2025 was a big year for nuclear energy in the Bluegrass State.
Major developments in the private sector of the industry moved forward, including the August announcement of General Matter’s plans to site the first private uranium enrichment facility in the U.S. in Paducah, a $1.5 billion investment in the region backed by billionaire Donald Trump ally Peter Thiel.
Just down the road from the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, where General Matter plans to build, Global Laser Enrichment has continued developing its project: creating the first commercial laser uranium enrichment plant in the world. The company said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted its licensing application in August. In September, GLE also said that they had completed “a large-scale enrichment demonstration” at a North Carolina facility that proved their proprietary technique could work at commercial scale.
A pair of Kentucky sites were also shortlisted for potential federal projects that could bring nuclear developments to the state. The former PGDP facility is among four federally owned properties where the Department of Energy is currently inviting companies to submit bids to build and power an artificial intelligence data center. Also, Fort Campbell – the U.S. Army base that straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee border – is among the nine installations being considered for the site of a microreactor as a part of the military’s Janus Program.
It was also the first full year of operation for the Kentucky Nuclear Energy Development Authority, the commonwealth’s non-regulatory agency aimed at laying the groundwork for the state’s “nuclear energy ecosystem” and helping it grow through things like development grants and statewide educational efforts.
Despite all of this movement in the industry, none of the electricity generated in Kentucky today comes from nuclear power. That’s something that state Sen. Danny Carroll, the Paducah Republican who helped to end Kentucky’s moratorium on nuclear developments in 2017 and pushed to create KNEDA in 2024, expects to change in the coming years.
“We're getting to this point so much quicker than I ever dreamed we would be, and I would venture to say at this point [that] I predict that, within 15 years, we're going to have a nuclear reactor in our state – and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it was 10 years,” Carroll said. “That's how quickly things are moving.”
The biggest obstacles for nuclear energy in the state, Carroll said, are cost and public perception. Both are things he hopes can be addressed by KNEDA.
Nuclear energy was among Carroll’s legislative priorities detailed at a Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce event this week.
In the upcoming session, Carroll said he expects nuclear efforts to move ahead “full throttle.” He said his fellow western Kentucky lawmaker Rep. Randy Bridges, also a Republican from Paducah, will be putting forth a legislative request to allocate $150 million toward economic development funds for the state’s nuclear industry to be administered by KNEDA. In conjunction, Carroll plans to propose a pilot project utilizing half of those funds to get three sites around the state prepped for the early permitting process to build a reactor.
In his proposal, Carroll said he sees KNEDA covering a third of each site’s roughly $75 million price tag to go through the process with those funds – with the other two thirds coming from the participating utility and a hyperscaler (like Google or Amazon) hoping to buy nuclear power for use by data centers.
In western Kentucky, Carroll hopes that the former PGDP property is selected for the federal project and eventually becomes “a nuclear campus” with multiple companies operating on the grounds, and the entire site powered by a reactor.
Though a lot of development in the nuclear space has happened in western Kentucky, Carroll said he wants this push into the industry to include communities across the state.
“We want to make sure that central, especially eastern Kentucky, is included in all of this. They have suffered the most with the downturn in coal usage, and so we want to make sure they benefit,” he said. “We're going to develop an entirely new economy related to the production of nuclear energy, and we hope to get many communities across the state ready for that and reap the benefits of that as we move forward.”
Carroll said the state’s Office of Energy Policy has already identified a number of sites for potential development, and that they are particularly looking at brownfields that formerly housed industrial sites like coal furnaces.
The other $75 million in Bridges’ state budget request would go toward grant funding to support other efforts in the nuclear space. Carroll said KNEDA’s grant program awards funds to urge the development of the state’s evolving “nuclear economy” by supporting ancillary businesses, providing education and workforce development. From its original $10 million in grant funds, Carroll said $2 million went to the University of Kentucky’s School of Engineering in Paducah to create a laser and photonics program that could create a workforce pipeline for companies like GLE hoping to locate in the region.
Moving forward, Carroll expects Kentucky to be in the running for many private developments in the nuclear energy field as more companies look for ways to power data centers to support the use of AI.
At a recent gathering in Lexington held by an investor-owned utility, Carroll said there were representatives from major companies like Google, Amazon and X-energy – an advanced nuclear reactor and fuel company that’s building the first U.S. facility to exclusively make fuel for small modular reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
“The need for data centers, AI is really what's driving everything right now, and then also the need for increased generation,” Carroll said. “It's going to be just a tremendous amount of energy that we're going to need over the next couple decades, that we’ve got to gear up, and we've got to get ready to go. Kentucky is well suited, and we're in a great position right now.”
Carroll said nuclear power is “the future of base load energy” with electricity demand projected to increase 50% by 2050 in the U.S. The senator said he hopes that the state will develop a diverse energy economy that uses nuclear power as well as coal and renewable sources like solar, wind and hydroelectricity to keep the lights on.
“We expect that we'll continue to use all of those resources as we move forward,” he said. “However, I think the only avenue to meet the demand that's coming in the next decades is going to be nuclear.”
Kentucky’s General Assembly convenes on Jan. 6.
