Nuclear restart announcements that read as press-release theater a year ago are now backed by signed power purchase agreements.
Two previously shuttered reactors have moved into binding, priced offtake agreements with datacenter operators in the past two quarters.
The financing structure matters as much as the megawatts: long-dated, investment-grade offtake is what actually gets a restart underwritten.
Restart timelines have slipped before, and regulatory recommissioning has no guaranteed schedule — a primer from the Department of Energy lays out the multi-year licensing steps a restart still has to clear, which executives citing a restart date as a hedge should treat as a probabilistic bet, not a committed delivery.
— Elena Cho