Texas Kicks Off Effort to Make State a Leader in New Nuclear

PUCT commissioner Jimmy Glotfelty leads the discussion at the Texas Advanced Nuclear Reactor Working Group’s first public meeting, on September 28. (Image: PUCT)

The Texas Advanced Nuclear Reactor Working Group—formed recently by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott—hosted its first public meeting last Thursday to discuss the group’s organizational structure and outline a plan to turn Texas into a national leader in the use of advanced nuclear energy.

“It’s exciting to see so much interest in this,” said PUCT commissioner Jimmy Glotfelty, Abbott’s pick to head the group, at the September 28 meeting. “Every day there’s another headline about something in this space. The challenge with those headlines is very few of them say ‘Texas.’ We are ecstatic about the X-energy-Dow project, but we need more of them, and our goal in this process is to figure out how we get more of them going.” (In May, X-energy and Dow announced the selection of the latter’s UCC Seadrift Operations manufacturing site in Texas as the location for their Xe-100 small modular reactor deployment project.)

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