reactors

The New Reactor Economy

In the twenty-first century, nuclear energy has re-emerged not only as a source of electricity but also as an instrument of geopolitical endurance. Among all global reactor exporters, Russia’s Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporationremains exceptionally resilient. Despite sanctions and fractured supply chains, Rosatom today is involved in the construction of thirty to forty reactor units worldwide, including in Egypt’s El-Dabaa, Bangladesh’s Rooppur, and Turkey’s Akkuyu.

Yet beneath the story of uranium and concrete lies a subtler revolution: the rise of digital-twin technology. A digital twin is a virtual, data-driven replica of a reactor that mirrors every process in real time using sensors, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It enables engineers to simulate performance, anticipate faults, and fine-tune safety systems remotely.

In doing so, Rosatom is no longer merely exporting atomic hardware; it is exporting data architectures and predictive-analytics ecosystems that tether partner nations to Russian digital infrastructures for decades. The company has consolidated these capabilities under its Unified Digital Platform, linking design, construction, and operation through cloud-based modelling and AI-driven monitoring (Rosatom Newsletter, 2025).

This digitalization marks a turning point in nuclear diplomacy: power now flows through algorithms and data, not only through megawatts and materials.

From Hardware Exports to Data Dependencies

Since 2020, Rosatom’s subsidiaries, notably Atomenergomash and Rusatom Service, have begun integrating digital lifecycle systems across their international reactor portfolio. The company’s engineering arm, ASE, has developed what it calls Multi-D IMS, a digital configuration-management platform that creates detailed virtual models of nuclear facilities during design and construction. These models enable real-time collaboration, fault prediction, and workflow optimization across sites, forming the foundation of Rosatom’s emerging digital-twin ecosystem.

Rosatom’s own communications describe these tools as part of a broader Unified Digital Platform, which connects design, manufacturing, and operation through cloud-based modelling and AI-driven analytics. While official statements do not identify specific plants using these systems, Rosatom notes that its “digital infrastructure and twin technologies” are being offered to international partners within its reactor export programs.

This architecture creates a durable maintenance corridor between Moscow and client operators.  Even after physical construction ends, the flow of digital data and software updates ensures that Russian engineers remain integral to plant performance.  In practice, the information layer itself becomes a channel of long-term engagement and influence.

Comparable Western vendors, EDF, Westinghouse, and GE Hitachi, are also pursuing digital-twin technologies. Yet Rosatom’s approach is uniquely state-integrated, aligning with Russia’s national strategy of digital sovereignty and self-sufficient AI infrastructure. The result is a hybrid of engineering innovation and strategic design: a system that embeds Russian digital standards within the nuclear industries of its partners.

For many developing economies, the offer is pragmatic: a single vendor providing financing, turnkey construction, and continuous digital assistance.  But this convenience introduces a subtler dependence, one not of uranium supply or credit, but of algorithmic reliance and data governance.

Kudankulam: India’s Quiet Test Bed

Nowhere is this shift more visible than in southern India. The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP), jointly operated by India’s Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) and Rosatom, is the first operational complex of VVER-1000 reactors in the Global South.

Originally a hardware partnership signed in 1988, Kudankulam is evolving into a digital interface. In 2020, Rosatom’s fuel subsidiary TVEL supplied India with next-generation TVS-2M fuel assemblies, extending reactor cycles from twelve to eighteen months, a shift managed through digital modelling and predictive maintenance.

Rosatom’s 2024 annual report outlines plans to connect Kudankulam’s operational analytics to its Unified Digital Nuclear Industry Platform, integrating India into the same digital ecosystem that supports Turkey’s and Egypt’s projects.

For India, this offers substantial advantages, higher capacity factors, enhanced safety diagnostics, and exposure to emerging global standards in nuclear AI. Yet it also entwines India’s civilian nuclear operations with Russian data protocols and remote diagnostic tools. Kudankulam thus becomes not only a reactor but also a node in Rosatom’s global digital web, where megawatts are managed by code as much as by turbines.

This duality defines the future of strategic cooperation: efficiency through integration, balanced against data-driven interdependence.

Algorithmic Sovereignty and Strategic Autonomy

Digital integration introduces a new vocabulary of power. Terms once reserved for information technology, data sovereignty, algorithmic control, and cybersecurity now shape energy diplomacy. For countries like India, which prize autonomy, these are practical concerns.

In 2019, a cyber incident at Kudankulam briefly demonstrated how vulnerable nuclear infrastructure can be when administrative networks intersect with global data flows. Although operational systems were unaffected, the episode exposed the need for stronger digital-governance frameworks in critical energy sectors.

Another question concerns ownership of reactor data. Predictive-maintenance algorithms rely on vast datasets, coolant temperatures, pressure levels, and sensor diagnostics gathered continuously during operation. If these datasets are processed on Rosatom’s proprietary cloud, who controls their reuse or replication? India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023) mandates localization for sensitive data, yet nuclear information exists in a legal grey zone, governed more by bilateral contracts than explicit national legislation.

For Russia, digitalization ensures resilience under sanctions. Cloud-based engineering assistance allows specialists in Moscow to monitor reactors abroad even when travel or logistics are constrained. For partners, it delivers cost-efficient expertise, yet it also embeds an asymmetry; operational sovereignty becomes mediated by foreign algorithms.

Rosatom’s approach reflects Moscow’s broader strategy of technological statecraft, using digital ecosystems to sustain global reach despite economic isolation. The outcome is a new form of dependence: not energy insecurity but informational dependency.

Atoms → Algorithms: The Next Frontier of Energy Diplomacy

Rosatom’s digital transformation parallels wider trends in global technology politics. China’s Digital Silk Road, the U.S.-EU “trusted-tech” frameworks, and Russia’s own push for a “Digital Atom Belt” all reveal how infrastructure and information are converging.

India occupies a delicate middle ground. Collaboration with Rosatom at Kudankulam grants access to advanced analytics, but New Delhi also explores partnerships with Western firms on small modular reactors and new fuel cycles. Balancing these engagements will require clear rules on digital interoperability, data governance, and cyber assurance.

India already has the institutions to do so. The Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) verifies reactor-control software domestically, while CERT-IN supervises cyber-critical infrastructure. Extending such oversight to digital-twin and predictive-maintenance platforms can preserve sovereignty while encouraging innovation.

For Russia, meanwhile, digital twins are both export products and diplomatic instruments. By embedding AI-based support systems in every reactor project, Rosatom ensures long-term relevance. Even if hardware exports slow, its role as a digital-lifecycle provider guarantees enduring engagement. In that sense, Rosatom’s most influential reactor export may no longer be physical; it is virtual.

Conclusion: The Politics of Invisible Power

The shift from atoms to algorithms defines the next frontier of nuclear diplomacy. During the Cold War, power was measured in reactors built or megawatts produced. Today, it is determined by who controls the data that sustains those reactors.

For partner nations, digital twins promise transparency, efficiency, and safety. For exporting powers, they offer a quiet form of leverage that persists beyond physical construction. As India pursues self-reliance through Make in India and Atmanirbhar Bharat, it must treat data infrastructure with the same strategic weight as fuel supply chains.

The aim should not be isolation from partners like Russia but reciprocal digital governance, shared access protocols, transparent algorithmic audits, and domestic data custody. Rosatom’s digital twin diplomacy exemplifies a future where technological cooperation and strategic caution must coexist.

The next great non-proliferation challenge may not concern uranium enrichment but data enrichment: who holds it, who protects it, and who decides how it is used?

May 24 (UPI) — President Donald Trump signed four executive orders to overhaul the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and hasten the process and deployment of new nuclear power reactors in the United States.

They allow agencies to build reactors on federally owned land, revamp the NRC, create new timelines for construction permits, and expand domestic uranium production and enrichment capabilities.

Trump on Friday signed the orders called: Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy, Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security and Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base.

Nuclear executives joined Trump, including Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez, who leads the largest operator of nuclear plants in the U.S.

Constellation wants to restart operations at Three Mile Island, aiming to bring the Unit 1 reactor back online in 2028. The Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island was the site of a partial meltdown in 1979.

“We’re wasting too much time on permitting and we’re answering silly questions, not the important ones,” the Constellation CEO said.

The agency is also reviewing whether to restart the mothballed Palisades plant in Michigan.

Dominguez said nuclear energy is best-suited to support artificial intelligence data center needs with consistent, around-the-clock service.

Between 1954 and 1978, the United States authorized construction of 133 civilian nuclear reactors at 81 power plants. Since 1978, the NRC has authorized a fraction of that number, and only two reactors have entered into commercial operation.

“Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion,” according to one of the executive orders.

Former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who now heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Energy Futures Initiative, said the moves could increase safety or security risks.

“Reorganizing and reducing the independence of the NRC could lead to the hasty deployment of advanced reactors with safety and security flaws,” Moniz, a nuclear physicist who served under President Barack Obama, said.

NRC overhaul

The 50-year-old independent NRC regulates nuclear reactors. The new executive order dictates reductions in force “though certain functions may increase in size consistent with the policies in this order, including those devoted to new reactor licensing.”

The NRC shall also create a team of at least 20 officials to draft the new regulations.

The order will not remove or replace any of the five commissioners who lead the body, according to the White House.

The NRC will work with the Department of Government Efficiency, the Office of Management and Budget, and other executive departments and agencies on the reorganization, according to the White House.

The public hearings process at the agency also will be streamlined, the executive order said.

New reactors

Trump’s orders also create a regulatory method for the departments of Energy and Defense to build nuclear reactors on federal land, the administration official said.

The commission will be required to decide on nuclear reactor licenses within 18 months and, within 60 days, the secretary of energy is expected to issue guidance on what counts as a qualified test reactor.

The order says that qualified test reactors can be safely operational at Department-owned or Department-controlled facilities within two years.

“Federal Government has effectively throttled the domestic deployment of advanced reactors, ceding the initiative to foreign nations in building this critical technology,” the order reads. “Our proud history of innovation has succumbed to overregulated complacency.”

Two new reactors that recently came online at Plant Vogtle near Augusta, Ga., took seven years longer than planned to build and came in $18 billion over budget.

The secretary of state is also expected to “aggressively pursue” at least 20 new agreements by the close of the 120th Congress “to enable the United States nuclear industry to access new markets in partner countries.”

“We’re also talking about the big plants — the very, very big, the biggest,” Trump said at the signing. “We’re going to be doing them also.”

Other changes

Another of the orders Trump signed seeks to fully leverage federally owned uranium and plutonium resources declared excess to defense needs.

Trump also wants a pilot program for reactor construction and operation outside the National Laboratories.

Within 240 days, the agencies are expected to develop management of spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste, and deployment of advanced fuel cycle capabilities “to establish a safe, secure, and sustainable long-term fuel cycle,” according to the order.

Additionally, the order directs the Department of Education to work toward increasing participation in nuclear energy-related apprenticeships and career and technical education programs.

The radiation containment domes at Arizona’s Palo Verde Generating Station were, truth be told, pretty boring to look at: giant mounds of concrete, snap a picture, move on. The enormous cooling towers and evaporation ponds were marginally more interesting — all that recycled water, baking in the Sonoran Desert.

You know what really struck my fancy, though? The paintings on conference room walls.

There were five of them, each representing one of the far-flung Southwestern cityscapes powered by Palo Verde. Two showcased Arizona: one for the Phoenix metro area — saguaro cacti and ocotillo in the foreground, freeway and skyscrapers in the background — and one for the red-rock country to the north. Another showed downtown Albuquerque. A fourth portrayed farm fields in El Paso, likely irrigated with water from the Rio Grande.

Then there was an image that may have looked familiar to Southern Californians: Pacific Coast Highway, twisting through a seaside neighborhood that looks very much like Malibu before the Palisades fire.

A painting of Pacific Coast Highway winding through Southern California, on display at Arizona’s Palo Verde nuclear plant.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

That’s right: If you live in Los Angeles County, there’s a good chance your computer, your phone, your refrigerator and your bedside lamp are powered, at least some of the time, by nuclear reactors.

The city of L.A., Southern California Edison and a government authority composed of cities including Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena all own stakes in Palo Verde, the nation’s second-largest power plant. In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, the plant was L.A.’s single largest energy source, supplying nearly 14% of the city’s electricity. The reactors supplied just over 9% of Edison’s power.

During a tour last month, I walked past the switchyard, a tangle of poles and wires where energy is transferred to power lines marching west and east. When all three reactors are running, the yard can transfer “the equivalent of half of the peak [electric demand] of the state of California on its hottest day,” according to John Hernandez, vice president of site services for utility company Arizona Public Service, which runs the plant.

“So it is a massive, massive switchyard,” Hernandez said.

For all the heated debate over the merits of nuclear energy as a climate change solution, the reality is it’s already a climate change solution. Nuclear plants including Palo Verde generate nearly one-fifth of the nation’s electricity, churning out 24/7, emissions-free power. Shutting down the nuclear fleet tomorrow would cause a giant uptick in coal and gas combustion, worsening the heat waves, wildfires and storms of the climate crisis.

Phasing out the nation’s 94 nuclear reactors over a period of decades, on the other hand, might be manageable — and there’s a case to be made for it. Extracting uranium for use as nuclear fuel has left extensive groundwater contamination and air pollution across the Southwest, especially on tribal lands, including the Navajo Nation.

“When we talk about nuclear, thoughts often go toward spent fuel storage, or the safety of reactors themselves,” said Amber Reimondo, energy director at the Grand Canyon Trust, a nonprofit conservation group. “But I think an often overlooked piece…has been the impacts to those who are at the beginning of the supply chain.”

Reimondo participated in a panel that I moderated at Palo Verde, part of the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. She noted that the nation’s only active conventional uranium mill — where uranium is leached from crushed rock — is located in Utah, just a few miles from the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation.

Waste ponds at Energy Fuels’ White Mesa uranium mill in southeastern Utah.

(Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Even during the Biden years, Reimondo said, it was tough to overcome bipartisan enthusiasm for nuclear energy and “get folks to take seriously the impacts that [tribal] communities are feeling” from mining and milling.

“We just haven’t reached a place in this country where we are listening to these folks,” she said.

That dynamic has remained true during the second Trump administration. Just this week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said his agency would fast-track permitting for a uranium mine proposed by Anfield Energy in Utah’s San Juan County, completing the environmental review — which would normally take a year — in just 14 days.

Burgum and President Trump, like Biden-era officials before them, say it’s unwise for the U.S. to rely on overseas suppliers for nearly all its uranium. But many environmental activists, even some who are fans of nuclear, believe running roughshod over Indigenous nations and public lands is disgraceful. And counterproductive.

Victor Ibarra Jr., senior manager for nuclear energy at the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, said rebuilding the U.S. nuclear power supply chain will require local buy-in — on the front end, where uranium is mined, and on the back end, where spent fuel is stored. Thus far, political opposition has derailed every attempt to build a permanent fuel storage site, meaning nuclear waste is piling up at power plants across the country.

If there’s any hope for more uranium mining and power plants, Ibarra said, it will involve a lot of conversations — conversations that lead to less pollution, and fewer mistakes like those made during the 20th century.

“I think it’s really unfortunate that the nuclear industry has behaved the way it has in the past,” he said.

The benefits of nuclear reactors are straightforward: They generate climate-friendly electricity around the clock, while taking up far less land than solar or wind farms. If building new nuclear plants were cheap and easy — and we could solve the lingering pollution and safety concerns — then doing so would be a climate no-brainer.

If only.

The only two nuclear reactors built in the U.S. in decades came online at Georgia Power’s Vogtle plant in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and cost $31 billion, according to the Associated Press. That was $17 billion over budget.

Units 1 and 2 at the Vogtle nuclear plant near Waynesboro, Ga., seen in 2024.

(Mike Stewart / Associated Press)

Meanwhile, efforts to build small modular reactors have proved more expensive than large nuclear plants.

“It would really be quite unprecedented in the history of engineering, and in the history of energy, for something that is much smaller to have a lower price per megawatt,” said Joe Romm, a senior researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. “We try to make use of the economies of scale.”

Those setbacks haven’t stopped wealthy investors including billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos from bankrolling efforts to bring down the cost of small modular reactors, in hopes that mini-nuclear plants will someday join solar panels and wind turbines as crucial tools in replacing planet-warming fossil fuels.

I hope they succeed. But I’m not going to spend much time worrying about it.

Like I said earlier: Love it or hate it, nuclear is already a huge part of the nation’s power mix, including here in L.A. We’ve lived with it, almost always safely, for decades — at Palo Verde, at Washington state’s Centralia Generating Station, at the Diablo Canyon plant on California’s Central Coast. Nuclear, for all its flaws, is hardly the apocalyptic threat to humanity that its most righteous detractors make it out to be.

It’s also not the One True Solution to humanity’s energy woes, as many of its techno-optimist devotees claim it to be. There’s a reason that solar, wind and batteries made up nearly 94% of new power capacity built in the U.S. last year: They’re cheap. And although other technologies will be needed to help solar and wind phase out fossil fuels, some researchers have found that transitioning to 100% clean energy is possible even without nuclear.

So what’s the answer? Is nuclear power good or bad?

I wish it were that simple. To the extent existing nuclear plants limit the amount of new infrastructure we need to build to replace fossil fuels: good. To the extent we’re unable to eliminate pollution from uranium mining: bad. To the extent small reactors might give us another tool to complement solar and wind, alongside stuff like advanced geothermal — good, although we probably shouldn’t spend too much more taxpayer money on it yet.

Sorry not to offer up more enthusiasm, or more outrage. The climate crisis is a big, thorny problem that demands nuance and thoughtful reflection. Not every question can be answered with a snappy soundbite.

Before leaving Palo Verde, I stopped by the conference room for a last look at the paintings: Arizona. New Mexico. Texas. California. It was strange to think this plant was responsible for powering so many different places.

It was strange to think the uranium concealed beneath those domes could power so many different places.

A painting of metro Phoenix, on display at Arizona’s Palo Verde nuclear plant.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

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