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Advanced Power Solutions

Transforming technical readiness into financial certainty.

America’s reactors are proven, licensed, and operating. What has stalled new nuclear is not the technology — it is financeability. Andrews Nuclear exists to close that gap.

How we do it Talk to us
The United States at night, seen from orbit
The United States at night. Every light is demand.
Chief Aim: The World’s Leader in Advanced Power.
The Constraint

Lenders want to be first to go second.

Why proven reactors still don’t get built

The problem was never the technology.

The Westinghouse AP1000 is certified, licensed, and generating power in the United States, today. The engineering has been proven at commercial scale. Even so, almost no new nuclear plants are being built in this country, and the reason is financial rather than technical.

A nuclear project consumes billions of dollars years before it produces anything a lender can underwrite. Someone must carry that cost, and that risk, ahead of everyone else, and it is a position very few are willing to take. The constraint on American nuclear power is therefore not the science, and it is not the licensing. It is financeability.

Andrews Nuclear exists to solve that problem. We take on the development risk that sits between a promising site and a financeable project, we assemble the capital, and we carry the asset to the point where a proven utility can own and operate it with confidence. Every decision we make answers a single test: does this make the project more bankable?

Our Model

We develop, finance, and de-risk. A proven utility owns and operates.

We work on a build-own-transfer model: we take the risk that has stopped everyone else, then hand over an asset built to be run by people who have run one before.

01 — Develop

Site, license, community

We sequence site control, grid interconnection, water, permitting, community alignment, and federal licensing from the first day rather than retrofitting them later. Our screening framework weighs land, transmission, water rights, seismicity, environmental and cultural resources, constructability, workforce, and community readiness. The earliest decisions are the ones that set the schedule and the cost.

02 — Finance

The full capital stack

We originate and structure the whole stack: federal loan program debt, sponsor equity, and long-term contracts to sell the power to creditworthy customers. Most developers cannot do this work, which is why most projects never reach a final investment decision.

03 — De-risk

Lessons enforced, not noted

Every failure mode from the last U.S. build cycle is written into our model as a gate, a contract term, or a funded contingency. The record of what went wrong is public and detailed. We treat it as a specification.

04 — Transfer

Owned by an operator

A proven nuclear utility takes over ownership and operations. Accountability for the following decades then rests with an organization that has actually built and run nuclear plants, which is precisely where it belongs.

Platform

Bankability is the filter. The reactor is interchangeable.

We do not start with a favorite technology and look for somewhere to put it. We start with what can actually be financed and built.

Today that means the Westinghouse AP1000. It is Generation III+, simplified and safety-focused, with a growing global operating record and standard low-enriched fuel from a mature supply chain — no dependence on fuel that does not yet exist at scale. It is also the only fully licensed, construction-ready large reactor in the United States, which is another way of saying the only one a lender can underwrite today.

We plan for more than one unit. Sites are chosen and configured to carry more than one reactor unit, and our development work reserves that capacity rather than spending it on a single machine. Nuclear economics reward the second unit and the third: the licensing basis, the interconnection, the crews and the supply chain are already paid for.

The same discipline applies to the reactor. We will add small modular reactors — or any other design — the moment one becomes bankable, by which we mean it has real operating data behind it, a guarantee of its performance, and a financing package that closes on time and on budget. We will add it when it becomes bankable, not when it becomes fashionable.

A reactor that cannot be financed is not a power plant. It is a drawing.

Brownfield is not a compromise. It is an advantage.

The fastest way to build a new nuclear plant in America is to build it on a brownfield site, meaning land that has already carried a power station. An existing or former nuclear site brings a switchyard and transmission already sized for the load, ground already characterized and often already licensed, a workforce that has built and run nuclear before, and a community that wants the jobs back.

A project starting on untouched land, which the industry calls a greenfield site, has to buy every one of those from nothing, and it pays in years rather than dollars. Industry experience puts the schedule advantage at eighteen to thirty-six months — the difference between a financeable plan and an aspiration.

Only a finite number of American sites have hosted nuclear, hold interconnection, and can take another unit. That list is short, it is knowable, and working it is the first thing we do.

Water is the constraint nobody prices.

A two-unit large light water station rejects heat through wet cooling towers that consume roughly 55 million gallons a day — about 38,000 gallons every minute, for sixty years. Across the American West and a widening band of the country, that number alone decides whether a site works. No nuclear plant in the United States runs on dry or hybrid cooling today. Fully dry cooling was evaluated for large plants and found too costly in capital and in hot-day output; fully wet cooling rules out the sites that need power most. The middle ground is where the work is.

We are working to make hybrid cooling practical for large reactors. To put that work on public footing, we originated a reactor-agnostic feasibility study performed at Idaho National Laboratory — air-cooled condensers, hybrid wet and dry systems, wet surface air coolers, adiabatic pre-cooling and passive thermosyphon coolers, benchmarked across plants from roughly 300 to 1,200 megawatts of electrical output — and helped fund it through a consortium convened by the INL Foundation.

The findings will be published openly rather than held proprietary. Water is the industry’s problem, not ours alone, and it is worth more solved in public than owned in private.

Clean Energy

The case for nuclear is not a slogan. It is arithmetic.

Every energy company claims its power is clean. Fewer are willing to put the comparison on the page. Nuclear earns its place on every measure at once — it runs when you need it, it emits almost nothing, it asks very little of the land, and it is among the safest ways yet found to make electricity. Here is the arithmetic, from sources anyone can check.

Nuclear runs when you need it
Capacity factor — the share of the year a plant actually produces at full output. This is the number that separates firm power from power you hope arrives.
Nuclear
93%
Natural gas
60%
Wind
34%
Solar PV
23%
U.S. Energy Information Administration, average annual capacity factors by generating technology. Figures rounded.
Nuclear emits almost nothing
Lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions in grams of CO₂-equivalent per kilowatt-hour — counting construction, fuel, operation, and decommissioning, not just the smokestack.
Coal
820
Natural gas
490
Solar PV
48
Nuclear
12
Wind
11
IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group III, Annex III — median lifecycle emissions by technology, gCO₂e/kWh.
Nuclear asks very little of the land
Approximate acres required per megawatt of capacity. Land is finite, farmland is contested, and a plant that produces more power per acre leaves more of a county the way its people want it.
Wind
70.6
Solar PV
43.5
Nuclear
12.7
Strata, The Footprint of Energy: Land Use of U.S. Electricity Production (2017). Acres per MW of installed capacity; the practical gap widens further once capacity factor is applied.
Rank them on harm, and the order barely changes.
Four measures of impact. Move the slider. Nuclear sits at or near the bottom of every one — and on safety it is statistically tied with wind and solar, not ahead of them. We would rather show you that than round it in our favor.

Clean air, firm power, and a small footprint are usually presented as a choice. In nuclear they are the same decision.

Cost & Schedule

The first question anyone asks is about Vogtle. Here is our answer.

Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia were the last large reactors completed in the United States, and they finished years late and billions of dollars over budget. Serious people therefore do not ask whether nuclear is a good market. They ask why the next project will not repeat that result. It is the right question, and it has an answer: the failures and the successes of the past decade used the same reactor design. The difference between them was execution, and execution can be specified in advance.

I

Finish the engineering before first concrete.

Completing the design against measurable criteria is a condition of our contract with the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firm that builds the plant. This is not a redesign of a certified reactor. It is a refusal to begin building one that is not finished on paper.

II

Underwrite the builder, not just the contract.

A fixed price is only as good as the organization holding it. We weigh firm pricing against demonstrated capacity to deliver it, with one entity accountable for integration and owner-side protection sized so no single failure can strand the project.

III

Make workforce continuity a selection criterion.

Keeping one construction organization across every unit is what separated the programs that finished from those that stopped. We make crew retention an explicit standard when we choose an EPC contractor, rather than something we simply hope for.

IV

Carry a visible, pre-funded contingency.

We present the overrun cushion openly to the capital markets rather than burying it in line items. Sophisticated investors do not punish a contingency they can see. They punish the one they find later.

Drawn from the public record of the AP1000 program: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, MIT-ANP-TR-201; Idaho National Laboratory, Potential Cost Reduction in New Nuclear Deployments Based on Recent AP1000 Experience, INL/RPT-25-84701 (June 2025); and U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 10 CFR Part 52 Lessons Learned, ML23325A202 (January 2024).

These commitments are set out in full in our white paper, Lessons Learned in New Nuclear Development. Request a copy.

The Window

Demand, policy, and a proven platform have arrived together.

American electricity demand is growing again for the first time in a generation — artificial intelligence and hyperscale data centers, industrial onshoring, electrification — faster than firm capacity is being added. These loads cannot be interrupted, cannot wait on the weather, and increasingly will not accept carbon. Very few technologies answer all three at scale. Only one is already licensed and operating.

Federal support has moved in parallel: a loan program with historic lending authority, licensing reform that is shortening the regulatory path, and an explicit national objective of multiplying nuclear capacity by mid-century. Allied capital is committing to build American reactors alongside American partners.

These conditions have not aligned since the 1970s. Andrews Nuclear was built to move inside that window.

Federal Programs

The public support behind new nuclear is real, and it is dated.

Every program below carries a deadline. We build the schedule backwards from them, because a credit you miss by a quarter is a credit you never had.

01 — Energy Dominance Financing

Title 17, Section 1706 — DOE Office of Energy Dominance Financing

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act rewrote Section 1706 and extended its loan authority through FY2028. The revised Program Guidance issued 13 May 2026 names a two-unit Generation III+ light water build as an example of a qualifying project — which is, precisely, an AP1000 pair.

Constraint. Authority runs to FY2028. The older Section 1703 authority, provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, expires 30 September 2026.

02 — The technology-neutral credits

Sections 45Y and 48E — production and investment

New nuclear keeps a carve-out from the wider phase-down. Projects that begin construction through 2033 earn the credits at full value; the value steps down to 75% for construction beginning in 2034 and 50% in 2035, and ends after 2035. Both credits stay transferable under Section 6418 and available for direct payment under Section 6417, so the value can be turned into cash whether or not the owner owes enough tax to use the credit directly. A further 10% bonus is available on the production credit to an advanced nuclear facility in a nuclear energy community — one more reason we work brownfield sites first.

Constraint. Full value requires construction to begin by the end of 2033, stepping down through 2035. The earlier deadlines carried in most summaries of this law apply to wind and solar, not to nuclear.

03 — Licensing reform, delivered

The ADVANCE Act of 2024 and 10 CFR Part 53

This is the part of the policy agenda that has already been delivered. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) cut the hourly rate it charges advanced reactor applicants from $318 to $148, a reduction of more than half, in place until 2030. Thirty-one of the Act’s thirty-six implementation milestones were complete by April 2026. The final Part 53 rule arrived in March 2026 — the first new reactor licensing framework since 1989, built to deliver design approvals in eighteen months or less.

Constraint. Reduced fee rate sunsets in 2030.

04 — What the programs will not do

Federal support is conditional, and the conditions bind

The revised Title 17 guidance disallows participation where a project benefits from other federal support — including a federal entity acting as customer or offtaker. Credits are expressly carved out of that test, but the loan is not. Separately, for projects beginning construction from 2026 onward, the credits impose a material assistance cost ratio that limits how much of a project may be sourced from a prohibited foreign entity — 40% for construction beginning in 2026, tightening in later years.

Constraint. We structure to these constraints rather than around them, and we say so early.

Sources: DOE Office of Energy Dominance Financing, Title 17 Program Guidance (13 May 2026); One Big Beautiful Bill Act; Internal Revenue Code §§45Y, 48E, 6417, 6418; ADVANCE Act of 2024; U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission FY2025 fee rule and final Part 53 rule (March 2026).

Partners

We do not do this alone, and we do not pretend to.

Nuclear rewards people who know what they do not know. We lead development and capital formation, and partner with best-in-class organizations for reactor technology, engineering and licensing, construction, legal, and long-term operations.

Enercon
Engineering firm of record — nuclear engineering, licensing support, financial analytics
White & Case
Legal counsel — Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission experience
Idaho National Laboratory
Air-cooled and hybrid heat-rejection feasibility research — originated by Andrews Nuclear, funded through a consortium convened by the INL Foundation, findings published openly
Community

A power plant is a fifty-year neighbor.

A project of this size does not visit a town. It moves in. It brings skilled trades, a tax base that funds schools and roads for decades, and a reason for young people to build a life where they grew up instead of leaving. It also asks something real of the place that hosts it.

We treat that exchange as the center of the work, not a formality at the end of it. We show up early, answer questions plainly — including the uncomfortable ones — and stay long after the ribbon is cut, because the plant will still be there.

Community readiness is a screening criterion in our site framework, weighted alongside transmission and water. A project the community does not want is not a bankable project. Doing right and doing well are the same thing here.

A Note from Our Founder

The United States was not on the slide.

In October of 2025, I sat at a table in Austin, Texas at the Texas Nuclear Summit and watched a slide go up on new nuclear development around the world. China was on it. Russia was on it. Poland and Canada were on it. The United States was not.

I asked the people at my table what I was looking at. I was new to the industry, and I was there to learn. What they told me was that America had not stopped building nuclear plants because the technology failed. We stopped because our capital markets and our regulatory process made it nearly impossible to start, and because we let the supply chain that once led the world move overseas.

I did not like that answer. I still do not. We invented this industry. We should be leading it, and we cannot afford to wait and hope while someone else defines the century.

Later that same day, Governor Greg Abbott spoke. I had met the Governor a few times through our advanced fuels project in East Texas, and I have a great deal of respect for him, so I sat in the front row and paid close attention. His message was direct. We need more nuclear power, we need it now, and we cannot afford to lose the AI race to China. And then he did something I did not expect. He gave the room a call for action — if you want to build new nuclear, come do it here, and we will move at the speed of business.

I felt compelled. Not interested. Compelled. I left that conference, and within a matter of days I founded Andrews Nuclear.

Nick Andrews in the audience at a nuclear industry conference
Nuclear Opportunities Workshop, 2026.

I believe nuclear power is the future, and I believe we need it for the long term. Not for one budget cycle or one boom in demand, but for the next sixty years and beyond. The plants we build now will still be running when my grandchildren are raising families. Very few things a person can work on carry that kind of time horizon, and I do not take it lightly.

What gives me confidence that this moment will last is that the country is genuinely united on it. The ADVANCE Act passed the House 393 to 13 and the Senate 88 to 2, was written by Republicans and Democrats together, and was signed by President Biden in 2024. The Trump administration has since made nuclear energy a national priority — setting a goal of four hundred gigawatts by 2050, directing the Department of Energy to prioritize it, and putting real federal capital behind new large reactors. Two administrations of different parties, pulling in the same direction. In a business where the asset outlives the politics, that durability is not a talking point. It is the foundation you underwrite on.

I want to be straightforward about what I am and what I am not. I am not a nuclear engineer or a physicist. I am a developer. What I know how to do is assemble the pieces that make a very hard project real — the site, the technology, the offtake, the partners, and the capital — and to keep going when it gets difficult, because it always gets difficult. Everything else, I have hired for. We have built a bench of people who have actually delivered these plants, and my job is to listen to them carefully, ask better questions than I asked in Austin, and make the decisions only I can make.

That is the whole idea behind Andrews Nuclear. The reactors are proven. The demand is here. The support is bipartisan and it is real. What has been missing is someone willing to take the earliest risk and do the unglamorous work of making a nuclear project financeable, so that a proven utility can own it and run it for the next sixty years.

A young boy holding the Earth in his open hand

There is a larger idea here, and it is why Andrews Nuclear sits inside Andrews Advanced. Clean power and clean fuel are the same problem from two directions. A plant like the ones we intend to build does not only put electricity on a wire — it makes it possible to produce fuel without the carbon, here, with American labor and an American supply chain. Firm, carbon-free power is the input. Clean fuel is what you make with it.

I have stopped calling this a sixty-year asset. It is the thing our children, our grandchildren, and generations we will never meet are depending on us to get right. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it does not permit shortcuts.

We intend to be that company. It has been the joy of my life to build it, and we are just getting started.

Nick AndrewsChairman & Chief Executive Officer
Leadership

Built by people who have carried a first-of-a-kind program into the federal loan process.

Andrews Nuclear is led by its founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Nicholas B. Andrews, CCIM, a developer-underwriter who has spent his career assembling the site, technology, offtake, and capital behind infrastructure-scale energy projects. As Chief Executive Officer of USA BioEnergy, he carried a first-of-a-kind advanced-fuels program into the U.S. Department of Energy loan program on the strength of landmark commercial agreements. He brings that same financeability-first discipline to Andrews Nuclear.

Execution is the decisive variable in nuclear, and we have built for it. Our advisory bench includes a former president of one of the largest U.S. nuclear utilities, with senior leadership from the Vogtle 3 & 4 and Barakah programs — people who have delivered these builds rather than studied them.

Andrews Nuclear and USA BioEnergy sit under the Andrews Advanced umbrella — cleaner fuels and cleaner power, developed on the same conviction: the hard part is not the science, it is getting it financed and built.

Contact

Talk to us directly.

We hear from utilities, landowners, economic development organizations, suppliers, capital partners, and communities. We read everything that comes in, and it reaches Nick.

Nick Andrews
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
nickandrews@andrewsnuclear.com
Andrews Nuclear LLC
Scottsdale, Arizona
Advanced Power Solutions
Maximizing the commercial viability of established reactor designs.
Utilities and Cooperatives

Firm power on your system, without your balance sheet.

You need capacity that runs whether or not the wind blows. What you do not need is to carry a first-of-a-kind development budget, a construction schedule, and a licensing risk on the way to getting it.

Andrews Nuclear carries all three. We secure the site, run the licensing path, assemble the capital and hold the construction risk. You contract for the power. And when the plant is built and running, ownership and operation can come to you — on terms you set, at a time you choose, or not at all.

Why we end with you owning it

Most developers offer to own the plant so that you do not have to. We think that is the wrong answer for a utility or a cooperative. You already know how to run generation. What the market has not offered you is a way to add nuclear without putting development risk in front of the people you answer to. That is the gap we fill, and it is why our structure ends where a utility would want it to end rather than where a developer would.

What we bring

  • Development and construction capital, and the risk that goes with it.
  • A licensing path run by people who have carried a first-of-a-kind project into the federal loan program.
  • A site-selection framework of nearly two hundred criteria, and completed fatal-flaw work.
  • Offtake origination beyond your own load, so the first-of-a-kind cost does not land on your members.

What we need from you

  • A site, or an interconnection position worth building against.
  • A long-term power purchase agreement — the thing lenders actually underwrite.
  • An early view of your governance path: board, members, and any lender consents.

Start with a conversation between your finance and nuclear leadership and ours. Ninety minutes, no obligation, and you will know quickly whether the structure works on your system.

Contact us →

Offtakers

Firm, carbon-free power, contracted on terms you can plan around.

Data centers, industrial loads and anyone else who needs power that is there at three in the morning in February. We develop the plant; you contract for the output.

What we will tell you plainly

The timeline is the 2030s.

Anyone promising you nuclear power sooner is either building something very small or has not been through licensing. Site characterization, a construction permit and an operating license are measured in years, and we would rather you plan against a real date than a hopeful one.

Somebody has to carry the first-of-a-kind premium.

A first unit costs more than the fifth. That cost is real, and it does not disappear because a contract is silent about it. Our structure puts it with the party best able to price it — usually the offtaker who most needs the power, not the utility’s ratepayers. We will show you where it sits in any deal we propose.

Firm means firm.

A capacity factor above ninety percent, on a site with existing interconnection, under a long-term contract. That is a different product from a renewable power purchase agreement with a shape.

What a conversation needs

  • Volume and the delivery window you are planning against.
  • Term — twenty years is the base that finances; shorter terms change the structure and the price.
  • The credit that stands behind the contract, because that is what a lender underwrites.
  • Whether you want an option on additional units as the site scales.

Tell us the load, the window and the term. We will tell you honestly whether we can serve it, and what it would take.

Contact us →

Communities

A power plant is a fifty-year neighbor.

We would rather answer the hard questions before anyone breaks ground than after. Here are the ones we are asked most, answered the way we would want them answered if it were our county.

A project of this size does not visit a town. It moves in. It brings skilled trades, a tax base that funds schools and roads for decades, and a reason for young people to build a life where they grew up instead of leaving. It also asks something real of the place that hosts it. We treat that exchange as the center of the work, not a formality at the end of it.

Community readiness is a screening criterion in our site framework, weighted alongside transmission and water. A project the community does not want is not a bankable project.

Questions we are asked

The honest answers.

Is it safe?

Nuclear power has among the lowest death rates per unit of energy of any source — roughly 0.03 deaths per terawatt-hour, against about 0.02 for solar and 0.04 for wind. Those three sit in one statistically indistinguishable tier, and ranking within that tier is not meaningful. We would rather show you that than round it in our favor. Coal is roughly a thousand times higher.

What about the waste?

A plant of this size produces a few tonnes of used fuel a year. It is solid, it is stored in sealed steel and concrete casks on site, and those casks have an operating record measured in decades. Every American plant already does this. It is not a solved political problem, and we will not pretend otherwise — but it is a well-understood engineering one.

How much water will it use?

More than most people expect, which is why water is the first thing we test on any site and the reason we have walked away from otherwise excellent ones. We are also funding research at Idaho National Laboratory on hybrid and air-cooled designs that cut water use sharply, and we are publishing the findings openly rather than holding them proprietary.

What does it do for the county?

Construction employs thousands for several years. Permanent operations employ several hundred at wages well above the local median, for sixty years. And a plant of this scale becomes the largest property taxpayer in most counties by a wide margin — which funds schools, roads and emergency services for as long as it runs.

Will it raise my electricity bill?

Our projects are structured to be financed privately, not through electric customers’ rates.

What happens if you start and then stop?

A fair question, and the honest answer is that it depends on when. Before construction, the site returns to its owner and the cost falls on us and our investors. Once construction begins, restoration obligations are secured — with a bond or letter of credit posted before the first shovel — so that no community is left looking at a half-built site with no funded way back.

Why here?

Because the site already has what a nuclear plant needs and most places do not: transmission capacity, cooling water, transport access, and usually a community that has lived alongside industrial or nuclear generation before. We do not choose sites to be convenient. We choose them because the alternative is a decade of permitting somewhere that was never suited to it.

If you live near a site we are studying, we will come and talk — to a county commission, a chamber, a church basement, or a kitchen table. Ask us.

Contact us →

Capital

Two raises, and they are not the same thing.

Nuclear projects are usually described with one very large number, which obscures the fact that there are two quite different funding events with different risks, different timelines and different investors.

First

Development capital

The smaller one, and the one that unlocks everything else: securing site control, running pre-application work with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, commissioning the geotechnical and environmental studies, and building the core team.

This is the capital that turns a candidate site into a permitted site — and a permitted site is worth materially more than an option on a field.

Second

Project equity and debt

This comes at financial close, alongside federal loan program debt and the tax credit structure, and it funds construction. It is a different instrument for a different investor, and it prices against a project that by then has a license path, an offtake contract and a construction cost basis behind it.

How we think about it

  • Development capital and project equity are raised separately, priced separately, and should never be blended in a conversation.
  • Value steps up at defined milestones — site control, construction permit, notice to proceed, commercial operation — and those steps are where early capital is recognized.
  • We do not quote a federal loan-to-value figure. The programs are live, the guidance moves, and any number we published today would be wrong by the time you read it.

If you invest in infrastructure at development stage, we would welcome a conversation about how our projects are structured.

Contact us →

Newsroom

News and announcements

Company announcements, the research we fund, and coverage of our work. For interviews and media inquiries, contact Nicholas B. Andrews directly.

For immediate releaseSeptember 21, 2026

Idaho National Laboratory Foundation and Andrews Nuclear Partner on Open Study to Cut Water Use in New Nuclear Power

Reactor-agnostic feasibility study of hybrid air–water cooling will be performed at Idaho National Laboratory and published for public use — opening sites the industry, and the AI data centers it serves, cannot build on today.

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho — September 21, 2026 — The Idaho National Laboratory Foundation and Andrews Nuclear today announced a partnership to fund and publish a feasibility study into hybrid air–water cooling for large thermal power plants. This engineering work may determine where the next generation of American nuclear plants can be built. Andrews Nuclear convened the study and is its founding member. The INL Foundation will create a consortium to fund the study. The Foundation will contract with researchers at Idaho National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy's lead nuclear energy laboratory, to perform the work, and the findings will be published and made freely available.

The study began with a live development problem. Andrews Nuclear was evaluating a Western site with the land, transmission, and community support to host two large units — but not the water. Rather than treat that as a private obstacle to work around, the company worked to find a solution, then brought the question to the Foundation and put it on public footing.

Water is among the least discussed constraints on new power generation. Conventional wet cooling systems consume freshwater continuously — on the order of 600 to 1,000 gallons per megawatt-hour, or roughly 55 million gallons a day for a large two-unit station. Across much of the American West, and a widening band of the country beyond it, that requirement alone can decide whether a site is viable.

Fully dry cooling has been evaluated for large plants and found costly, both in capital expense and in lost output on hot days. Fully wet cooling can rule out the very sites where firm power is most needed. Hybrid designs — part dry, part wet — fall between those extremes, but they remain the least studied cooling option for nuclear plants. No U.S. nuclear plant currently uses dry or hybrid cooling. Existing research has focused largely on supplemental cooling for operating plants; what remains missing is a broadly available reactor-agnostic analysis that brings together the engineering, cost, and siting case for designing new large plants around hybrid cooling from the start. This partnership aims to provide that analysis.

The work centers on the 1,000- to 1,200-megawatt class, with smaller-unit reference data included for scale comparison. It evaluates air-cooled condensers alongside alternative water-reduction pathways: hybrid wet–dry systems, wet surface air coolers, adiabatic pre-cooling, and passive thermosyphon coolers — and assesses each option's performance, cost, and siting implications. A hybrid plant can lean on dry cooling when the air is cool and on water during the hottest hours, and the right balance depends on each site's weather. The analysis is grounded entirely in publicly available data and generic industry references, not any reactor-specific or proprietary design. Konor Frick of Idaho National Laboratory will be the principal investigator.

The findings may matter most to the data center industry. AI and hyperscale computing are driving the steepest growth in American electricity demand in a generation, and those loads want firm, carbon-free power sited close to where the computing happens. Data centers also shed heat by evaporating water, and several of the technologies under evaluation here are already used to cool server halls. A campus that pairs a reactor with the load it serves puts two large water demands on one watershed. An answer that reduces that impact and makes a site workable for the plant may also make it workable for the customer.

At Andrews Nuclear, our chief aim is to be the world's leader in Advanced Power. Our plan is to build new nuclear and conserve water at the same time, and that solution is going to be different at every site.Nicholas B. Andrews, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Andrews Nuclear

The INL Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization, funds the study philanthropically, with costs shared across a consortium of donors. The Foundation owns and publishes the findings; participating organizations contribute as charitable donors, hold no contractual relationship with the Laboratory, and receive no proprietary results, early access, or claim on the work product. Every participant sees the results at the same time as the public.

The Foundation is inviting additional participants to join the consortium, particularly from the data center, utility, and industrial sectors whose siting decisions the findings are most likely to affect. The Foundation will release the findings publicly upon completion.

We see this research significantly advancing new nuclear generation, reducing data center regional impacts, and making the US more efficient and competitive. We are delighted to have such a good initial donor and industry leader starting this initiative.Linda Montgomery, Chair of the INL Foundation

# # #

About the Idaho National Laboratory Foundation

The Idaho National Laboratory Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that supports and advances the work of Idaho National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy's lead nuclear energy laboratory. Through its Innovation Fund, the Foundation directs philanthropic capital to the earliest and least fundable stage of technology development: the stage where the technical evidence is created and before commercial capital can responsibly follow. The Foundation focuses on laboratory research reaching the point where the market can act on it.

Media contacts

Idaho National Laboratory FoundationJohn De Michele, Director of Development
john@inlfoundation.org · 760-840-7335

Andrews NuclearNicholas B. Andrews, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
NickAndrews@AndrewsNuclear.com · 602.909.6677

Joining the consortium. The Foundation is assembling the donor consortium that funds this study. Utilities, data center operators, and industrial power users whose siting decisions turn on water are the participants it is looking for. Write to NickAndrews@AndrewsNuclear.com and we will make the introduction.

In the press

Coverage of this announcement will be listed here as it appears.

Privacy

Privacy policy

What this website collects, which is very little, and what happens to it.

Effective 18 September 2026

The short version

This site has no forms, no accounts, no advertising, and no tracking cookies. We do not sell or share personal information. If you write to us, we keep your message so that we can answer it.

What we collect

  • What you send us. If you email an address listed on this site, we receive your name, your email address, and whatever you choose to tell us.
  • Server logs. Our hosting provider records standard technical information for every visit, including your IP address, browser type, the pages requested, and the time of the request. This is ordinary web server activity and is used for security and reliability.
  • Typefaces. This site loads fonts from Google Fonts. Your browser requests those files from Google, which means Google receives your IP address as part of that request. Google's handling of that data is governed by its own privacy policy.

We do not use analytics, advertising networks, social media pixels, or cookies set by us.

How we use it

To answer you, to keep a record of our correspondence, and to keep the site running and secure. That is all. We do not sell personal information, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not use it to build profiles.

We may share information where the law requires it, or with service providers who host our website or email and are bound to protect it.

How long we keep it

Email correspondence is retained as part of our business records. Server logs are kept for the period our hosting provider sets, typically a short number of months. You may ask us to delete correspondence at any time, subject to any legal or record-keeping obligation to retain it.

Your choices

Write to us and we will tell you what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under state or national privacy law, including the right to know, the right to delete, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them. We honor those requests regardless of where you live.

Security

We take reasonable measures to protect the information we hold. No website or email system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Children

This site is intended for a business audience and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes

If this policy changes, the effective date above will change with it. Material changes will be described on this page.

Contact

Privacy questions and requests: nickandrews@andrewsnuclear.com
Andrews Nuclear LLC, Scottsdale, Arizona