All of the programs that the current administration claims to love are being knee-capped by contradictory and confused trade policy.
Nuclear no exception.
The always well informed Joe Romm, now at the University of Pennsylvania, gave an excellent zoom session a few weeks ago, the full version I have posted at bottom. Covered a lot of ground, but for this post I’ll focus on Small Nuclear v Tariffs, excerpted above.
Joe Rome for Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media:
Any success the U.S. might have with SMRs depends on foreign sales, foreign uranium, and foreign components. So, Trump’s ever-shifting tariffs—as well as his alienation of major U.S. trading partners like Canada and Europe—make SMRs an even riskier bet than they already are. Also, if the economy shrinks due to Trump’s policies, so does demand for new electric power plants, particularly the most expensive and risky experimental plants, like SMRs. And the twin threats of inflation and higher interest rates both increase the risk of even bigger construction cost overruns.
The nuclear supply chain is heavily dependent on foreign countries like China. The DOE’s September 2024 “Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear” report, for instance, warns that we do not have “significant domestic suppliers” for key materials used to build nuclear reactors, and “Of particular concern are Hafnium, Niobium, Yttrium, Chromium, and Nickel.” Significantly, export controls on yttrium were one of the retaliatory measures that China put in place in early April in response to Trump’s tariffs.
Canada and Europe have not only been top tariff targets—but also they are currently some of the first customers for U.S. SMRs, as noted in the March analysis, “Trump’s Tariffs on Canada Could Kill the U.S. Nuclear Energy Revival.” The authors warn, “U.S.-based companies marketing small modular reactors, from NuScale to GE-Hitachi, have received their first crucial orders from European and Canadian customers. Without these demonstration projects, their reactor designs will remain confined to paper.”
The analysis also notes that “the leading U.S.-based vendor of reactor technology, Westinghouse Electric Company, is now Canadian-owned.” Indeed, as Westinghouse itself explained in 2025, it is “owned by Canadian energy powerhouses Brookfield and Cameco” and is “the only nuclear vendor with an advanced, proven and fully operational advanced Generation III+ reactor technology”—the AP1000, used for the recent Vogtle reactors—that can be built “and generate electricity by as early as 2035.”
The DOE’s recent nuclear Liftoff report extensively discusses the U.S. nuclear industry’s dependence on foreign suppliers for both its “nuclear fuel supply chain” and “component supply chain.” The report notes, “As of 2024, there is limited domestic capacity for making nuclear-grade forgings.”
We rely on foreign suppliers for over 90% of our reactors’ uranium fuels. Canada is the single biggest supplier, providing over a quarter of our imports. “The nuclear industry depends on a global supply chain that can take uranium concentrate from Kazakhstani mines, for instance, convert it to uranium hexafluoride in Canada and enrich the product in France, before finally delivering it to a U.S. fuel fabricator,” the March paper notes. Trump’s tariffs would “make that exceedingly complicated, costly and precarious, to the great detriment of the U.S. nuclear sector.”
Even without the tariffs, Canadians’ anger over Trump’s trade policies and repeated claims that he wants the country to become the 51st state has seriously undermined the prospects for collaboration between the two countries on nuclear energy.
The March analysis notes that “North America’s largest manufacturing facility for commercial reactor equipment, for instance, is the BWXT factory in Ontario, where the pressure vessel for GE- Hitachi’s BWRX-300 reactor is supposed to be fabricated—that is, if the BWRX project is not canceled” as a result of turmoil between the countries.
In short, the U.S. needs to have a positive working relationship with Canada, China, and other countries to consider significantly expanding nuclear power or mass-producing SMRs—assuming we ever figure out if any of the dozens of experimental designs being pursued are practical and affordable.
But it’s not just the GE-Hitachi reactor that is under threat. The nuclear industry has long touted that its fuel is secure because it comes from friendly countries, notably Canada, which is right next door. Did the industry contemplate that we could turn a friendly country into an unfriendly country?
Tariffs on uranium, which have been threatened as part of a general tariff, could in the long term stimulate production in this country, but their effect for years to come would be to raise prices for nuclear energy and make it less competitive.
Canada does not believe that its uranium mining is threatened, because demand for uranium is price-inelastic. “They don’t really have a lot of other options to go get that uranium from,” Devan Mescall, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan’s Edwards School of Business, told the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. “You’re not going to start and stop nuclear reactors,” he said
Tariffs could stifle the bi-national effort to build the 300-megawatt GE-Hitachi SMR, pushing Canadian utilities into using Canadian, rather than U.S. technology. Tariffs could also set back the micro-reactors that Canada wants for isolated communities and mining operations, and U.S. customers want for reliable, on-site power for computer centers and other installations that require high reliability In the past, the United States was so central to the world reactor market that a supplier could easily launch a model here and think later about selling it abroad. But now we have a “nuclear renaissance” in which there are no orders beyond two demonstration projects. The industry needs to get the ball rolling, and losing the Canadian market will not help.
United States President Donald Trump is only biting the hand that feeds his country’s nuclear power system if he follows through on his threat to impose a 10 per cent tariff on uranium and other energy-related imports.
Devan Mescall, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan’s Edwards School of Business, said the uranium industry is better positioned to deal with tariffs in the short term than other industries, in part because there are no available alternatives.
“The demand is not really going to change with the price because you’re not going to start and stop nuclear reactors,” Mescall said.
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Complete Romm présentation here: