The tech revolution has arrived, and the nation needs more clean energy.
According to the Edison Electric Institute, the U.S. has broken records for energy grid investment 14 consecutive years, and U.S. investor-owned electric companies are expected to spend more than $1.1 trillion between 2025 and 2029 to bolster the aging grid as it stares down new demands.
But nuclear, which accounts for about 20% of the country’s clean electricity generation, has significantly lagged renewable technologies like wind and solar — subsidies for which are set to expire in 2028 — when it comes to capacity investment.
Advocates on the ground in Wisconsin, including elected officials, are looking to change that.
Paul Wilson, the Grainger Professor of Nuclear Engineering and the Chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics, says nuclear energy is the largest and most reliable source of clean energy we have today.
“It’s basically on all the time, except for a couple of weeks every couple of years when you have to refuel it,” Wilson says. “So that means we can rely on it being there when we need it for critical infrastructure.”
Today’s critical infrastructure is largely powered by data centers, which are popping up all over Wisconsin. The $1 billion Meta project in Beaver Dam and the $15 billion Vantage project in Port Washington have been polarizing for many reasons, including their energy usage — opponents worry that Wisconsin’s weather and manufacturing base have already put the state in a precarious energy deficit, and adding hyperscale data centers could drive energy costs through the roof.
There’s data to back up those concerns. In fact, says Rep. David Steffen (R-Howard), Wisconsin imports six times more energy than it produces.
Steffen, who has represented Wisconsin’s 4th Assembly District since 2015, is among the legislature’s staunchest advocates for the Dairy State to become a pioneer in nuclear energy adoption. He says he first became interested in the issue through a conversation with Kieran Furlong, CEO of Madison‑based Realta Fusion — a startup specializing in compact fusion technology, including small modular reactors (SMRs). Steffen says he was disappointed to learn that Furlong was mostly looking outside of the state to deploy Realta’s technology.
“I want to show companies like Realta and new startups in the space that, listen, Wisconsin shouldn’t just be your feedstock for incredible talent,” says Steffen, who points to the University of Wisconsin’s nuclear engineering program as arguably the strongest in the nation. “I want that human capital and physical capital to be finding a home in Wisconsin.”
Steffen, who has drafted multiple bills on the issue over the last year, says nuclear energy is a rare and exciting bipartisan issue that has been pushed by a coalition of Republicans including he and Sen. Julian Bradley (R-New Berlin) as well as Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. The trio is united around two major goals, Steffen says: to be a hub of innovation and development for the next-generation nuclear industry, and for the state to get to a place where we can “handle our own load.”
Last summer Evers took action on two pieces of legislation. Wisconsin Act 11 creates a board to organize, promote and host a nuclear power summit, which will likely be held in Madison in spring 2028; Wisconsin Act 12 establishes the Public Service Commission to conduct a comprehensive nuclear power siting study.
And there’s more to come, Steffen says.
“We went 15 years in Wisconsin without passing any legislation relating to nuclear energy, except for lifting a moratorium,” he says. “And this year, we will probably have five to seven pieces of legislation that will put us near the top of all the states in terms of energy and commitment.”
Getting to work
Wilson calls 2025 “a watershed year for state support for nuclear energy” and agrees that the momentum for studying nuclear is welcome and overdue: “I frankly felt we were falling behind a lot of other states,” he says. “Wisconsin was kind of sitting on its hands.”
And while nuclear energy has a long history, that history is littered with substantial blips of inactivity that have made it hard to gain a foothold. Rob Smith is president of Pittsburgh-based Sargent Electric, a top 50 electrical contractor that employs hundreds in De Pere. Despite its history that includes building one of the country’s first commercial reactors, Smith says, it would be going too far to describe his company as currently “working on” nuclear. Sargent wrapped up its work on the Beaver Valley reactor more than 40 years ago — right now, the company is just trying to support nuclear’s comeback.
The lack of scale and repetition has left our collective nuclear muscle underworked, Smith explains, and most of the nuclear technology supply chain has gone overseas in the last 30 years. These factors drive up costs and slow down processes.
Look no further, both Smith and Wilson say, than the only large nuclear project completed in the U.S. in the last 30 years: The Vogtle reactors in Waynesboro, Georgia were finished in 2023, seven years behind schedule and $17 billion over budget.
“Some people might consider [Vogtle] sort of the nail in the coffin for nuclear,” Wilson says. “But another view of it is, we learned a lot of lessons.”
Steffen says he’d love to see Wisconsin make the effort to get its energy deficit to net zero through nuclear. Almost all of Wisconsin’s current nuclear energy load is produced at the state’s lone facility, Point Beach in Manitowoc County, which recently had its Units 1 and 2 licenses renewed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission through 2050 and 2053, respectively. According to its parent company, NextEra Energy, the Point Beach facility generates enough electricity to power nearly 1 million homes and businesses — putting Wisconsin right around the national average. Meanwhile, efforts are underway by WEC Energy Group and EnergySolutions to recommission the Kewaunee Power Station in the next decade.
Slow and steady
Wilson says he sees three major issues as barriers to adoption and acceptance of nuclear energy: cost, deployment time and waste management — the last of those being the easiest to tackle.
“It’s very compact; it’s easily contained; and it’s very easy to keep track of and know where it is,” Wilson says. “We have log books where we know where every single piece of used nuclear fuel is, and we have been paying into a fund federally for the long-term disposal of used nuclear fuel.”
While the upfront costs of nuclear are “quite high,” Wilson says, Steffen points out that it actually offers more long-term cost stability: “One of the great things about nuclear is, once you turn that thing on, the cost structure is fixed for the lifespan of the project – 50, 60, 70 years. And unlike other sources, like natural gas or coal, it’s not subject to the volatility of the commodity market.”
Wilson says the question of “who takes the financial risk?” is a key component of the cost equation, and construction outside of the utility sector is a possibility he’s eyeing closely. Dow Chemical is working on a project in Texas that will become the first advanced nuclear power plant dedicated to a U.S. industrial complex, with more projects likely to follow if successful. Tech could follow suit.
“The big tech that wants to build these data centers has a very different risk profile, very different financial interest than the utility sector,” he explains. “Some of these other industries may be financially in a better place to take on the risk of nuclear energy.”
The time it takes to deploy nuclear reactors further complicates the financial equation, especially against the backdrop of hyperscale data centers that need to be done yesterday.
“If you decided you wanted to build a nuclear power plant today, it could be eight or 10 years before you get the first energy out of it,” Wilson says. “But deciding not to begin building now because it won’t be ready for 10 years just deprives you of that clean energy 10 years from now. And if you take that argument to its natural extension, you’ll never build.”
“If we’re going to be doing the investment on the front end, on the research side, creating world‑class nuclear engineers, how about we create an environment in Wisconsin where they want to stay?”
Rep. David Steffen, (R-Howard)
Tipping the scale
Speaking at an Oct. 28 nuclear energy panel event hosted by the Wisconsin Energy Institute, Rob Hughes, head of external affairs for Realta, argued for small modular reactors as a more accessible innovation that can also bolster Wisconsin’s manufacturing economy.
“We’re gonna talk about making machines again,” Hughes said. “This is one of the only places in the country where we can make these kinds of machines. When we shift to a mindset where we’re thinking about energy abundance, just think about the human capital that you’re going to unlock and the things we can do 100 years from now that we can’t even imagine.”
The major motivations for building SMRs are that they have cheaper upfront costs and faster deployment, Wilson says.
With large reactors, Wilson says, “we’ve done it before.” But “maybe the last time we did it, it was kind of expensive and we weren’t very happy about that. But it’s a lot less certain what that will look like for small reactors.”
In the grand scheme of things, SMRs are unproven but worth a long look, Smith says.
“Bigger is more efficient. Bigger is better. And so the logic of the small modular reactor is a little bit counter to that scaling that has led to big coal plants, big nuclear plants, big gas plants being the way to go,” he says. “But one of the advantages of a small reactor is the components are smaller; they can be replicated much more easily.”
That said, “cheap” is a relative term. Smith says Sargent recently estimated an SMR project at $3 billion. “Small” is relative, too; Smith says a 1-megawatt microreactor weighs a whopping 400 tons.
“Although it’s smaller, it’s still a big project,” he says.
Smith says ELECTRI International, the research foundation of the National Electrical Contractors Association of which he is a member, is funding a research project on SMRs that will be available later this year.
“People want to know, ‘What’s the timeline? I need to train my people and prepare them for this new, emerging industry,’” he says. “The point is, we need to be investing in these technologies now so that whenever they can be commercialized, we’re ready.”
‘Not your father’s nuclear plant’
As Steffen prepares for his role on the Wisconsin Nuclear Power Summit board, he recognizes that public education is a big component of his mission going forward.
“I can tell you that the resistance has been less than I expected,” he says. “Folks who … remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are concerned about that, and rightly so. This is a long-term education process, and I’m aware of that. People have to get to a point where they understand that this is not their father’s nuclear plant.”
Wilson says he perceives the general public as more receptive to nuclear energy today than in years past.
“I think there’s been a major shift in our society with its view of nuclear energy,” he says. “And I think what that means is that there are many places around the state that are curious about what it looks like to host a nuclear power plant and what that means for the local benefits to their community, but as well to the broader global environmental benefit.”
Steffen says investing in nuclear is simply the right thing to do.
“There are very few times when a state has an opportunity to significantly change or enhance its economic development profile, and we have that opportunity with next generation nuclear,” he says. “This is one of those times in our history where we could be setting ourselves up to be a hub within the nation or even within the globe.”
