The NRC issued the Tennessee Valley Authority a construction permit for a 300 MW GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 at Clinch River, Tennessee, at the end of September — the first US construction authorisation for a commercial small modular reactor. The review took 14 months from the April 2025 application, about four months faster than the NRC's own schedule. It is permission to build, not to operate.
TVA / GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 — Clinch River, Tennessee — The NRC issued the Tennessee Valley Authority a construction permit for a 300 MW BWRX-300 at its Clinch River site in Oak Ridge at the end of September 2026 — the first US construction authorisation for a commercial small modular reactor, and the first held by a utility rather than a reactor developer. The review took 14 months from TVA's April 2025 application, about four months ahead of the NRC's own schedule. A construction permit is not an operating licence: TVA must build the plant and obtain a separate licence before loading fuel. TVA has said the site could host up to four units; the design's first unit anywhere is Ontario Power Generation's Darlington project, targeted for 2030.
Poland's SGE applied under the UK's Advanced Nuclear Framework to build 14 GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 SMRs across three sites — ~£35B total, first power targeted 2034, with Samsung C&T, Laing O'Rourke and Google Cloud in the consortium.
NRC staff completed the safety evaluation for TVA's BWRX-300 at Clinch River ahead of schedule and recommended issuing the construction permit — all five statutory criteria met, with remaining review hours cut from 25,000 to ~16,500.
OPG / GE Hitachi — OPG set the ~953-tonne basemat foundation module 35 m below ground for the first of four BWRX-300 units at Darlington — North America's (and the G7's) first SMR build, targeting grid connection by 2030.
