The lede: Every nuclear headline this year — Palisades' restart, Three Mile Island's rebirth as Crane Clean Energy Center, Duane Arnold's revival, a dozen SMR groundbreakings — reads like a story about reactors. It's actually a story about the grid queue. FERC's Order No. 2023 forced transmission operators onto "first-ready, first-served" cluster studies to clear a backlog that hit 2,600 GW of stalled projects. Reform is thinning the line, but the physical bottleneck hasn't moved: large power transformers, generator step-up units, switchgear and the turbine-generators that actually convert reactor heat into grid electrons are sold out years in advance. Whoever wins the nuclear-developer horse race — Holtec, Constellation, TVA, NuExtera, whoever — still has to buy that hardware from the same shrunken supplier base. That's where the money concentrates.
Who cashes in: