United States Nuclear Power Plant Locations

Frequently asked questions about US nuclear power plants

All US nuclear power plants: profiles

What the nuclear map reveals

Where America’s reactors sit tells its own story. The active fleet clusters in the East and Midwest, where Illinois alone hosts more reactor capacity than most countries. A second concentration sits across the Southeast, along with a few very large stations in the West, led by Palo Verde in Arizona, the nation’s single biggest power plant of any kind. Because reactors run at capacity factors above 90 percent, these 54 active plants generate roughly a fifth of all US electricity, and about half of its carbon-free electricity, from just 40 states.

The other half of the map is history and future in one frame. The 40 decommissioned plants span the whole history of the industry, from the demonstration reactors of the 1950s that first put nuclear electricity on the grid to the early retirements of the 2010s, when cheap gas undercut aging reactors. The restart-pending and planned entries mark a sharp reversal now under way: surging demand from data centers, plus a renewed appetite for firm carbon-free power, has made restarting closed reactors and building new ones, including small modular designs, viable for the first time in a generation. Read more in our analysis of America’s nuclear fleet at a crossroads.

Small modular reactors and microreactors under development

Every station mapped above is a conventional large-scale plant, and a typical large unit falls somewhere between 550 MW and 1,500 MW. Almost none of that fleet is new. High capital costs and long licensing and approval timelines have kept large reactors from being built for decades, and that gap is what a new generation of smaller designs is aiming at. (A note on figures: EIA-860M (August 2026) puts the 54 operating plants at 101,906 MW nameplate across 94 reactors. The ~96,900 MW quoted at the top of this page is net summer capacity, the same fleet on a lower, warm-weather basis.)

A small modular reactor (SMR) is defined by size rather than technology: roughly 300 MW per unit or less. Its main components are modular and factory-assembled, then shipped to the construction site for installation, which is intended to shorten build times and improve siting flexibility. A microreactor is a subset of the same idea at about 20 MW or less, small enough to run as part of the grid, inside a microgrid, or entirely independent of it. That flexibility is the commercial draw: SMRs are under consideration for AI and data-centre loads, for industrial sites, and for remote communities where transmission and distribution costs are high or a full-size station simply makes no sense.

Reviewing commercial designs under development as of February 2026, the EIA groups them into four coolant families plus a residual category:

• Light water-cooled: These are typically smaller versions of existing large designs, using the hydrogen in water as a moderator to slow neutrons. Most are pressurized water reactors running conventional low-enriched uranium, aimed at scalable baseload power for an ordinary grid. TVA's Clinch River project, listed above, uses GE Vernova Hitachi's BWRX-300, a light-water boiling water design.
• High-temperature gas (HTGR): These designs use a graphite moderator and helium coolant. They operate hot enough to drive industrial processes that need high heat, such as hydrogen production, and generally use HALEU or TRISO particle fuel. Dow's Long Mott project, listed above, uses X-energy's Xe-100 HTGR.
• Molten salt (MSR): Molten salts serve as coolant, as fuel, or both. Where the two are combined, fissile material such as uranium or plutonium is dissolved directly into a fluoride or chloride salt. High operating temperatures make them candidates for industrial heat as well as electricity.
• Sodium-cooled (SCR): These use liquid sodium in place of water, permitting higher temperatures at lower pressure and potentially burning a greater share of the fuel inside the reactor vessel. TerraPower's Natrium plant at Kemmerer and Oklo's Aurora at Eielson AFB, both listed above, are sodium-cooled.
• Other designs: Several vendors whose concepts do not fit neatly into the categories above are also in pre-application discussions with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Fuel is the quiet constraint on all of it. Most US reactors today run on low-enriched uranium below about 4.95% uranium-235. Many advanced designs instead call for HALEU: high-assay low-enriched uranium is enriched above 4.95% and below 20%. The higher enrichment gives higher burnup, which allows a smaller reactor footprint and less spent fuel, but it also depends on enrichment and fabrication capacity that barely exists domestically. That is why the conversion, enrichment and fuel-fabrication facilities tracked on our Uranium Supply Chain page bear directly on whether any of these designs get built.

Federal and military programs

Government support has expanded sharply and now shapes most of the near-term pipeline. DOE reissued a $900 million funding tender for SMR deployment in March 2025 and launched its Energy Reactor Pilot Program that June, fast-tracking the testing of advanced designs at DOE-authorised sites outside the national laboratories; applicants fund their own reactors, while the program supplies regulatory speed and a path to further private capital. DOE's initial selections were Aalo Atomics, Antares Nuclear, Deep Fission, Last Energy, Oklo, Natura Resources, Radiant Industries, Terrestrial Energy and Valar Atomics. A companion DOE Fuel Line Pilot Program is intended to stand up the domestic fuel supply those reactors will need.

The military is moving on a parallel track. The Defense Innovation Unit's Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations program named eight eligible vendors in April 2025: Antares Nuclear, BWXT Advanced Technologies, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems, Kairos Power, Oklo, Radiant Industries, Westinghouse Government Services and X-energy. In October 2025 the Army launched the Janus Program, building on the transportable Project Pele reactor, and has since named nine installations as possible microreactor sites: Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Drum, Fort Hood, Fort Wainwright, Holston Army Ammunition Plant, Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Redstone Arsenal. The Navy, which has run reactors at sea since the 1950s, is separately soliciting commercial SMRs and microreactors for its shore installations.

Directory of US reactor designs under development

The projects mapped above draw on a much wider field of designs. The EIA reviewed commercial SMR and microreactor designs under development in the United States as of February 2026; the full set is reproduced below, grouped by coolant family. Capacity is per unit, in megawatts electric (MWe). Most designs here have no announced site yet.

Light Water-Cooled (9 designs)

Water as coolant and moderator; mostly pressurized water designs on conventional low-enriched uranium. The most regulator-familiar route.

High-Temperature Gas (10 designs)

Graphite moderator, helium coolant. Runs hot enough for industrial process heat and hydrogen production; usually HALEU or TRISO fuel.

Molten Salt (4 designs)

Molten salts as coolant, fuel, or both. High temperature, low pressure; suited to heat as well as power.

Sodium-Cooled (4 designs)

Liquid sodium instead of water: higher temperature at lower pressure, and more of the fuel burned inside the vessel.

Other Designs (3 designs)

Concepts that do not fit the categories above, in pre-application discussion with the NRC.

Fuel key: LEU low-enriched uranium (under 4.95% U-235, standard in today’s US reactors); HALEU high-assay low-enriched uranium (above 4.95%, below 20%); TRISO tristructural-isotropic particle fuel fabricated from HALEU; molten fissile salt uranium or plutonium dissolved directly into the salt. Source: U.S. EIA, Small modular reactors and microreactors under development in the United States (April 27, 2026), from NRC, DOE and company data.

What appears on the map, and what does not

The map carries 17 advanced reactor projects, of which 6 are already under construction and 11 are planned, drawn from the EIA inventory. Every one of them clears two bars: it will generate electricity, and its reactor design has been chosen. Projects that fail either test are described below but are deliberately kept off the map, because a pin implies a decision that has not actually been made.

What is mapped splits into three groups. Commercial power stations, namely TerraPower’s Natrium at Kemmerer, Holtec’s two-unit Pioneer plant at Palisades, TVA’s Clinch River BWRX-300, Dow and X-energy’s Long Mott, Energy Northwest’s twelve-unit Cascade facility at Richland, and Oklo’s Aurora-INL, are the entries most comparable to the operating fleet. Power-producing demonstration units such as Kairos’s Hermes 2, Aalo-X, Westinghouse’s eVinci, Radiant’s Kaleidos and Valar’s Ward 250 are mostly clustered at Idaho National Laboratory and are small, but they will put power on a grid or a load. Military projects, namely Project Pele at INL and the Air Force microreactors at Eielson AFB and Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, each have a named design and a rated output.

Excluded: reactors that will not generate electricity

Several prominent projects are research or demonstration reactors that produce heat, neutrons and data but no power, and so are not power plants in any sense this page tracks. Kairos’s original Hermes at Oak Ridge is licensed as a non-power demonstration; its successor Hermes 2, which will generate, is mapped. The Molten Salt Research Reactor at Abilene Christian University holds the first NRC construction permit for a liquid-fuelled reactor, but the NRC is explicit that it will not generate electricity; it runs at low power to produce operational data for Natura’s later 100-MWe commercial system. TerraPower and Southern Company’s Molten Chloride Fast Reactor Experiment at Idaho National Laboratory carries no electrical rating at all, and the University of Illinois’ proposed KRONOS unit is licensed as a non-power research reactor.

Excluded: sites where the reactor has not been chosen

An early site permit reserves a location; it does not commit anyone to a plant. Duke Energy’s Belews Creek site in North Carolina entered NRC review in February 2026 and Appalachian Power’s Joshua Falls property in Virginia is in pre-application work, but neither has selected a reactor technology and Joshua Falls has no rated output. The U.S. Army’s Janus Program named nine installations, namely Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Drum, Fort Hood, Fort Wainwright, Holston Army Ammunition Plant, Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Redstone Arsenal, as candidate microreactor sites, with no design or capacity chosen at any of them. Five further EIA entries have no announced site: Terrestrial Energy’s Project TETRA and the Antares Mark-0 demonstration, Deep Fission’s Kansas project, the ENTRA1–TVA NuScale facility, and Radiant’s second Air Force unit. All of these move onto the map once a design and a location are settled.

Together the 17 mapped projects account for roughly 2.7 GW of announced capacity, against about 97 GW operating today, a reminder that this remains a pipeline rather than a power system. Capacity is shown as a range where the design spans one, as with Westinghouse’s eVinci at 0.2–5 MWe.