How EPRI guides for siting power plants and for selecting the optimal technology help nuclear power reach its potential
It’s challenging to get dozens of nations to agree on much of anything today. Yet at the 2023 Conference of the Parties (COP) gathering in the United Arab Emirates, 25 countries committed to work together to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050. At the 2024 COP in Azerbaijan, another six nations joined the United States, Canada, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom in their declaration to ramp up global nuclear capacity.
In the United States, support for nuclear power is a rare point of bipartisan agreement. The Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act provided billions of dollars to extend the life of existing nuclear power plants and to accelerate advanced reactors and other advanced nuclear technologies. The Trump administration recently released four executive orders designed to speed the deployment of advanced nuclear technologies.
The motivations to scale nuclear power are varied. For example, some advocates for nuclear energy point to its ability to deliver around-the-clock, carbon-free electricity that can complement variable renewable sources. Others focus more on its role in reliably delivering electricity as demand soars, especially from the data centers needed to power artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Indeed, analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) concluded that data center load growth tripled between 2014 and 2024 and was expected to double or triple again by 2028. An EPRI report released last year found that data centers could consume between 4.6 percent and 9.1 percent of annual electricity generation by 2030.
There are many reasons to believe that a nuclear resurgence is happening and accelerating, both to meet demand and to replace capacity from retiring coal and gas plants. However, for nuclear power to triple in capacity and be positioned to meet growing energy demand, there is a basic challenge: Every new plant needs a site, and choosing that site is one of the most consequential decisions in the life of any project. It’s also a decision that is far from straightforward. Indeed, in today’s environment, siting decisions are exceptionally complex because many reactor technologies are new, regulatory frameworks are evolving, and stakeholder expectations are higher than ever.
“We’re at a critical moment. There’s real momentum behind nuclear again. But to meet these ambitious targets, we need smarter, faster ways to evaluate both where to build and what to build,” said Chad Boyer, Senior Principal Technical Leader, EPRI’s Advanced Nuclear Technology (ANT) Program.
Why a New Generation of Technologies Brings Siting Challenges and Opportunities
The past decade has seen the rise of advanced reactor designs. These technologies promise to be more scalable and more flexible than traditional gigawatt-scale reactors. The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) reports that 56 commercial Advanced reactor (ARs) designs are in various stages of development in 17 nations around the world. Advanced reactors are frequently also referred to as Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), especially outside of the United States.
While attracting significant investment, these first-of-a-kind projects face challenges: cost containment, regulatory approval, supply chain readiness, and crucially, siting. “Advanced reactors have changed the conversation,” Boyer said. “They enable siting in places that wouldn’t have been feasible for large reactors—closer to load, at brownfield industrial sites, or in water-constrained areas. But they also require a new way of thinking about how and where we build.”
ARs also bring the promise of standardized designs and factory fabrication, both of which can support faster deployment and potentially lower costs. However, these benefits can only be realized if the early steps—technology selection and siting—are done thoughtfully.
A Guide for Siting
Recognizing the complexity of modern nuclear siting—and the critical importance of getting it right—EPRI released the Site Selection and Evaluation Criteria for New Nuclear Energy Generation Facilities in 2022, an update to EPRI’s longstanding siting guide. The guide outlines a multi-step process designed to help utilities move from broad regional considerations to an approach appropriate for identifying specific sites.
The initial step involves defining a region of interest based on business objectives, grid needs, and the availability of infrastructure. This is followed by the identification of candidate areas, where basic exclusionary criteria such as flood risk, seismic hazards, and protected lands are applied. From there, utilities assess potential sites within those areas based on more nuanced criteria like constructability, stakeholder acceptance, and transmission access. Detailed screening and scoring help determine a proposed and an alternative site, providing a foundation for license applications and long-term development.
The 2022 update to the guide reflects a dramatically different landscape for nuclear. It integrates considerations for small and advanced reactors, including reduced emergency planning zones and compatibility with sites that lack abundant water. Social and economic concerns are also embedded in the methodology, recognizing the importance of trust and community support. New technologies offer promise, but they come with unknowns that the guide helps navigate.
“The process is scalable and adaptable,” Boyer explained. “It doesn’t prescribe a perfect site—it gives you the tools to make consistent, transparent, and justifiable decisions.”
In addition to helping organizations select among potential sites, the guide also serves to coordinate internal teams and external stakeholders. It maps the flow of decision-making over time, guiding collaboration among engineering, environmental, public affairs, permitting, and real estate teams. This integrated approach is critical, particularly as timelines for nuclear development tighten and the need for predictability grows more acute.
The guide also seeks to proactively address future priorities. This includes providing recommendations for long-term data management and project documentation. Addressing data management and documentation early ensures that information gathered during siting activities remains accessible for future licensing work, thereby minimizing duplication and improving project continuity.
Scaling Siting for the Challenges Ahead
While advanced reactors expand the list of feasible sites, they don’t necessarily reduce the number of variables involved. Advanced cooling technologies, for instance, allow nuclear plants to function with less water. However, those systems can also introduce additional costs and complexity. In regions like the U.S. Southwest, utilities must consider not just scarcity but legal water rights and inter-basin transfers.
Meanwhile, the process of interconnecting new generation to the grid has become increasingly difficult. Lengthy interconnection queues and regulatory bottlenecks make existing access to transmission lines an especially valuable site feature. Advanced reactors also bring unique siting concerns. Some designs rely on new fuels or novel reactor geometries, which can trigger unfamiliar permitting hurdles. The EPRI guide takes these factors into account, helping provide a reality check of how new reactor designs fit real-world site conditions.
Additionally, siting must consider the social license to operate—an increasingly important factor for projects involving emerging technologies. Communities want assurance that their voices are heard and their concerns addressed. The EPRI guide incorporates community engagement strategies that align with best practices in public participation and trust-building. “The footprint is smaller, but that doesn’t mean the process is simpler,” Boyer said.
Choosing a Technology
To complement the Siting Guide, EPRI also published the Owner-Operator Reactor Technology Assessment Guide. The technology guide helps utilities avoid the high cost of misaligning their operational goals and their technology choices. The guide lays out a six-step approach to technology assessments. First, the utility must define its mission and business objectives, a step that is often glossed over. From there, a long list of reactor types is reviewed and winnowed based on technical and regulatory compatibility. Vendor-specific designs are then assessed against detailed criteria, including cost, constructability, licensing pathway, fuel cycle compatibility, and more.
“Too often, people chase the shiny object,” Boyer said. “They hear about a new design and want to evaluate it. But we tell them: Start with your mission. Do you need firm power in a remote region? Flexible output to support renewables? That’ll guide your decisions.”
The technology guide also encourages utilities to create go/no-go screening thresholds that eliminate incompatible designs early in the process. Those remaining are ranked based on how well they align with the utility’s stated objectives, allowing for a manageable shortlist.
The guide doesn’t just deliver rankings; it establishes an institutional record that can support decision-making over time. With many nuclear projects taking years to develop, the rationale behind key decisions can easily be lost. EPRI’s approach builds traceability into the process, ensuring continuity even if staff or leadership changes.
By following the guide’s recommendations, utilities can also improve their ability to communicate with regulators and financial stakeholders. A well-documented decision process builds confidence in the choices being made and supports the case for investment.
Real-World Use at SRP and Bruce Power
Utilities across North America are using EPRI’s siting and technology assessment guides. Salt River Project (SRP), the Arizona-based public power utility, is relying on both documents to evaluate the potential for deploying advanced nuclear technology in its resource portfolio. According to Barbara Cenalmor Bruquetas, senior resource development project manager at SRP, the guides provided a disciplined approach to exploring options without locking the utility into any single technology or site.
SRP began its evaluation with a focus on a brownfield location. The site under consideration is home to a coal plant and still holds valuable water rights and grid interconnection capacity. Cenalmor Bruquetas explained that the Siting Guide helped SRP evaluate not only the technical feasibility of the site—including cooling requirements and seismic resilience—but also the softer dimensions like environmental justice and public perception.
In parallel, the utility drew on the Technology Assessment Guide to navigate a growing universe of AR designs. SRP had clear priorities: minimal water consumption, scalability, operational flexibility, and alignment with desert conditions. The guide offered a structure for aligning those goals with existing and emerging vendor offerings. While SRP has not finalized its technology selection, the process has significantly narrowed the field and clarified what questions to ask. Cenalmor Bruquetas emphasized that the technology guide helped SRP consider future readiness, including how different designs might scale over time and how they might be affected by fuel availability and evolving regulations.
“We’re not selecting a vendor yet,” Cenalmor Bruquetas said. “But the guide is helping us narrow the field and understand what technologies might realistically serve our long-term resource mix.”
At Bruce Power in Ontario, where the existing nuclear infrastructure already supports large-scale operations, the emphasis has been more squarely on technology selection. Andrew Brooks, an Engineering Manager at Bruce Power, said the utility is considering the addition of up to 4,800 MWe of new nuclear on its existing site and how these reactors might complement the older units over time. The Technology Assessment Guide helped the company systematically screen options based on maturity, licensing readiness, and alignment with operational needs.
Brooks noted that early conversations around advanced nuclear often focus on potential rather than practicality. The guide’s insistence on defining clear goals at the outset was critical for Bruce Power’s process. Instead of investing time in a broad survey of unvetted designs, the utility created a focused shortlist of technologies that met specific performance, safety, and regulatory benchmarks. From there, the team engaged in deeper conversations with vendors to understand timelines, fuel strategies, and integration requirements. The guide also gave them tools to ask better questions about supply chain maturity, the ability to support a multi-decade lifecycle, and the all-important discussions about cost, schedule, and risk.
“It gave structure to a messy process,” Brooks said. “And it helped us communicate internally with planning, operations, and leadership.”
In both cases, the utilities used the guides not only to improve internal coordination but also to prepare more thoroughly for eventual public and regulatory scrutiny. In an era where stakeholders demand transparency and justification, these frameworks help utilities demonstrate due diligence.
Can Better Decisions Drive Faster Progress?
While siting and technology selection don’t guarantee project success, they lay the foundation for it. EPRI’s tools are helping utilities make defensible decisions that avoid costly missteps. Utilities are no longer approaching these projects as one-off pilot efforts, but rather as critical components of long-term resource strategies.
EPRI Technical Expert:
Chad Boyer
For more information, contact techexpert@eprijournal.com.
