Everyone wants a small modular reactor. Almost no one is pouring nuclear concrete yet. Tech companies and utilities have spent the past year signing deals for these compact plants, pitched as the answer to surging electricity demand. The contracts are real. The construction mostly isn’t, at least not the nuclear part, and the gap between the announcements and the first poured reactor is wider than the headlines suggest.
Where actual building is happening
The furthest along is TerraPower’s Natrium plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming. Crews have been building the non-nuclear side of that site, the parts that don’t need a federal reactor license, while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reviews the reactor itself. That sequencing is the tell. You can build the turbine hall and the support buildings now, but you can’t pour the reactor foundation until the NRC signs off, and that review runs on its own clock.
The pipeline behind it
The list of backers is serious. X-energy is working toward eight of its Xe-100 reactors, an 80-megawatt high-temperature gas design, at sites tied to Dow in Seadrift, Texas, and Amazon in Richland, Washington. Kairos Power has a partnership with Google and a demonstration reactor underway in Tennessee. NuScale has a long-running agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and TVA and Holtec landed $800 million in federal cost-shared funding to push their work forward.
That’s real money and real corporate demand, mostly from data center operators who want firm, carbon-free power and can’t get enough of it from the grid. The interest is genuine and it isn’t going away. It’s the same demand pulling capital across the energy sector.
Why the dates keep moving right
X-energy’s own target for delivering its first fleet sits in the early 2030s. That’s the honest number across most of the sector, whatever the press releases imply. Three things slow these projects down: licensing a new reactor design takes years even when the engineering is sound, the supply chain for nuclear-grade components is thin, and first-of-a-kind builds almost always run long and over budget.
For construction firms, the practical read is that SMRs are a late-decade pipeline, not a 2026 one. The site work and balance-of-plant scopes are bookable now. The reactor work isn’t, and pretending otherwise just sets up the next round of missed dates.