“Make America nuclear again” That is the aim of Rick Perry, a former governor of Texas who served as energy secretary in Donald Trump’s first term as president. On July 4th, to back up the sloganeering, he launched Fermi America, a firm hoping to build the world’s largest energy and data-centre complex. Outside Amarillo, a cattle town in the Texan panhandle, bulldozers shift red soil for a facility that will first generate electricity using natural gas and solar, before construction of conventional nuclear reactors and several small modular reactors (SMRs), which will produce 11 gigawatts (GW) of power.
The past 20 years have not been happy ones for nuclear energy. Although such power is a significant part of the energy mix in some countries (see chart 1), no plant has been built on time and on budget in Europe or North America over the period. As the costs of renewables have tumbled,already expensive nuclear projects in America, Britain and Finland have suffered from delays and vast cost overruns. But on August 25th, in the latest sign of nuclear enthusiasm, Fermi and Westinghouse, a nuclear-tech firm, unveiled a partnership that will seek approval to build four of the latter’s large AP1000 reactors in Amarillo. Is a long nuclear winter showing the first shoots of spring?