Nuclear Power, Fuel and Small Modular Reactors

Nuclear power is the energy business with the widest gap between the value of what already exists and the cost of building more. An operating US reactor makes firm, carbon-free electricity around the clock at a capacity factor above 90% for a total generating cost in the low $30s per MWh (industry estimate, Nuclear Energy Institute, 2023, verify), and after 2024 technology companies paid premium prices on 20-year contracts to secure that output: Constellation Energy's restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1 (renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, ~835 MW) for Microsoft, Talen Energy's 1.92 GW Susquehanna contract with Amazon, Meta's 20-year deal for Clinton. Yet the last two large reactors finished in the United States, Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia (Southern Company), entered service in July 2023 and April 2024, about seven years late and at more than double the original budget (over $30bn for the two units on most reported bases, ~$35bn including financing costs by some counts, verify basis), while the pair at V.C. Summer in South Carolina was abandoned half-built in 2017 and their vendor, Westinghouse, went bankrupt. Europe's EPRs tell the same story: EDF's Flamanville 3 reached the grid in December 2024 seventeen years after construction began, and Hinkley Point C's cost estimate rose to ~£35bn (reported February 2026, verify money basis) with first power now expected around the end of the decade. Meanwhile China, Russia and Korea build on time often enough to dominate world new build, and the fuel chain (uranium mining, conversion, enrichment, and the high-assay fuel many new designs need) is concentrated in Kazakhstan, Russia and a handful of Western firms. This section explains how an existing reactor earns money and why plants that closed for economic reasons in 2013–2022 became valuable again; life extensions, uprates and restarts; why first-of-a-kind new build destroys capital and what has worked (Barakah, China's series builds); the fuel cycle from mine to fuel assembly, uranium pricing, and Russia's place in enrichment and HALEU; small modular and advanced reactors and the gap between NRC approval and a customer at the price; licensing and the 2025 US executive orders; fusion as a financing story; and the data-centre deals that repriced the fleet. A worked example prices a stylized restart against a stylized first-of-a-kind SMR, and a checklist sets out diligence questions for nuclear projects and companies.