The United States sought to reassert itself as a top exporter of nuclear technology during President Donald Trump’s trip to Asia this week, pressing Japan and its big banks to help finance deals that could benefit major U.S. companies, including Westinghouse Energy and GE Vernova Hitachi.
Thirty-one countries have committed to tripling nuclear power by 2050. But industry experts say U.S. builders of nuclear reactors have struggled to match the scale, simplicity and affordability of competitors, especially Russia.
“Russia has the ability to come in and provide a turnkey approach. They’ve got a really great pitch,” said Todd Abrajano, president and CEO of the United States Nuclear Industry Council. “They can handle everything from the financing, the construction, providing the labor, providing the fuel. They have a very broad scope in terms of what they have to offer.”
To add insult to injury for the U.S., China is rapidly boosting its nuclear sector and positioning itself to export more nuclear technology.
China is dramatically cutting costs, building plants at more than one-seventh of the price of U.S. plants, according to recent academic research out of Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University and other institutions. China is building dozens of large-scale reactors domestically and partnering with Pakistan on nuclear development. Meanwhile, it struck a deal on radioisotopes last week with Brazil and is eyeing a plant build in Kazakhstan. In 2022, China signed a deal to develop plants in Argentina.
“The world is wanting to go and embrace nuclear power,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a cheerleader for nuclear energy, said last week. “And guess who’s building their reactors? The Russians or the Chinese.”
“Do we want them leading in a new energy technology? That’s totally nuts,” he said.
It wasn’t always this way. At the end of World War II, the U.S. was the only nuclear power. As other countries began to harness the atom, President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched “Atoms for Peace.” The initiative provided technologies and fuel to countries in exchange for them agreeing to follow U.S. nonproliferation rules. That gave America incredible geopolitical leverage to steer the development of nuclear energy.
Yet over the last four decades, America’s global leadership has gradually eroded, and the U.S. is scrambling to reboot its uranium enrichment capacity.
The Chernobyl disaster soured global attitudes towards the energy source, and a wave of privatizations largely left the U.S. nuclear industry to fend for itself against state-owned competitors in Europe.
Russia has largely filled the vacuum, building plants even for U.S. allies like Hungary, Egypt and Turkey. But Abrajano said Russia’s global nuclear business hit roadblocks after President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
“If a country like [Russia] has the ability to control your energy security, that’s very, very problematic,” Abrajano said.
Part of the Trump administration’s plan for selling more multibillion-dollar nuclear reactors emerged this week. The Commerce Department under Secretary Howard Lutnick and the owners of Westinghouse announced a “strategic partnership” to build more large-scale reactors for utilities in the U.S. and potentially abroad.
Under the partnership, the federal government could eventually acquire a 20 percent stake in Westinghouse. And that could put the Pennsylvania maker of modern AP1000 reactors — with a storied 140-year-old history dating to the Gilded Age industrialist George Westinghouse — in a stronger position to compete with companies from Russia or China that have significant government support.
Russia & China: the veteran and the prodigy
For years, Russia’s state-owned Rosatom has secured contracts across Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia by offering full-service nuclear packages — design, financing, construction, fuel supply and training.
Michael Seely, founder of the industry consulting firm AtomicBlender, said Rosatom offers the most comprehensive and affordable paths to market. He cited Bangladesh as an example, where four Russian reactors are expected to come online this December.
But even Turkey, a NATO member, struck a deal with Rosatom in 2010.
Previous negotiations failed, where Russia would have built, briefly owned and then transferred the plant to Turkish ownership. But this time, Russia sweetened the pot by assuming operational and ownership responsibilities in exchange for Turkey agreeing to buy power from the plant at a reduced price.
Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said the Russian approach has geopolitical roots as much as economic ones.
“They’re not as concerned with turning a profit as they are with employing an overbuilt industrial sector and taking the buyer hostage, as clearly you can read up in the case of the Turks,” Sokolski said.
Construction on Rosatom’s plant in Turkey has significantly slowed since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, raising friction as Turkish officials pushed to expedite construction.
Meanwhile, some experts say China is poised to overtake Russia in the coming years.
“I expect that initially the competition actually will be most fierce with Russia,” said Paul Saunders, a nuclear expert and president of the nonprofit Center for the National Interest. “The fact that it may be Russia that sort of loses deals first, I think, will be cold comfort to U.S. or other firms in allied countries that might be competing with them.”
“China is positioning itself in a way that will allow its companies to become pretty tough competitors,” he added.
So far, China hasn’t thrown its weight around globally in the nuclear sector, like it has with critical mineral processing, electric vehicle manufacturing and other clean energy technologies.
“If the government wants to start marketing China Inc. in the nuclear space, they’ll make it happen,” said Grant Hauber, a strategic energy finance adviser for Asia at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
America’s catch-up
The U.S. never fully left the field: Westinghouse has sold its AP1000 reactors to China and has contracts for plants in Poland and Bulgaria. Still, it’s playing catch-up, experts say.
At its most basic level, the U.S. has struggled to compete internationally because its domestic supply chain went limp. Total U.S. nuclear electricity generation was the same in 2018 as it was in 2007, after nuclear’s hefty price tag and the public opinion fallout from the Fukushima accident shuttered many projects.
But beginning in the first Trump administration and continuing through former President Joe Biden’s term, the federal government has moved to whip the supply chain back into shape.
In 2020, Congress funded the $230 million Advanced Reactor Demonstration program with the stated goal to promote “nuclear energy leadership.” Under Biden, the program distributed significant funding to leading advanced reactor firms like TerraPower and X-energy.
“The vision that Congress laid out was always to deploy first in the United States but to enable global deployments, and leaning into the opportunity to deploy with our closest allies is what X-energy has always believed was the best pathway to market for us in the global marketplace,” said Ben Reinke, senior vice president of global business development at X-energy.
With the backing of tech giant Amazon, X-energy is building its flagship plant for a Dow Chemical processing facility in Texas and recently inked a deal to construct reactors in the United Kingdom. He says government support and better technology make American reactors more attractive to friendly nations.
Another situational advantage for the U.S. is also arguably its biggest weakness: the hodgepodge of actors needed to build a plant abroad. Putin’s government in Russia can more easily pull the plug on a project in a country that lands on the Kremlin’s wrong side. That’s harder when Westinghouse or another U.S. company is involved, analysts say.
Nicholas Castillo, a former program officer at the Caspian Policy Center, said this appeal might even be able to secure deals among traditionally Russian-friendly states. Take Armenia, as an example.
“Yerevan is making a concerted push away from Russian influence,” Castillo said. “Partnering with the Americans — and not Russia — on a nuclear deal would be a huge part of that.”
Armenia has since entered a strategic partnership with the U.S. on nuclear power, and it is currently considering building a planned new nuclear plant with America.
“The U.S. can still run on that reservoir of goodwill and positive perception of what America is and its role in the world,” said Nigel Li, a research fellow at the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. “Now, if certain policies change, that could make the export of nuclear technology even more accessible to other countries.”
Still, some experts say U.S. nuclear export controls are overly restrictive.
“I don’t think that we come off as an attractive business partner to international customers if they have to worry about us handcuffing them with export controls on light water reactor technology,” said Russell Goff of Nuclear Talent Scout, an industry recruitment firm. “Technology that is widely available on the internet in 2025 is no longer the secret competitive information it once was when the old laws were written.”
Similarly, Westinghouse is protective of its proprietary technology,even among American allies.
After a January lawsuit settlement, Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power withdrew from European project bids. While the terms are not public, reporting from the Financial Times said the South Korean state company agreed to pay Westinghouse $825 million per exported reactor for 50 years and restrict its sales to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.
South Korea’s ruling party called the agreement a “humiliating slave contract.”
Still, nuclear consultant Seely says most smaller countries make decisions primarily on cold, hard cash.
“The U.S. would have to offer more or less comprehensive financing” to make significant inroads with nonaligned smaller countries, Seely said.
“We are starting to see a little bit of that between the Export-Import Bank of the United States and the U.S. International Development Finance Corp.,” Seely said. “So there is some money available, but it’s not necessarily as straightforward as if they’re getting it from Rosatom or from China, where the money just comes more or less directly from the government.”
