America's plan to deploy 91 small modular reactors hinges not on construction capacity, but on a critical shortage of nuclear licensing engineers and regulators who can approve new reactor designs. Westinghouse's AP300 reactor has been stuck in pre-application review for 39 months, with the company now hiring engineering firm Amentum to accelerate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approval process.

Why Is Licensing Taking So Long for Small Modular Reactors?

The AP300 was designed as a smaller, simpler version of Westinghouse's proven AP1000 reactor running at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. The pitch was straightforward: shrink an existing design, keep the same fuel and safety systems, and skip the regulatory burden of evaluating something entirely new. Westinghouse announced the AP300 in May 2023 and initially projected design certification by 2027.

That timeline has slipped significantly. As of August 2026, the AP300 remains in pre-application activities, and the formal design certification application has not yet been filed. The NRC's public docket shows 11 white papers submitted and returned with staff feedback, covering everything from core design and fuel cycles to seismic categorization and emergency planning zones. One planned white paper on the licensing application approach was abandoned entirely.

The regulatory engagement plan was updated in June 2026, but Westinghouse filed it under trade-secret protection, meaning the current public record of how the company plans to license the reactor stops in early 2024. This secrecy is routine and legitimate, but it also reflects the competitive pressure surrounding nuclear licensing expertise.

What Does the Amentum Deal Reveal About the Real Bottleneck?

On August 4, 2026, Westinghouse announced a partnership with Amentum, a Virginia-based engineering and technical services contractor with more than 50,000 employees across roughly 70 countries. The deal is unusually specific: Westinghouse is not buying forging capacity, cranes, or construction labor. It is buying engineering hours and licensing hours, which is a different scarcity entirely.

"The collaboration is expected to accelerate the licensing of the AP300 SMR with the NRC," said Dan Sumner, president and chief executive of Westinghouse.

Dan Sumner, President and Chief Executive Officer, Westinghouse

Amentum's credential is not concrete or steel; it is regulatory paperwork. The company has supported clients across every UK Generic Design Assessment since that process was created, for both large reactors and small modular ones. The firm is already hired by Westinghouse's competitors, including Rolls-Royce for SMR deployments in the UK and Czech Republic, and EDF for a ten-year, $730 million professional services contract for British stations.

The fact that the same firm is being rented by competing reactor vendors tells you the shortage is real and sits upstream of any single company's brand or strategy.

How Many Reactors Are Actually in the Pipeline?

Cameco, which co-owns Westinghouse, disclosed a pipeline of 91 small modular reactor units in its second-quarter 2026 results. These units break down into tiers ordered by how close each is to a final investment decision:

• Department of Energy Loan Program: 10 units with long-lead components including reactor pressure vessels already being purchased.
• Cameco, Brookfield, and Commerce Department Partnership: 10 additional units through a joint venture arrangement.
• Restart Projects: 2 units from the abandoned V.C. Summer site in South Carolina.
• International Commitments: 3 units for Poland's first nuclear plant on the Baltic coast, 2 each for Bulgaria and Ukraine.
• Front-End Engineering and Design Stage: 11 units in active design and planning phases.
• Early Origination: 51 units in preliminary stages across Canada, India, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, and elsewhere.

Cameco's filing is explicit that projects may stall or leave the pipeline at any point. The company is not guaranteeing all 91 will be built.

What Does "Nth-of-a-Kind" Mean for Cost and Schedule?

The cost and schedule improvements Cameco projects are not free. They arrive only at what the industry calls Nth-of-a-kind, defined as five separate two-unit projects completed and a sustained order rate of at least two reactors a year. Under those conditions, overnight capital costs fall from $20 to 26 billion per reactor to $14 to 17 billion.

Two reactors a year, every year, forever. This is not two reactors built in sequence by one team, the way Vogtle Unit 3 handed its lessons to Vogtle 4. This means multiple sites running simultaneously, each needing its own site-specific licensing package, its own regulatory submissions, and its own design engineering staffed by people qualified to sign nuclear safety documents.

Where Did the Construction Workforce Go?

The famous Vogtle number is the CA20 module. Georgia Power put it at more than 2.2 million pounds, taller than five stories, with a footprint of about 67 by 47 feet. A crane lifted it into the Unit 3 nuclear island in March 2014 as the heaviest lift of the project at that time.

That is the photogenic part, and it is not the part anyone is short of now. Bechtel, which took over construction in 2017, put the peak workforce at more than 9,000 craft professionals on site, 70 million work hours without a lost-time incident, and costs on Unit 4 running 30 percent below Unit 3. More than 1,500 of Bechtel's own professionals came off that job with hands-on nuclear construction experience.

Unit 3 entered commercial operation in July 2023 and Unit 4 in April 2024. Then the site wound down, because that is what construction sites do. Rebuilding that workforce on ten simultaneous projects is a genuine problem, and it is one the industry has spent three years discussing.

But the Amentum deal suggests the constraint has moved somewhere else entirely: not to the crane operators or the welders, but to the engineers and regulators who must approve each reactor design before a single foundation is poured.

Steps to Understand the Nuclear-AI Energy Convergence

• Recognize the Supply Chain Shift: The bottleneck in nuclear deployment is no longer construction capacity or manufacturing, but regulatory expertise and licensing approval timelines that can stretch years beyond initial projections.
• Track Workforce Redeployment: Monitor how Bechtel, Amentum, and other major contractors allocate their nuclear-qualified staff across competing projects, as this will determine which reactors actually get built first.
• Follow Pipeline Attrition: Watch which of the 91 planned reactors advance from early origination to front-end engineering and design stages, as Cameco explicitly states that projects may leave the pipeline at any point.

Dominic Kieran, who chairs the Westinghouse board and runs Cameco UK, told the results call the company sees few bottlenecks around construction and called its assessment "prudent." He is probably right about construction. That is exactly why the constraint moved somewhere else.