By Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON, May 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Energy is considering a plan to offer utilities billions of dollars in financing to secure components of large nuclear reactors that can take years to obtain, the head of the industry group Nuclear Energy Institute said on Tuesday.
Items such as reactor vessels and steam generators can take years to secure, and the effort would attempt to reduce the time it takes to build large AP1000 nuclear plants.
"It's going to help several
U.S. utility companies that are interested in AP1000 deployment," Maria Korsnick, president and CEO of NEI, said at her organization's conference in Washington about the financing plan.
The DOE, which does not typically discuss pending loan applications, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The department's Office of Energy Dominance Financing has hundreds of billions of dollars in financing aid, including loan guarantees for projects that struggle to get bank loans. During Trump's first term, the only use he made of the division, known then as the Loan Programs Office, was for financing reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia.
President Donald Trump has set a goal of quadrupling U.S. nuclear power capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050, an aggressive target considering the last reactors built in the U.S. were about seven years delayed and billions of dollars over budget.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said the biggest use of the OEDF will be for nuclear power plants.
Grant Isaac, the president and chief operating officer of Cameco , one of the Canadian owners of Westinghouse, which designs and develops AP1000 reactors, told an earnings call last week that five or six utilities are in "very advanced stages" of seeking financing from the DOE's loan office. The utilities are "interested in advancing project delivery by considering things like ordering the long lead items ahead of time," Isaac said.
(Reporting by Timothy GardnerEditing by Rod Nickel)
