A sleeper headline with outsized consequences
On 19 June 2024, while most news feeds were fixated on summer primaries and sports scores, the U.S. Senate approved the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act as part of a larger defense-authorization package. The vote was not even close—88 senators said aye—giving the bill a momentum that transcends the usual partisan trench warfare.
If the House signs off in the coming weeks, ADVANCE will become the most consequential U.S. nuclear-energy law since the Energy Policy Act of 2005. It would streamline licensing, shower regulators with new resources, and hand America’s next-generation reactor start-ups the policy certainty they have lobbied for since the term “small modular reactor” (SMR) first entered Beltway vernacular.
What exactly does the ADVANCE Act do?
- Modernizes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The bill instructs the NRC to create a technology-inclusive licensing framework by 2027, replacing rules still rooted in the gigawatt-scale reactors of the 1970s.
- Caps review times. Initial construction permits must be processed within 24 months, with final operating licenses within 42 months—deadlines that today often stretch toward a decade.
- Creates a prize authority. Up to $800 million in milestone payments would flow to the first advanced reactors that can prove commercial operation on U.S. soil.
- Tackles supply chains. The Department of Energy is ordered to stand up a program for domestic production of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), the designer fuel required by most advanced concepts.
- Strengthens export tools. A new “international nuclear export strategy” aims to help U.S. vendors compete with state-backed Russian and Chinese rivals.
The tech getting a policy tailwind
“Advanced reactor” is an umbrella term for roughly a dozen designs that depart from the light-water architecture dominating today’s fleet. The headline classes include:
• Sodium-cooled fast reactors – promise walk-away safety and the ability to “burn” long-lived transuranic waste. • High-temperature gas reactors – use helium coolant and TRISO fuel pebbles that can withstand 1,600 °C, enabling industrial heat applications and hydrogen production. • Molten-salt reactors – dissolve fuel in liquid salt, allowing on-the-fly reprocessing and inherent pressure relief. • Micro-reactors – sub-10-MW units that fit on a flat-bed truck, marketed to remote mines, data centers, and military bases.
Most of these systems come in modules ranging from 1 MW to 300 MW, a scale that slashes overnight capital cost and, advocates say, allows serial factory manufacturing. But without predictable licensing timelines and demand signals, venture funding alone cannot carry them past the prototype phase. That is the gap ADVANCE tries to bridge.
Climate math, grid resilience, and geopolitics
Why the sudden bipartisan appetite? Three vectors have converged:
- Decarbonization deadlines: California, New York, and a dozen other states have statutory 2045 or 2050 net-zero targets. Modeling by Princeton’s ZERO Lab indicates that hitting those goals without tripling nuclear output would require overbuilding wind and solar by 80 % and battery storage by 300 %, raising land-use and NIMBY friction.
- Blackout anxiety: The North American Electric Reliability Corporation warns that two-thirds of U.S. grid regions already face capacity shortfalls during extreme weather. Dispatchable, carbon-free kilowatts are at a premium.
- Strategic rivalry: Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Rosatom has inked eight new build-operate-own reactor deals across the Global South. China has ten Hualong One units under construction domestically and is courting Saudi Arabia. Washington worries that whoever supplies the fission hardware also writes the safety rulebook and wins the decades-long fuel-service contracts that follow.
ADVANCE explicitly links export competitiveness to national security, instructing the State Department to clear backlogs in 123 Agreements (the treaties that allow nuclear trade). In other words, the U.S. is re-arming not just with semiconductors and rare earths but with reactor blueprints.
The critics: cost overruns and waste worries
Opponents point to the cautionary tale of Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia, the first new large reactors built in the U.S. this century; they arrived seven years late and $17 billion over budget. “Streamlining does not fix fundamental economics,” argues Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who also warns that non-light-water systems will yield exotic waste streams the NRC has never handled.
Then there is the proliferation dimension. Fast reactors can produce weapons-usable plutonium; molten-salt designs could make on-site fuel recycling routine. ADVANCE directs the NRC to consider safeguards but does not mandate new physical-security rules, a loophole critics say could haunt Washington in export markets.
The road from bill to kilowatts
Even if President Biden signs ADVANCE this year, the hard work starts on day two. The NRC will need hundreds of new engineers to write risk-informed codes, Congress must appropriate the prize money, and DOE’s fledgling HALEU enrichment effort—currently one centrifuge cascade in Ohio—must scale 20-fold.
On the commercial side, three projects will serve as bellwethers: • TerraPower’s Natrium demonstration in Wyoming (345 MW, molten-salt energy storage hybrid) now aims for 2030 startup after delays triggered by Russia-linked fuel supplies. • X-Energy’s first Xe-100 high-temperature gas reactor in Washington State (4×80 MW modules) chasing 2032. • NuScale’s Carbon-Free Power Project in Idaho, the sole light-water SMR in the race, which just re-baselined its cost at $89/MWh; municipal utilities will decide this summer whether to stick around.
If even one of these plants beats coal-to-nuclear conversion timelines in Eastern Europe or beats the levelized cost of combined-cycle gas at home, investor sentiment could flip from curiosity to gold-rush.
The bottom line
ADVANCE will not single-handedly usher in a nuclear renaissance; capital markets, public perception, and supply chains will have their say. But by attacking the procedural molasses that has slowed U.S. nuclear projects for decades, Congress has given advanced reactor innovators something they have never had before: a clock they can plan against. Whether that is enough to light a truly next nuclear era is the multibillion-dollar question—but for the first time in years, the answer does not feel preordained.
Sources
- Reuters – “U.S. Senate passes ADVANCE Act to boost nuclear energy,” 19 June 2024.
- U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works – “Bipartisan group introduces ADVANCE Act,” legislative summary, June 2024.