About This Project & Our Methodology

US Nuclear Power Plants began as an interactive map of America’s commercial reactors and has grown into a free, independent reference that maps and tabulates every utility-scale power plant in the United States across eleven energy categories: nuclear, the uranium fuel-cycle, geothermal, coal, biomass, petroleum, wind, hydroelectric, natural gas, solar and battery storage. Each page pairs an interactive national map with a sortable, searchable table and a profile card for every facility, so anyone, students, journalists, researchers, industry professionals or curious residents, can see what generates their electricity and where it sits. Our goal is simple: take the authoritative but hard-to-read government datasets that describe the US power system and turn them into something everyday people can actually explore, without an Excel spreadsheet certification or a GIS degree. Everything on the site is built from primary public sources, processed transparently, and credited on every page.

This is an independent project maintained by a small team, and we would like to give a big shout out to our longtime friend, Marcus, who helped us through the early stages of development. Also, we would like to give a special thanks to all our colleagues, friends, and family who gave us the feedback we needed to mold this website into a useful and dependable tool.

Where the data comes from

The backbone of our tools is the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Form EIA-860, the annual census of electric generators of 1 megawatt and larger operated by utilities and independent power producers. We use the 2025 early-release files, specifically Schedule 2 (Plant), which provides each plant’s name, location, owner and coordinates, and Schedule 3 (Generator), which lists every generating unit’s technology, prime mover, primary energy source, nameplate capacity, operating year, and status. Every plant’s status and capacity is then reconciled against EIA’s Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory (Form EIA-860M), currently the June 2026 release, which carries newly completed, retired and planned units between annual publications. The battery storage page is built directly from EIA-860M. For the nuclear and uranium pages we supplement EIA with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (reactor lists and licensing actions), the U.S. Department of Energy (advanced-reactor and SMR announcements), the EIA Uranium Marketing Annual, and reactor-level operating data. Construction-cost figures are converted to constant 2025 dollars using Consumer Price Index multipliers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Every page lists its exact sources in the footer.

How we build each page

The same repeatable method produces every energy generation page, which is why the numbers are consistent across the site:

• Selecting plants. For each fuel we filter the Generator schedule to units whose primary energy source matches that fuel. For example, energy source code SUN for solar, WND for wind, NG for natural gas, or the petroleum codes (DFO, RFO, KER, JF, WO, PC, PG) for petroleum. Filtering on the primary fuel means a coal plant that co-fires gas is not double-counted as a gas plant.
• Aggregating to the plant. Individual generating units are grouped by EIA plant code so that each row is a whole plant or farm (not an individual turbine, panel array or engine.)
• Classifying the type. Each plant’s technology is set by the dominant prime mover by capacity (for instance combined-cycle, combustion turbine, steam turbine or reciprocating engine for thermal plants; onshore versus offshore for wind; photovoltaic versus concentrating for solar). Battery storage is classified instead by what it sits next to: standalone, solar-paired, wind-paired, or sited at an existing power plant, determined from the other generators sharing its EIA plant code.
• Capacity. A plant’s capacity is the sum of the nameplate ratings of its qualifying generators, in megawatts. Battery facilities additionally carry energy capacity in megawatt-hours (MWh) where EIA reports it, and the ratio of the two gives the system’s duration at full output.
• Status. We resolve a single status per plant by priority. Any operating unit makes the plant Active; otherwise standby/out-of-service units make it Standby; a plant only in the proposed schedule is In development/Planned; and a plant only in the retired-and-cancelled schedule is Decommissioned.
• Location. Coordinates are the EIA plant coordinates; plants without valid coordinates are omitted from the map.

To keep the two petroleum and natural-gas pages from overlapping, any plant with a natural-gas-primary generator is treated as a natural gas plant and excluded from the petroleum page entirely, including dual-fuel sites.

Glossary of key terms

• Nameplate capacity (MW). The maximum output a generator is designed to produce, in megawatts. One thousand megawatts equals one gigawatt (GW). Capacity is potential output, not the electricity actually generated over a year.
• Prime mover. The machine that converts energy into electricity, such as a steam turbine, combustion turbine, reciprocating engine, photovoltaic array or wind turbine. We use it to classify each plant’s technology.
• Primary energy source. The main fuel or resource a generator consumes. It is how we decide which page a plant belongs on.
• Combined cycle. A highly efficient design that pairs a combustion turbine with a steam turbine that recovers the turbine’s exhaust heat.
• Active / Standby / In development / Decommissioned. Our four plain-language status buckets, mapped from the detailed EIA status codes as described above.
• Utility-scale. Plants of 1 MW and larger that report to EIA. Rooftop and other small “behind-the-meter” systems are estimated separately by EIA and are not power plants in this dataset (although a future update may include a heatmap of small residential systems).

Updates, accuracy and independence

The website is refreshed when EIA publishes new annual data, reconciled against the monthly EIA-860M inventory in between, and updated when major licensing or retirement news breaks. EIA notes that early-release files are not fully edited and may withhold a small number of plants pending validation, so figures should be read as the best current public snapshot rather than a real-time register. We correct errors promptly, but if you spot one, please reach out using our contact page. This is an independent project, built and maintained by energy-data enthusiasts; it is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any government agency, utility or trade group, and it earns no commission from any company shown.