AtkinsRéalis Group Inc. ATRL-T +0.60%increase has launched efforts to license its Candu reactor in the United States, an opening salvo into a market that has traditionally been regarded as off-limits to foreign vendors.
The Montreal-based company submitted a notice to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, Tuesday morning, beginning the process to obtain a license for its Enhanced Candu 6, or EC6, reactor.
The application arrives at a moment when the U.S. government is working to discourage imports of many Canadian products including cars, steel and aluminum through tariffs and other measures. Yet AtkinsRéalis could benefit from a drive by U.S. President Donald Trump to reorganize the NRC with the explicit goal of speeding up licence applications for commercial nuclear power plants.
AtkinsRéalis is applying under a new streamlined process, known as Part 53, which compels the NRC to decide on granting licences for commercial power plants within 18 months. That deadline was imposed by an executive order Mr. Trump signed last May, which also demanded “wholesale revision” of the NRC’s regulations and large reductions in its staffing to remedy what he regarded as overzealous oversight.
Nuclear strategy raises questions about Canada’s predilection for Candu
The EC6 is an updated, 730-megawatt version of a 1970s-era reactor that was exported to Argentina, Romania, Korea and China. Because it’s not a first-of-a-kind reactor, and because it completed a prelicensing review by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission more than a decade ago, the company hopes the NRC might license the EC6 even more quickly.
“We’re shooting for 12 months,” said Joe St. Julian, president of AtkinsRéalis’s nuclear business.
The U.S. has traditionally been regarded as a difficult market for foreign reactor vendors to crack. Nearly all of the more than 130 reactors built in the U.S. decades ago used technology from four domestic vendors; most were boiling water reactors and pressurized water reactors, technologies the Americans also exported worldwide.
Partly for this reason, Mr. St. Julian said, AtkinsRéalis dedicated few of its marketing efforts to the country in recent years. But the company sensed an opening after Mr. Trump’s May, 2025, order, which demanded the NRC facilitate the expansion of U.S. nuclear generating capacity four-fold by mid-century, implying that hundreds of large new reactors are needed.
Mr. St. Julian said that only one U.S. vendor offers large reactors: Westinghouse Electric Co., which markets a large reactor known as the AP1000. He’s betting Westinghouse lacks adequate resources to build hundreds of them.
“The U.S. does not have the capacity to do that any more, given the fact that their entire nuclear industry has atrophied over 30 years.”
According to reports, the Trump Administration has opened talks with other foreign vendors, including South Korean diplomats representing Korea Electric Power Corp. Mr. St. Julian said AtkinsRéalis has been in talks with the NRC for more than a year, and the U.S. federal government has encouraged its application.
“We’re not sure how this is going to play out, but all signs and all dialog have been very encouraging for us to actually go there.”
AtkinsRéalis is also developing an updated version of its 1980s-era Candu 850 reactor, dubbed the Monark, which has a planned capacity of 925 megawatts. Mr. St. Julian said the company intends to seek an NRC licence for that reactor once it has completed licensing with the NRC’s counterpart in Canada, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
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Canada’s nuclear industry previously made forays into the U.S., with little success.
Decades ago, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., or AECL, (a Crown corporation and the predecessor of AtkinsRéalis’s nuclear division) designed a reactor known as the Candu 3U for the U.S. market, but it was never built or sold.
AECLmarketed another product known as the Advanced Candu Reactor 700 south of the border in the early 2000s. Intending to make a more compact, cheaper version of the Candu 6, AECL planned to use slightly enriched uranium fuel and light water as a coolant. It formed a partnership with a major American utility, Dominion Energy D-N +0.34%increase, to explore the possibility of building the reactor, and sought to license from the NRC beginning in 2002.
The NRC, though, advised that AECL would have to resolve a variety of technical issues to satisfy its concerns.
“The staff expects that the review and evaluation of the ACR-700 design will be more challenging, will involve expenditure of more resources, and may take longer to review than a typical light-water design,” it warned in a letter to the company in 2004, estimating the certification process could take longer than 60 months.
Shortly afterward, Dominion dissolved the partnership, citing concerns about how long the NRC review would take.
The NRC has since acknowledged that its regulatory framework was tailored to the American-designed light water reactors it was familiar with, and has cast Part 53 as a remedy. (Critics have made similar complaints about Canada’s regulatory framework, which evolved largely with a focus on the heavy water Candu technology.)
The drive to speed up NRC licensing decisions has worried some critics.
In a commentary published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last July, former NRC chairs Stephen Burns, Allison Macfarlane and Michard Meserve warned that the Trump administration had undermined its previous status as an independent regulator free from industry and political influence, and that its new licensing deadlines were “arbitrary.”
“We are concerned about the unintended safety consequences that a reduced NRC independence and a schedule-driven regulatory paradigm threaten to bring,” they wrote.
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