Peering across the bay, Cedar Key residents scan the contours of a now-defunct nuclear power plant. Duke Energy’s Crystal River Nuclear Plant is a relic of the 1970s nuclear-buildout boom, predating the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island and the industry’s subsequent overhaul.
The view is hardly unwelcome for Michael Presley Bobbitt as he wades knee-deep into the Cedar Key estuary, hunting for clams and hoping a nuclear renaissance is afoot.
Rapid sea-level rise threatens the 50-year-old writer and clam farmer’s livelihood. That’s one reason Bobbitt supports the uptake of clean-energy technologies, such as nuclear power. Green tech could be critical in the fight to sustain Cedar Key’s delicate ecosystem, he said—and his clamming enterprise.
“When you live as close to the Gulf of Mexico as I do, protecting the environment is, you know, No. 1,” Bobbitt said. We’re affected by coastal change already.”
Fossil fuel emissions contribute to rising water temperatures and coastal erosion. When the ocean gets too warm, clams may stop feeding, close their shells and die. Wide-scale population loss would devastate the clamming industry, aligning Bobbitt’s interests with nuclear power, a carbon-free alternative to coal and natural gas.
At its peak, the Crystal River plant generated roughly 860 megawatts of electricity — enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes — before it officially closed in 2013. The facility was among 12 such sites that shuttered in the U.S. between 2012 and 2021, primarily due to economic challenges. The closures removed nearly 10% of the country’s total nuclear generating capacity at the time.
But not all hope is lost for those like Bobbitt, who's betting on a nuclear comeback.
Duke Energy Florida signaled as recently as 2024 that it’s open to future nuclear projects. While the utility has no concrete plans to construct new reactors, it’s not ruling out revisiting a build it formally shelved almost a decade ago in southern Levy County, about 8 miles from the Crystal River plant.
The prospect of a nuclear buildout in Florida comes amid renewed interest in the technology as the aging U.S. electrical grid comes under strain. Electricity demand has spiked in recent years as the world becomes more electrified and power-hungry technologies, such as artificial intelligence, lap up more of the increasingly stressed supply.
The state will have to weigh competing priorities as it diversifies its energy portfolio.
Going nuclear… almost
In the mid-2000s, Progress Energy had big nuclear ambitions. The utility was preparing to wring more power from its plant in Crystal River and considering a new build on nearby land. Construction mishaps and the global financial crisis derailed those plans.
While attempting to replace Crystal River’s aging generators, workers cracked part of the structure, damaging it beyond repair. At the Levy site, a confluence of unforeseen circumstances and financing issues slowed momentum. Costs ballooned from early estimates of around $14 billion to nearly $25 billion.
Then, the project changed hands. Duke Energy acquired Progress in 2012, assuming control of the Levy site and its associated complications. Spending continued to snowball, and shortly thereafter, work on the plant stalled.
Although it never broke ground on the proposed reactors, Duke ultimately spent $871 million on the project, costs borne by its Florida customers, according to Charles J. Rehwinkel, deputy public counsel with the Florida Office of Public Counsel.
When the dust settled and all expenses, including contract-termination fees, were tallied, the tab came to about $1 billion.
“That was pretty much a disaster from a customer standpoint,” said Rehwinkel, who represents Florida ratepayers in state utility matters.
A state law designed to encourage investment in nuclear electric generation allows utilities to charge ratepayers in advance for a plant’s financing and pre-construction costs. Even if the project never materializes, customers are on the hook.
While the original Levy plan was canceled, Duke requested in 2024 that the land where the reactors were once slated for construction be added back to the rate base.
In a case it filed with the Florida Public Service Commission, which regulates investor-owned utilities, Duke said it might use the site for future solar or nuclear projects. Following a settlement, the cost of the land was excluded from customer rates.
Duke’s filing doesn’t suggest any solid nuclear commitments. Notably omitted from its most recent 10-year site plan — the document utilities provide the PSC outlining long-term construction intentions — is a nuclear plant at the Levy site.
“Advanced nuclear overall is still a longer-term option,” Duke spokeswoman Ana Gibbs told WUFT.
If that were to change, regulators would need to start the assessment process anew.
“The FPSC’s decisions with regard to any power plant need determination or cost recovery requests would be based solely upon the evidence presented on a proposed project,” the agency wrote in an email. “[They] would not be impacted by any previous project.”
Florida currently hosts two active commercial nuclear power sites, one on Hutchinson Island and another on Biscayne Bay. Reactors at those facilities, both operated by Florida Power & Light, generate roughly 11% to 13% of the state’s electricity.
A new power paradigm
Utilities must grapple with the challenges of an aging electrical grid. Updates to electricity infrastructure have long been accomplished piecemeal, at the local level. The U.S. has not engaged in a comprehensive nationwide grid overhaul since the mid-20th century.
The energy needs of today look a lot different from those of the 1960s — or even 2021, for that matter.
Since the onset of the artificial intelligence boom in 2022, electricity demand has soared. Data centers, the sprawling warehouses where AI models are trained, slurp up a ton of electricity to perform complex computations. These facilities could account for half of all power demand growth in the U.S. through the rest of the decade, the International Energy Agency estimates.
Many states won’t be able to handle the extra load without expanding their energy mix, according to Scott Holladay, an associate professor of economics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Tech giants have tapped nuclear energy to service some of their data centers’ power needs, but haven’t done so on a large scale.
While mega-cap companies operate somewhat above the political fray and aren’t as easily bogged down in bureaucracy, firms like Amazon and Google face similar timelines for bringing new nuclear power online as traditional utilities.
“Data centers are coming online really quickly, and nuclear power plants obviously take a very long time to build,” Holladay said. “And so it’s not clear that we could get the nuclear plants built when the data centers need them.”
That’s one reason tech players still rely heavily on natural gas: It remains cheaper — at least in terms of upfront costs — and far less complicated than the transition to renewables. To some, recent challenges at a Georgia nuclear facility illustrate that reality.
Georgia Power had worked for years to update reactors at its Vogtle nuclear plant. One of its stated goals was to better serve the state’s growing base of industrial- and data-center clients. But the project, completed in 2024, suffered severe delays and cost overruns, bringing the bill to about $35 billion — far exceeding an initial estimate of $14 billion.
Georgia Power has raised rates for its nearly 3 million customers to begin recouping those costs.
Addressing safety
Not everyone is ready to embrace nuclear power. While public sentiment has shifted over the years, some still harbor safety concerns — especially those who lived through the high-profile nuclear accidents of the late 1970s and ‘80s.
But Pete Burger, a retired healthcare worker in Williston, isn’t worried. Burger, who remembers the accident at Three Mile Island, said he’s confident changes to plant design have addressed the issues that plagued the site, which experienced a partial meltdown in 1979.
“There’s not a whole lot of problems with [reactors] anymore,” Burger said. “I think the safety measures are there.”
Nuclear safety standards became far more robust in the wake of the incidents at Three Mile Island in New York, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan. Regulators stressed hazard prevention, ushering in advancements in radiation detection and reactor testing.
Andreas Enqvist, an associate professor in UF’s nuclear engineering department, underscored the rigor of radiation-detection systems in modern plants.
Nuclear power facilities are equipped with an array of sensors that monitor the environment within the reactor and the nuclear material itself. When radiation levels exceed safety thresholds, sensors alert the plant’s operator, who can quickly turn off the reactors. Sensors also detect seismic activity, which triggers automatic shutdowns.
“Interestingly enough, if you compare a nuclear power plant to a coal power plant, there’s usually about three times more radiation [in the 50-mile vicinity] outside of a coal power plant,” Enqvist said. “And that kind of speaks to just how well implemented some of these radiation checks are.”
Workers at nuclear sites are often scanned for radiation before and after they enter the facility to ensure their safety, he added.
Even before reactors are installed, engineers test for deficiencies. Justin Watson, also of UF’s nuclear engineering program, uses advanced computer simulations to study reactor kinetics.
Watson and his colleagues write computer code to model reactor behavior under adverse conditions. The researchers test their simulations against the findings of existing experiments to identify flaws in a reactor’s design.
“So it’s not just something of, oh, I write up a code, here’s my result — it works,” Watson said. “No, we don’t trust it; we [validate] it with experimental data.”
Promise and peril
Nuclear projects tend to be additive to their host communities.
Building a plant requires thousands of workers. Once online, facilities can staff hundreds of people, often at competitive salaries, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
The prospect of job creation has Warren Thomas, a farmer based in Archer, excited about a nuclear-powered future. Thomas said he’d love to see a nuclear plant come to North Central Florida, where he knows plenty of contractors in need of work.
Large infrastructure projects can also juice a community’s tax base. Nuclear plants are frequently the largest taxpayer in their locality.
Thomas’ advice to Florida utilities and policymakers: “Get her done.”
That certainly won’t be easy.
The biggest hurdles utilities will encounter with nuclear power aren’t technical; they’re procedural, said Christopher Thomas, an associate professor of economics at the University of South Florida. He and Warren Thomas share no relation.
The regulatory burdens associated with nuclear projects can make their construction cost-prohibitive, he said. Before a utility can build a new plant, it must receive the green light from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that licenses and regulates civilian nuclear projects.
That process, from proposal to approval, can take between two and 10 years. Throw into the mix a series of tests and cost analyses, and a project can drag on for far longer than a utility initially anticipated.
Christopher Thomas is no fan of red tape.
“This is an opportunity for the Florida bureaucrats to show that they actually can efficiently oversee this [kind of] project,” he said. “They’re the ones that are getting in the way.”
As with any undertaking of this scale, when there’s big money on the line, things tend to get political.
What Florida needs is one successful nuclear project to demonstrate viability and to catalyze more development, Professor Thomas said, adding that the state’s energy resilience and economic productivity depend on it.
“I think Florida needs to send a signal that we’re going to be friendly to energy-intensive industries, like AI, for one,” he said. “I’m very hopeful, and I’m modestly optimistic.”