By Jennifer Hiller
"USA250: The Story of the World's Greatest Economy" is a yearlong WSJ series examining America's first 250 years. Read more about it from Editor in Chief Emma Tucker.
The U.S. nuclear power industry's last building spree ended around 1990, when East and West Germany reunified and "Home Alone" was one of the year's hit movies.
By then, nuclear power was long out of favor. Since then, the focus shifted to natural gas, wind and solar power. But now, rising electricity demand, a focus on the climate and the surging energy needs of the tech sector have revived interest in nuclear power.
Chris Womack, chief executive officer of Southern Co., which operates the nation's two most recently built reactors at its Vogtle plant in Georgia, says the U.S. will need a mix of energy sources, including nuclear power.
"You can't put all the eggs in one basket. 'All of the above' is very important in terms of meeting this moment, meeting this growing demand," Womack says. "We're going to upgrade the capacity of our nuclear fleet. And we're going to keep encouraging this administration and others to say, 'We've got to build more nuclear in this country.' You've got to look five years, 10 years, 20 years to generational needs down the road."
So, what might the next decades bring?
Back in the mix
Nuclear energy was once so popular it inspired starburst-patterned home decor and Walt Disney cartoons. ("Here with my right hand, I give you the magic fire of the atom," a genie says in "Our Friend the Atom," a 1957 Disney television episode.)
That enthusiasm started fading in the 1970s as construction costs rose and the growth of electricity demand slowed. Support collapsed after a partial core meltdown in 1979 at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania led to several days of panic, heightening awareness of potential safety risks.
Between 1979 and 1988, 67 planned nuclear projects were canceled, according to the Energy Department.
In recent years, calls for emissions-free, reliable energy pushed nuclear power into the climate conversation. Interest has accelerated as the tech industry touts the technology as a solution to the massive electricity demands of artificial intelligence.
Now, about 60% of U.S. adults say they favor adding more nuclear power plants, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year, up from 43% in 2020.
"We clearly need more nuclear power and we're bullish on it," says Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft. In 2024, Microsoft signed a 20-year power deal with Constellation Energy that will restart the undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island, now renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center. A Microsoft partnership with Nvidia is using AI to accelerate permitting and design, and to let developers virtually build the facility to identify potential issues before breaking ground.
New reactors, and old
Cost and logistics remain issues. Nuclear plants historically have been expensive and time-consuming to build.
Developers are trying to prove they can overcome that legacy by planning a wave of so-called small modular reactors, or SMRs, intended to be cheaper than their predecessors and delivered one after another in factory fashion as a way to drive down costs. The first demonstration and commercial SMRs are starting to come on stream in the U.S. and Canada.
"If we can figure out a design that people can be happy with and try and replicate that a series of times, I think that's going to help on construction," says Dan Eggers, senior executive vice president at Constellation Energy, which owns more nuclear plants than any other U.S. company. "It's going to help on operations costs, and that will all lead to hopefully a better cost profile."
The Trump administration wants to see large reactor projects started this decade, too, and said in the fall that it would facilitate the construction of $80 billion in Westinghouse reactors at sites around the country.
Meanwhile, extending the life of existing reactors and upgrading them to squeeze more electricity out of them is "really important," Eggers says.
A moonshot
On an even more ambitious note, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is pushing to develop nuclear energy on the surface of the moon.
The White House, in an April policy memo, called on the U.S. to deploy reactors on the lunar surface by potentially 2030. Under that directive, NASA will work on a program to provide at least a 20-kilowatt system over at least five years on the moon. That's roughly equal to a whole-house backup system.
The goal for the 2030s would be 100 kilowatts -- a modest amount of electricity on Earth, but unprecedented for space.
A reactor would offer a long-term, consistent supply of electricity that solar power with batteries can't manage on the moon, given the two-week lunar night. That could enable new scientific and economic activities around research, mining and tourism .
Small reactors also could be used to power spacecraft over longer distances, including to Mars. The White House wants to put nuclear propulsion systems into orbit as soon as 2028. Fission is more efficient than chemical reactions, so NASA could carry bigger payloads and have more power for instruments and communications.
Long bet on fusion
Fusion could also become part of the nuclear-power mix. The reaction that powers the sun has long been considered the ultimate clean-energy prize.
While conventional nuclear plants split heavy atoms in a process called fission, fusion does the opposite: It combines light atomic nuclei into heavier ones, releasing enormous energy without greenhouse-gas emissions or long-lived radioactive waste.
Scientists and engineers are still trying to build a system that reliably produces more energy than it consumes, and many experts consider commercial fusion a decade or more away.
Still, several private fusion companies in the U.S. are planning their first projects intended to deliver commercial power.
Among them are Helion Energy, which has agreed to deliver fusion power to Microsoft in 2028 in Washington state. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building a demonstration reactor in Massachusetts and planning to follow it with a commercial project in Virginia to deliver power to the grid in the early 2030s. And TAE Technologies is merging with Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social, aiming to break ground this year on a commercial plant at a location to be determined that would generate electricity in the early 2030s.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 09, 2026 13:30 ET (17:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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