Panelists Say Order-Books, Regulatory Streamlining and Supply Chains Can Cut Advanced Nuclear Costs

Tim Davis, director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, asked how to bring new nuclear facilities to market "safely, quickly, and within budget." Jeremy Harrell, chief executive officer of ClearPath, said the combination of incentives, regulatory reform and supply-chain investment is needed. "There's a lot of momentum in Washington DC on how we streamline the nuclear regulatory commissions both licensing and permitting process," Harrell said.

Lee Robinson of the Defense Innovation Unit recommended milestone-based firm fixed-price contracts to give market predictability and incentives: "milestone firm fixed price contracting is by far the way to go," he said. Ben Reinke of X Energy described how national-lab R&D and Department of Energy support (the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program) coupled with smaller, simpler, repeatable reactor designs can reduce the first-of-a-kind cost and enable standardization across sites. Reinke noted his company raised private capital against public dollars and is deploying first reactors with industrial off-takers, saying these partnerships help make projects financeable.

Panelists emphasized that the path to lower costs is multi-part: public incentives and early-stage grants to absorb initial risk, regulatory changes that allow consistent licensing across sites, and private-sector scale once an order book exists. The discussion also flagged the need to invest in both the reactor and fuel supply chains so manufacturing learning curves can drive costs down over repeated deployments.