Wright Tells Congress First 5 to 10 New US Nuclear Reactors Will 'Almost Certainly' Get DOE Loans
At an April 16 House Appropriations hearing, Energy Secretary Chris Wright pledged that the first five to ten new planned US nuclear reactors will almost certainly receive financing from the DOE lending office, directing the agency's renamed loan authority toward first-of-a-kind projects.
Overview
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told lawmakers on April 16, 2026, that the first five to ten new planned US nuclear reactors will “almost certainly” receive loans from the Department of Energy’s lending office, Reuters reported from the hearing. The statement sharpens the financing path for a domestic nuclear build-out that has been stalled for a generation. The comments came during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on DOE’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget, Utility Dive reported in its coverage of the same hearing.
The pledge crystallizes a strategy Wright has advanced for months: steering the bulk of DOE’s multihundred-billion-dollar loan authority — the Loan Programs Office, which now operates as the Office of Energy Dominance Financing — toward building a domestic fleet of large reactors and small modular reactors (SMRs). According to Reuters, the office has nearly $290 billion in remaining lending capacity.
What We Know
According to Fox Business, Wright has previously told industry audiences that “by far the biggest use of those dollars will be for nuclear power plants to get those first plants built,” and that equity from AI hyperscalers and data center operators could be paired “3-to-1, maybe even up to 4-to-1, with low-cost debt dollars from the Loan Programs Office.” In earlier comments reported by CNBC, Wright said nuclear power would receive the bulk of the money flowing from the Energy Department’s loan office, a position now reinforced by his April 16 testimony.
The April 16 hearing also pressed Wright on the department’s broader loan portfolio. He told the subcommittee that DOE is “restoring fiscal discipline,” including by “restructuring or eliminating over $80 billion in loans, more than 80% of the Biden-era loan portfolio, and we are redirecting that capital towards projects that strengthen reliability and American energy production,” according to Utility Dive. The administration is seeking to cut more than $15 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding and redirect roughly $4.7 billion toward what Wright called “firm baseload power” — coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydropower, geothermal and transmission — plus support for seven AI supercomputers at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the same Utility Dive report noted.
On process reforms, Wright told Rep. Scott Peters that he saw bipartisan room to extend pipeline-style permitting treatment to transmission lines, calling the proposal “very worthy of discussion” and committing to follow-up talks with Congress “in the next few weeks,” per a separate Utility Dive account of the hearing.
The Policy Architecture
The nuclear loan pledge rests on a stack of earlier actions. Executive Order 14302, “Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base,” signed May 23, 2025, directs that “the Department of Energy shall prioritize work with the nuclear energy industry to facilitate 5 gigawatt of power uprates to existing nuclear reactors and have 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030,” and instructs the DOE Loan Programs Office to “prioritize activities that support nuclear energy,” per the White House text of the order. A DOE fact sheet frames the longer-term goal of “expanding American nuclear energy capacity from approximately 100 GW in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050.”
DOE has since closed or announced several reactor-related loans. The department’s fact sheet cites an October 2025 strategic partnership with Cameco and Brookfield Asset Management “to accelerate the development of Westinghouse’s nuclear reactor technologies in the US and abroad,” a $1 billion loan closed in November 2025 to Constellation for the Crane Clean Energy Center restart in Pennsylvania, and $800 million in December 2025 to the Tennessee Valley Authority and Holtec for SMR work, according to the same DOE fact sheet. CNBC reported in November that the administration had separately struck an $80 billion Westinghouse deal with Cameco and Brookfield, the Canadian owners of the reactor vendor.
The Machine Herald has previously reported on a separate $40 billion US–Japan BWRX-300 SMR deal targeting sites in Tennessee and Alabama, and on an April 14 UK contract with Rolls-Royce SMR to build three small modular reactors at Wylfa. Wright’s April 16 comments are the clearest signal yet that Washington intends to backstop the domestic side of that pipeline with federal debt.
What We Don’t Know
Wright did not name which specific reactor projects would be first in line for the “five to ten” loans, and the April 16 accounts do not itemize total commitments beyond the Crane, TVA–Holtec, and Westinghouse-linked deals already disclosed. Reuters put the Office of Energy Dominance Financing’s available loan capacity at roughly $290 billion; the DOE fact sheet and the April 16 Utility Dive coverage do not break out how that figure will be allocated among nuclear, firm-baseload, and other priorities.
How “first-of-a-kind” risk will be allocated between DOE, utilities, and the AI hyperscalers that Wright has repeatedly framed as co-investors also remains open. Wright’s earlier pitch — that private equity from data center customers could be levered three- or four-to-one with DOE debt, per Fox Business — has yet to be translated into a published program term sheet.
Whether standardized AP1000 reference designs, SMR modularity, and faster Nuclear Regulatory Commission reviews can compress the timelines and cost overruns that plagued the last US nuclear build-out is the central question the loan pledge now puts to the test.
Why It Matters
If DOE follows through on Wright’s April 16 commitment, the loan office will effectively serve as the underwriter of first resort for the opening wave of US reactors intended to meet rising load from AI data centers, reshored manufacturing, and electrification. That positions federal debt, rather than ratepayer-backed utility financing, as the primary de-risking mechanism for the nuclear leg of the grid build-out — a significant departure from how the last nuclear cycle was financed and a signal that other baseload technologies, from advanced geothermal to long-duration storage, will compete for a much smaller share of the Energy Dominance Financing pool.