The leader of one of the nation’s largest insurance companies is open to underwriting expensive and risky nuclear energy projects — as well as more oil and gas drilling.
Nuclear energy is an “opportunity hiding in plain sight,” Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg told POLITICO’s E&E News on Tuesday. He pointed to the benefits of carbon-neutral power generated by nuclear plants as demand for electricity grows amid an expansion of cloud computing and generative artificial intelligence.
“Nuclear, gas — they’re all required,” Greenberg said in an interview on the sidelines of a Wall Street Journal summit for top executives. Chubb was the eighth-largest property and casualty insurer in the United States in 2023, according to data compiled by the ratings firm A.M. Best.
Utility companies in the U.S. have built only five new nuclear reactors over the last 34 years, the most recent of which came online in April. That reactor was part of Southern Co.’s Vogtle power plant expansion, a project that took 18 years to complete and ended up costing nearly $35 billion — more than double the initial estimate.
