Fermi America's nuclear plans just cleared their first regulatory hurdle.
NRC staff have preliminarily recommended issuing combined licenses for four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Project Matador, Fermi's planned power and AI campus outside Amarillo, Texas, according to a draft environmental impact statement the agency put out for comment on October 9th.
Together, the four units would add over 4.4 GW of nuclear generation capacity to the private grid.
It took 15 months from application, and Fermi wrote the draft itself as the first test of an NRC pilot that lets applicants prepare their own environmental reviews under staff supervision. The agency expects that to cut its in-house review time by about half.
The NRC is targeting a final version in December. The harder part is the safety review, which has no schedule yet. Fermi pulled the site-specific portion of its application and plans to refile it by Dec. 31, and a mandatory hearing and Commission vote come after that.
Fermi wants its first reactor running by 2032, meaning the NRC is far from the company's problem.
Last November, we warned that storm clouds were gathering as Fermi struggled to sign its first
