, where the NRC is forcing its brutally expensive and time-consuming regulatory regime on these small reactors. Their radiation risks are comparable to those of dental X-rays, which the NRC doesn’t even bother to regulate. If the suit is successfully resolved, either by shifting the regulation of small reactors to the states, or else by keeping it with the NRC, but at a greatly reduced cost and regulatory burden, it will be a huge deal for energy and manufacturing in the United States in general and Virginia in particular.
What is LAST Energy? It is a small startup based in Washington, D.C., founded and led by Bret Kugelmass, a brilliant engineer and visionary, who is on the road to Making Nuclear Power Great Again. He spells it all out in this recorded interview on YouTube.
His vision is not to pioneer new technology, but rather to build on safe and reliable technology developed in the 1950s by the U.S. Navy, initially for nuclear submarines. But unlike the Navy powerplants, LAST’s devices use a low enriched uranium, not the highly enriched fuels for military purposes.
The basic PWR technology has been incrementally improved over the years for safety and performance so that it is the dominant one in use today worldwide to produce nuclear power. It is so safe that it has never caused the death of even one person in the U.S., even in the face of the Three Mile Island meltdown, in about seventy years.
LAST’s game plan is to manufacture and sell the output of 20 MW micro reactors in the UK and Europe initially, because of the hopeless NRC regulatory regime in the U.S. Kugelmass has sold more than fifty units (whose production will start later this year or in 2026) via power purchase agreements, or PPAs (i.e. selling the electricity produced, not the reactors), for over $30 billion.
His goal is to build a factory to produce 10,000 reactors annually in the near future, the equivalent output of 200 big central station nukes. After that, he plans to pivot to larger ones, 100-200 MW, then larger still, shipped all over the world. That is the true game changer he envisions: human flourishing made possible by massive amounts of cheap energy everywhere, not just here in the West but especially in the developing world.
When the NRC’s regulatory regime is so oppressive that it makes the European Union seem loose by comparison, something is dreadfully wrong. And as rational as regulation may be in Europe, you can imagine how much more rational it must be in China, which bends over backwards to support its entrepreneurs. China has also embedded vast amounts of nuclear power in its growth plans, building on the original American work, some stolen technology, and genuine home-grown original work, and we need to get going or they will leave us in the dust.
Since the NRC hasn’t yet answered the suit, which they should have done by the beginning of March—almost two months ago—it is possible that it and the plaintiffs are talking settlement. If NRC’s grip is loosened, the benefits for Virginia will be huge, depending on where the line gets drawn for the relaxed oversight.
Both of Virginia’s major electricity providers are actively working on developing smaller modular reactor generation solutions, but they are initially looking at facilities much larger than 20 MW. Dominion Energy Virginia is under huge pressure from the data center industry to add capacity, but it is constrained in its choices by the Virginia Clean Economy Act.
BWX Technologies, Inc., domiciled in Virginia with large manufacturing operations in Lynchburg (as well as in other states and Canada) does most of its business with the United States Navy, for which it has manufactured all the reactors onboard our nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers since the USS Nautilus in 1956. But it is highly interested in commercial SMRs.
Another big player is Framatome (also in Lynchburg), a subsidiary of the big French nuclear player, plus many other small players. The bottom line is that nuclear is a very big deal for Virginia both in manufacturing and electricity production, and the right regulatory environment will bring rapid acceleration.
This lawsuit should succeed.
Bill Stewart received his AB and ScB in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, along with his Navy commission via their NROTC program. After sea duty and his obligated service, he moved into power engineering for a short period — when he came to the proverbial fork in the road and took it, going into the steamship industry.