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New Jersey has become the sixth state in the last decade, and the second this year, to fully repeal its moratorium on building new nuclear power stations.
On a crisp Wednesday morning at the Hope Creek Generating Station in the southwestern corner of the state, Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed legislation lifting the de facto ban that barred construction of new reactors until the United States established a permanent solution for radioactive spent fuel. The Democrat, who campaigned last year on building new nuclear power capacity in the state, said the prohibitions had outlived any usefulness.
“For too long, outdated laws have kept us from even considering new nuclear facilities,” Sherrill said, as steam billowed from the station’s hyperboloid cooling tower behind her. “One law required any new projects to point to a method of disposal that, quite literally, does not exist. It was written in the 1970s, tied to a technological requirement that made sense then but not today.”
Located along a crook in the Delaware River, south of Wilmington, Delaware, and north of where the waterway widens into a bay, the single-reactor Hope Creek plant sits on an artificial island alongside the two-reactor Salem Nuclear Power Plant. Both stations are owned by the utility giant PSEG. Combined, the two generating facilities produce 40% of New Jersey’s electricity and 80% of its carbon-free power.
The Garden State enacted one of the nation’s earliest bans on new atomic power back in the 1970s, when the U.S. was still building out its fleet of reactors without any real plan for dealing with the long-lived radioactive waste piling up in glowing blue pools at plants around the country. At the time, state lawmakers amended the Coastal Area Facility Review Act to require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to establish methods for radioactive waste disposal before new construction permits could be issued. Sherrill called the condition “an outdated standard that cannot be met.”
In the 1980s, the federal government took possession of all nuclear waste, and it designated Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert as the first location for a permanent repository. Work finally began on the facility in the 2000s under then-President George W. Bush. But President Barack Obama then yanked support from the project shortly after taking office, in a move that the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office later determined was made for political, not technical, reasons. The U.S. effort to deal with waste has remained largely paralyzed since. The law stipulates that Yucca Mountain must be the first destination for nuclear waste, preventing the government from shifting focus to another location. But few, if any, lawmakers have mustered the political support to volunteer a site in their own states to replace it as the nation’s premier tomb for radioactive material.
Instead, federal efforts have recently pivoted toward recycling and reprocessing. Starting under the Biden administration and accelerated under Trump, a nascent industry of startups is forming around the promise to extract valuable medical isotopes from radioactive waste and turn the material into fresh reactor fuel. The Department of Energy just last week ended a contest for states to submit applications to host nuclear innovation campuses that include fuel enrichment and recycling facilities.
If banning nuclear plants made sense 49 years ago, when the environmental effects of burning fossil fuels weren’t yet fully understood, the availability of intermediate storage containers — many of which are produced in New Jersey, at manufacturer Holtec International’s factory in Camden — makes the point of the state law moot.
“It’s a textbook example of the kind of inefficient government I ran to change,” Sherrill said. “This bill requires projects to use safe, cutting-edge storage methods instead — methods that have been used thousands of times in over 35 states for the last 40 years with a 100% safety record.”
State lawmakers first tweaked the statute last year to open the door to development of small modular reactors, a type of as-yet-unbuilt machine that artificially caps the output per unit at 300 megawatts in a bid to spur developers to place bulk purchases. A failed bill first introduced in December aimed to both rescind the moratorium and establish a new tax credit for advanced nuclear power generation that would help finance construction of at least 1,100 megawatts of new capacity. That particular number matches the output from a Westinghouse AP1000, the leading U.S. reactor design and the only third-generation model in operation in the country.
The site where Hope Creek and Salem are located has room for at least one more large-scale reactor, said Samuel Roland, a research fellow who tracked New Jersey’s nuclear bill at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning Washington, D.C.–based think tank.
“My sense is that there’s a strong push toward another full AP1000-style reactor at Salem just because they already have the space cleared for it,” he said.
The structure of New Jersey’s electricity market makes building a nuclear reactor challenging. Like much of the U.S., New Jersey broke up its monopoly utilities in the late 1990s, allowing for more competition between generators within its statewide market, which is part of the nation’s largest grid operator, the 13-state PJM Interconnection. That system favors cheap, easily built power infrastructure. Unlike in the mid-20th century, when monopoly companies saw ever-expanding profits from growing electricity demand, today utilities’ balance sheets aren’t typically large enough to shoulder the risk of a multibillion-dollar reactor project. Nuclear construction flatlined in every state that liberalized its electricity market.
That makes tax credits with early or up-front payments a potential tool to encourage new reactors in New Jersey, Roland said. The risk with any major electrical infrastructure project like this, he said, is that the state’s Board of Public Utilities allows too much of the cost to be added to customers’ bills.
“The question just comes down to modeling here: What is the structure that’s most beneficial to New Jersey ratepayers?” Roland said. “Obviously, you have a lot of hyperscalers who are looking for energy and could be an anchor tenant and help pay for it.”
The bill Sherrill signed on Wednesday doesn’t answer that question. Instead, it simply eliminates the need for a permanent waste-disposal strategy to come before a new reactor. But she also signed an executive order establishing a task force to “convene leaders from government, industry, the environment, and labor” to study how to improve financing and supply chains, workforce training, permitting frameworks, and public trust.
“Safe nuclear can produce clean stable power at a predictable cost, protected from global price swings,” Sherrill said.
New Jersey isn’t alone. Across the Hudson River, New York has sought to leverage its state-owned New York Power Authority to help finance the construction of 1 gigawatt of new nuclear, part of a broader state plan to build 5 GW of reactors in the next two decades. California, which just won federal approval to keep its last nuclear station open for another two decades, is weighing a bill that would lift the state’s moratorium on building new ones. Minnesota is considering the same. While five New England states still restrict nuclear construction, all six signed a pact last month to explore the possibility.
Since 2016, five states — Wisconsin, Kentucky, Montana, West Virginia, and, most recently, in January, Illinois — have fully repealed their moratoria.
A clarification was made on April 10, 2026: This story has been updated to reflect that the New York Power Authority will help finance the construction of 1 gigawatt of new nuclear.
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