⚛️DOE to Finance the First 10 Reactors

The U.S. just put its money where its mouth is.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the Department of Energy (DOE) is preparing to finance up to 10 new nuclear reactors through its rebranded lending arm, now called the Office of Energy Dominance Financing (nice one!).

The pitch is pretty straightforward: private capital should do the heavy lifting, but Washington is going to give the first wave a low interest push (shove) to get concrete in the ground.

The logic is simple, and kind of savage. The government spent decades smothering the industry with glacial slow permitting, regulatory overload, and economic uncertainty. Now it wants the restart button.

Wright’s plan is to use DOE loans for credit worthy partners, especially hyperscalers, meaning the AI and data center giants that are suddenly discovering that wind turbines do not do 24/7 compute.

The structure is basically: big tech brings equity up front, DOE backs it with low cost debt, and the first movers get rewarded for moving fast.

Nuclear buildout has been slow because investors won’t lock up billions for 10+ years when the schedule depends on a licensing process that moves like it’s buffering on bad Wi-Fi.

When DOE steps in with low interest loans, it changes the math. Not for every project, and not forever, but for the first 10 reactors that prove the template works.

And that’s the point. DOE financing plus faster licensing is the combo meal.

The “nuclear renaissance” stops being a meme and starts being a procurement cycle (I’m still going to post memes though).

🎉US NRC extends life for 3 reactors by 20 years

Quietly, without much pomp and circumstance, one of the most important nuclear assets in the United States just secured its future.

The Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama has officially received a 20-year license extension from the NRC, allowing all 3 units to keep operating well into the 2050s. That takes the site’s total operating life to 80 years.

That's 9 US Nuclear reactors that have received life extensions this year!

Browns Ferry is TVA’s largest generating asset and the third-largest nuclear power producer in the country, the 3 Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) are pushing close to 3.8 GW of capacity.

Unlike shiny new reactor announcements (though we like those too), this is real capacity, already built, already paid for, already connected to the grid.

For a fraction of the cost of new construction, the U.S. just locked in decades of ultra-reliable, zero-carbon baseload power. No new land. No new transmission fights. No new permitting wars. Just keep the plant running.

License extensions like this are one of the most underappreciated nuclear stories out there.

TVA is even planning incremental uprates over the next decade, potentially adding another 200+ MW from the same site.

Nuclear is not a transitional energy source anymore, it is permanent infrastructure. No headlines. No hype. Just 80 years of electrons.

⚓ U.S Navy Wants $2.4B SMRs and Naval Reactors

The FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) just turned “nuclear for national security” from a slogan into a 10 year pilot program.

Buried inside the $892.6 billion defense package is a requirement for the Navy to run a pilot at at least two naval installations to see how small modular reactors (SMRs), or mobile reactors, could actually power bases in the real world. Not a study group, an actual forced test drive.

And they are not thinking small. The draft bill includes roughly $384 million for advanced nuclear power systems and about $2.1 billion for naval reactors, plus language that gives special attention to a very 2025 combo: co-locating an SMR with a data center.

The bill also pushes the next domino: it requires a report on what authorities and barriers exist to supplying nuclear power from a military base to the civilian grid.

That is a quiet but huge signal.

If DoD sites become anchor customers for first of a kind reactors, and then can export power off base, you suddenly have a repeatable deployment pathway.

It does not stop at fission. The NDAA would authorize the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital to support both fission and fusion with loan guarantees, and it expands the Defense Industrial Base Fund to cover critical minerals, materials, and chemicals.

That is the full stack, power, finance, and supply chain, bundled into one must pass bill.

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🧱 You can build a mini-nuclear reactor at home!

If you ever wanted to build a nuclear reactor without filling out 4,000 pages of NRC paperwork, your moment has arrived.

Westinghouse just dropped an AP1000 LEGO-style bricks set, complete with a tiny engineer buddy in hard hat mode, doing what we all do at 2am: trying to make baseload happen.

It’s absurd, it’s nerdy, and yes, I want one.

Dear Santa…

⚡Electron Beam Wastewater Treatment

Welcome back to Atomic Alternatives, where we explore the strange, clever, and occasionally mind-bending ways nuclear science keeps the modern world running.

This week, we’re heading somewhere far less glamorous than a reactor hall…

A wastewater treatment plant.

Specifically, the kind dealing with industrial wastewater from textile dyeing, pharmaceuticals, and chemical manufacturing.

The stuff that is colorful, toxic, stubborn, and notoriously hard to clean.

Enter electron beam technology.

In a handful of advanced treatment plants, operators fire high-energy electron beams directly into contaminated wastewater. No heat, no chemicals added, just pure physics.

The electron beam triggers water radiolysis, creating hydroxyl radicals (•OH) and other short lived reactive species.

These highly reactive molecules slam into dyes, pharmaceutical residues, and industrial chemicals, breaking them into smaller fragments.

Think of it as molecular demolition.

Once broken down, the wastewater suddenly becomes much easier to treat using conventional biological processes. Microbes that would normally shrug and give up can now finish the job.

The result: faster treatment, fewer chemicals, and dramatically reduced toxic byproducts.

And no, the water does not become radioactive.

The electron beam switches off, the radiation stops, and what’s left is cleaner water and chemistry that actually plays nice with nature.

It’s nuclear tech doing what it does best: solving problems that look impossible with conventional tools.

😂Meme of The Week

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Fredrik

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