Congress didn't hand the nuclear industry a subsidy in the ADVANCE Act — it handed it a discount and a stopwatch, and those two things are worth more than cash. The 2024 law cuts NRC hourly licensing fees for advanced reactor applicants and forces the agency onto statutory review deadlines. That matters because for decades the single biggest cost of building a new reactor in America wasn't concrete or steel — it was the NRC's hourly-billed review process, which could run tens of millions of dollars and years longer than promised before a shovel ever hit dirt. Cheaper, faster, more predictable licensing changes the economics of every reactor developer's balance sheet — but not equally. Design maturity decides who benefits most, and that's where Oklo and NuScale split.
Who cashes in: