Across the U.S., states want to finance nuclear energy, putting taxpayers on the hook

• By Natanya Friedheim, Katie Beth Cannon, Ronan Spencer and Erin Bruce, The Statehouse Reporting Project
• May 27 2025

Michigan-based artist Devin J. Wright designed a mural called “The Spirit of Nuclear” for the University of Michigan’s Department of Nuclear Energy and Radiological Sciences, known as NERS.

Photo provided by Todd Allen, University of Michigan.

Talk to Texas lawmakers about nuclear energy, and they will stress energy independence.

Minnesota and Michigan lawmakers frame nuclear as a reliable, carbon-free energy source aligned with their states’ clean energy goals.

Illinois lawmakers emphasize high-paying union jobs.

In Indiana, lawmakers are eager for the influx of capital a burgeoning industry could bring.

Whatever their motivation, state lawmakers introduced more bills related to nuclear energy in the first few months of 2025 than all of last year, according to Zach Koshgarian of Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a think tank focused on advanced nuclear energy research.

“There’s been a flurry of state legislative activity,” he said.

Among the questions the bills in both red and blue states address is who would pay for the substantial upfront costs of constructing nuclear reactors. Many bills don’t address what would happen with the creation of more nuclear waste.

A proposal in Texas, the nation’s largest energy producer, calls for giving $750 million over the next two yearsin part to fund companies building or supplying nuclear plants. It would also create the Texas Advanced Nuclear Deployment Office, a planning agency and liaison between companies and the state. The bill is currently pending in committee.

“The United States cannot afford to cede leadership in nuclear energy to China,” state Rep. Cody Harris, R-Palestine, who introduced the bill, told the legislature’s State Affairs Committee on March 19.

After dedicating $300 million last year to restart the mothballed Palisades Nuclear Generating Station power plant, Michigan lawmakers resurrected a bipartisan package of pro-nuclear bills this session. The plant closed in 2022.

“Given where we were a few years ago, it’s a remarkable change in direction,” said Todd Allen, chair of the University of Michigan’s nuclear engineering and radiological sciences department.

Palisades is on track to become the first reactor in the nation to restart operations after being shut down. In many ways, it’s a sign of what’s to come.

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Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, site of the country’s worst commercial nuclear accident in 1979, has been rebranded the Crane Clean Energy Center. Under a deal with Microsoft, part of the plant will reopen to power the tech giant’s data centers.

Plans to restart Iowa’s only nuclear plant, Duane Arnold Energy Center, are also underway. The plant closed in 2020.

Increased energy use from data centers—warehouses full of computer servers—renewed interest in nuclear energy. International concern about energy dependence also grew following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Last year, 25 states took action to incentivize nuclear energy, whether through legislation or initiated by a governor, according to Christine Csizmadia of Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association. That’s up from 20 states in 2023 and 11 states the year prior.

The organization is tracking about 300 bills this year, an increase from previous years.

State efforts add to a former President Joe Biden-era clean energy federal funding blitz that included money for advanced nuclear, referring to smaller and safer nuclear energy technology. “It was a natural acceleration of things that started as far back as (former President Barack) Obama,” Allen said.

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Some states want to incentivize development. Others simply want to study the issue or remove barriers. Of 12 stateswith bans or restrictions on nuclear reactor construction, five have repealed their bans, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

A bill to lift Minnesota’s moratorium, currently on its second reading in the House, passed the state’s House energy committee with an added provision barring new construction on Prairie Island, a Native American reservation already home to one of the state’s two nuclear power plants. The Prairie Island Indian Community still opposes the bill.

Because the U.S. does not have a final repository for nuclear waste, the waste produced by the Prairie Island plant and others is stored on site.

“Our decision isn’t only about what is needed right now, in the moment. Our community thinks about the impacts of our decisions on the next seven generations,” Blake Johnson, the community’s government relations representative, told lawmakers at a March 13 energy committee meeting.

Public funding for small modular reactors

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee wants the nation’s first small nuclear reactor built at the state’s Clinch River Nuclear Site.

Small modular reactors (SMRs) generate a third of the energy of traditional reactors. Still in the prototype phase, they’re designed for mass production and easy transport.

“The enhanced safety allows them to be located closer to populations, and that makes them an attractive replacement to retired coal or other fossil generation or putting (them) right next to industrial operations like Dow Industries,” said Marcus Nichol, executive director of new nuclear at the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Dow, a chemical firm, might surpass Tennessee’s ambitions. The company has plans to build a modular reactor in Texas. Holtec International, the company restarting the Palisades plant, also plans to build SMRs alongside the larger plant.

As part of the 2023-24 budget, the Tennessee General Assembly approved $50 million for the Nuclear Energy Fund, meant to expand nuclear power and energy across Tennessee. It has drawn energy companies Kairos Power and Orano to the state.

The Tennessee Valley Authority also committed $350 million to new reactor development.

“The Volunteer State is on track to be the epicenter of energy innovation, and it couldn’t happen at a more crucial time,” Lee said in his State of the State address in early February.

The TVA previously applied for an $800 million federal grant for the development of the Clinch River Site, an SMR site. However, the application was revised, and applicants were asked to resubmit. The TVA announced they resubmitted the grant application on April 23.

“If awarded, this grant will help TVA and our coalition members build the nation’s first SMR and provide families and businesses with affordable and abundant energy,” said Don Moul, TVA president and CEO, in a press release.

The 2025-26 budget passed the Tennessee legislature on April 16, with increased funding for nuclear projects.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s Operation Gigawatt aims to create an “abundance of energy” by doubling the state’s power production over the next decade.

“Utah is ready to build advanced nuclear,” Cox said in an Instagram post. “We’re accelerating site selection, rightsizing regulation, and getting to work.”

The state has both exported and imported energy in the past. For now, it relies on coal and natural gas.

Utah’s SMR project, in collaboration with nuclear power company NuScale and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, jumped in cost from $5.3 billion to $9.3 billion.

“Everybody knows that down the road we’re going to have to make that transition,” said Rep. Carl Albrecht, R-Sevier. He sponsored a bill signed by Cox last month creating state nuclear planning agencies.

In Indiana, a bill signed by the governor on April 20 provides tax credits to companies developing SMRs in the state. The measure also prevents the shutdown of coal plants unless it’s proven the energy would be replaced to the same extent and in a cheaper way.

Testimony was heard from a number of Indiana organizations, generally in opposition. The main concerns related to cost for ratepayers, uncertainty around the technology and the possibility of nuclear waste.

Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, amended the bill to raise financial liability for developers to 80% of the cost, leaving ratepayers with 20%.

“The problem is that no small modular reactor has actually been put into service in the entire United States,” Pierce told lawmakers at a House meeting. He said the technology would likely take over a decade to be online.

Two other measures that passed the Indiana legislature create programs to encourage developers. Senate Bill 423, signed by Gov. Mike Braun on May 1, would develop a pilot program to support parties interested in developing SMRs in Indiana.

Another measure, SB 424, allows qualifying utility companies to recover the costs of developing SMRs from ratepayers before construction is completed. The governor signed the bill on April 10.

Sen. Eric Koch, R-Bedford, who authored both measures, said even major companies only have so much to invest.

“I would like that capital to come here. Is it a rush? I wouldn’t use that word ‘rush,’ but there is an urgency,” he said.

Through resolutions in the last two years, Republican states including Idaho, Tennessee and Utah recognized nuclear energy as “clean” energy. An Ohio billlast year classified nuclear energy as “green.” In 2023, North Carolina lawmakers included fusion and fission in a list of clean energy sources that included wind and solar.

A Colorado bill signed into law last month designates nuclear as a “clean” energy. Utility companies can thus use nuclear energy to meet state clean-energy targets.

The moves make federal funds designated for clean energy projects available for nuclear projects, Csizmadia said.

No long-term plan for nuclear waste

Much of the discussion focuses on cost and incentives, even as concerns about safety and waste storage persist among the general public. Nuclear energy supporters around the world are trying to find ways to alleviate those fears.

In The Netherlands, a bright orange bunker stores high-level radioactive waste. Every 10 years, the company contracted to store the waste repaints the building a slightly lighter shade of orange. By 2103, the end of the company’s 100-year storage contract, the bunker will be painted white.

The color changes mimic the decreasing heat and radiation emitted from spent nuclear fuel.

Art hangs from the concrete walls of the company’s depot for low-level radioactive waste, mere feet away from waste-filled drums.

“People can walk around,” said Koshgarian of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance. “They can also look at art and they can learn about nuclear energy. I think there’s a lot of demystifying to be done around nuclear waste.”

Unlike its representation in popular culture, nuclear waste from power plants is neither bright green nor oozing. But at high levels, its radioactivity can break apart DNA, impairing the body’s ability to regenerate cells.

“When you make that choice to go down the nuclear pathway, you are committing future generations to deal with that waste for thousands, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of years,” said Lexi Tuddenham, executive director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah.

HEAL Utah is an advocacy group that opposes HB 249, signed into law by Utah’s governor on March 26. Tuddenham said radioactive exposure is a history Utah is “particularly familiar with” referring to residents exposed to nuclear weapons testing known as downwinders and communities impacted by uranium mining.

Commercial reactors in the U.S. have accumulated around 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste over the last six decades.

Ceramic fuel pellets the size of a pencil eraser packed with uranium are put into metal fuel rods, like crayons packed into a box. Once used, those rods move to a spent fuel pool—a pool of water where the waste sits for five to seven years to cool down.

Next, the waste heads to dry storage, locked away in steel- and concrete-lined canisters known as dry cask storage. For now, the spent fuel from commercial plants in the U.S. sits either in cooling pools or casks, both of which are located on site in the vicinity of the reactor.

France, which gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear, recycles its spent fuel, extracting still more energy from it. In the U.S., it is more cost effective to mine fresh uranium than recycle spent fuel, according to Csizmadia of Nuclear Energy Institute.

In 1987, Congress identified a site in Nevada as the country’s final repository for spent fuel. Faced with political opposition, the federal government abandoned the project in 2010.

Last year, Canada joined a handful of countries with a final nuclear waste repository. The process of selecting the site required community feedback and took more than a decade.

Even as Texas looks to lead the nuclear energy revival, a 2021 state law limits storage of high-level nuclear waste in the state to existing plants.

The status quo will remain, and fuel will be housed on site “until the federal government finally takes ownership of that and stores it somewhere outside of Texas,” said Harris, the state representative.

TheStatehouseFile.com is publishing this article as part of the Statehouse Reporting Project, a collaborative effort by collegiate journalism programs operating in statehouses across the country. Caleb Crockett contributed to this report.