Kiewit’s nuclear business has roughly doubled every year since 2022, and the company’s nuclear chief says the thing that’s going to break isn’t labor. It’s the paperwork behind the steel.
Mike Rinehart, president of nuclear solutions at the Omaha-based contractor, told Construction Dive on Aug. 25 that Kiewit now has more than 10 commercial nuclear projects underway plus a dozen more under Department of Energy programs. He expects nuclear to become “a billion-dollar-a-year business or more easily” for the firm. Both the growth rate and the forecast are Kiewit’s own figures. The company is private and doesn’t publish audited segment results.
The NQA-1 bottleneck
Nuclear construction runs on NQA-1, the quality assurance standard governing safety-related components. A pipe spool headed for a safety system isn’t the same commodity as the identical spool going into a paper mill, because the nuclear one carries a documented pedigree back through the mill. Rinehart’s position is blunt: that supply chain “will not be able to support the demand that we see.”
His answer is commercial grade dedication, where the contractor buys commercial-source material and qualifies it up to safety-related status through added engineering, lab work, testing and oversight. That shifts the burden onto tier-one EPCs and their engineering staff rather than onto vendors who’d have to stand up NQA-1 programs from scratch.
Three commodities he names as tight: steel, pipe, and electrical equipment. Transformers and switchgear he calls “very difficult,” which won’t surprise anyone who has priced a substation in the last two years.
What’s driving the volume
Kiewit Nuclear Solutions is lead constructor on the Oklo Aurora Powerhouse at Idaho National Laboratory. Behind that sits federal money: DOE is offering loans of up to $17.5 billion to utilities and energy companies covering 10 reactors at five sites, announced in June. The NRC also issued its first commercial reactor construction permit in nearly a decade earlier this year, to a TerraPower subsidiary.
The repeat-execution argument has a working example north of the border. Bruce Power is midway through rebuilding the reactor core in Unit 4, its third such outage, and the previous unit came back seven months early. Bechtel, meanwhile, took control of the site of Poland’s first nuclear plant earlier this month.
Why nuclear jobs go bad
Rinehart’s diagnosis of cost overruns is the more interesting claim. “I think some people use regulation as the scapegoat of why nuclear jobs go bad,” he said. His view is that the failures are EPC integration failures, with engineering, procurement, construction and stakeholder management not lining up, rather than the NRC moving goalposts.
He pushes back on the labor shortage narrative too. Kiewit runs a task force that meets quarterly with the building trades at national level, which is a different posture from complaining about craft availability after a bid is already priced.
What it means for the order book
The nuclear pipeline is finally real after fifteen years of announcements that went nowhere, and the industry is finding that the constraint isn’t reactors or money. It’s the several thousand suppliers who’d need to rebuild a quality program most of them abandoned in the 1980s.
Commercial grade dedication solves that at the EPC level, but it also concentrates engineering cost and risk with the handful of firms big enough to carry it. Owners pricing new nuclear should read Rinehart’s comments as a warning about who will actually be able to bid this work, and how few of them there are.