Romania's Surprising Bet on American Nuclear Technology
A former coal plant outside Bucharest is about to become the most watched nuclear construction site in Europe, and the choice of technology says as much about geopolitics as it does about engineering.
Romania is not the first country that comes to mind when you think about nuclear ambition. The country runs two aging CANDU reactors at Cernavodă, operates on a grid that still leans heavily on fossil fuels, and has spent the better part of two decades in failed negotiations with one foreign partner after another over its energy future. European partners tried in 2009 and quit. China tried in 2015 and got booted in 2020. Now the Americans are in, and unlike every arrangement before this one, something appears to actually be moving.
On February 12, 2026, shareholders of Romanian state nuclear operator Nuclearelectrica approved the Final Investment Decision for a 462-megawatt SMR plant at a former coal site in Doicești, about 90 kilometers northwest of Bucharest. The technology: six NuScale Power Modules at 77 MW each, designed and certified in the United States. The project company, RoPower Nuclear, describes this as the most advanced SMR project at the European level. Romania’s Energy Minister Bogdan Ivan called it “the transition from the analysis phase to the implementation phase.”
That is the good news. The rest of the story is more complicated, and it is worth understanding precisely, because Romania’s bet on American nuclear technology is not just a construction story. It is a strategic statement that carries implications well beyond a single plant on a de-industrialized river valley in Dâmbovița County.
How Romania stopped trusting Beijing and started calling Washington
The Doicești project did not happen in a vacuum. To understand why Romania chose American SMR technology, you have to understand what it chose instead, and why. 🌍
Romania’s only nuclear plant, Cernavodă, uses Canadian CANDU technology — pressurized heavy water reactors commissioned in 1996 and 2007. Plans to build two more units at Cernavodă (Units 3 and 4) stalled for years. By 2013, China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN) had signed a memorandum of understanding to build them. Six years of negotiations followed. They went nowhere. In January 2020, Romanian Prime Minister Ludovic Orban announced the partnership with CGN was not going to work. By May 2020, Romania formally terminated the agreement.
The timing was not coincidental. In August 2019, the US Justice Department had placed CGN and several subsidiaries on a trade blacklist, accusing them of acquiring advanced American technology for military use. And in that same month, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and then-US President Trump had signed a joint statement in Washington that, reading between the lines, left very little ambiguity about what Romania’s “strategic partners” wanted to see happen to CGN’s involvement in Romanian nuclear infrastructure.
This sequence matters for the Doicești story:
Romania removed a Chinese state company from its most sensitive energy infrastructure under American pressure
Within months, it signed an intergovernmental agreement with the US on nuclear cooperation
The NuScale MOU with Nuclearelectrica began in March 2019, the same month the geopolitical winds changed
The US Export-Import Bank eventually issued letters of interest for up to $3 billion in project financing
What looks like a commercial technology choice is also a geopolitical alignment, and no one on either side is pretending otherwise. The US Embassy in Romania explicitly calls the country “a key partner to support regional energy security” in its December 2025 strategic dialogue statement. The Heritage Foundation described SMR cooperation as an opportunity to counter “the malign political influence of Russia” in Central and Eastern Europe. Romania is on NATO’s eastern flank, neighbors Ukraine, and has zero interest in energy infrastructure controlled by Moscow or Beijing. American nuclear technology, with American financing, is therefore not just a power source. It is a strategic anchor. ⚛️
Think about that the next time someone tells you SMR contracts are purely about megawatt economics.
What the Doicești project actually involves
Setting aside the geopolitics for a moment, what is Romania actually building? 🔬
The site is the former Doicești coal-fired power plant, which has already had its old infrastructure removed. The plan is to build six NuScale VOYGR-6 modules on that footprint, with a combined output of 462 megawatts electric. That is enough to power roughly 400,000 Romanian homes and meaningfully reduce the country’s remaining coal dependence.
The engineering team is substantial:
Fluor Corporation, the US engineering giant, serves as main contractor for the FEED (Front-End Engineering and Design) work
NuScale Power is a subcontractor to Fluor, which is an interesting reversal of what you might expect from the technology licensor
Samsung C&T, the South Korean construction and engineering conglomerate, is also involved in the FEED phases
Studsvik Scandpower from Sweden has been contracted for nuclear fuel analysis software (CMS5), bringing in a fourth country’s industrial base
The construction timeline targets the first module in commercial operation in 2033, with subsequent units following. The FEED Phase 2 study was completed in late 2025, producing what NuScale CEO John Hopkins described as the data needed for the final investment decision: an updated cost estimate, schedule, and the safety analyses required for licensing.
Romania’s nuclear tech director Dan Șerbănescu noted that NuScale’s technology builds on half a century of light-water reactor experience, which matters more than it might seem — regulators and operators working with a technology that shares DNA with existing fleet designs start from a more solid knowledge base than a genuinely novel reactor type. What the plant adds on top of that familiar foundation is passive safety systems: the NuScale module does not require external power or active cooling intervention to prevent meltdown, a characteristic that significantly reduces the complexity of the emergency planning zone. That has implications for where you can put these things, and in a densely populated European country with strong public opinion on nuclear safety, it matters a lot. 🛡️
The FID and what it does, and does not, mean
Here is where a dose of realism is useful, because the FID announcement made headlines across Europe, and some of that coverage was rosier than the situation warrants.
The Nuclearelectrica shareholder approval on February 12, 2026 is explicitly conditional. The official documents describe a set of conditions whose fulfillment is mandatory for the project’s feasibility. Romanian Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan was admirably blunt about this at the announcement: “Given the very large amount of money, the complexity of such projects and the technology being in early days, I estimate we will not see the investment immediately.” 📋
The financial picture makes his caution understandable:
Total project cost is estimated at up to $7 billion by the Romanian government
The US government commitment is reported to cover approximately $4 billion of that — through a combination of EXIM Bank financing and DFC support
The remaining financing gap requires Romanian government support, private investors, and potentially EU funds
The pre-EPC phase, expected to last about 15 months, will nail down the Class 2 budget estimate and the contractual structure before any major construction begins
There is also an ownership complexity worth noting. RoPower Nuclear is currently owned 50/50 by Nuclearelectrica and Nova Power & Gas (part of E-Infra). Reports as of late 2025 suggest a restructuring in which South Korean firm DS Private Equity (DSPE) may take a stake, with Nuclearelectrica’s share dropping to 46.5%. Whether that restructuring closes cleanly will affect the financing timeline.
What the FID genuinely does is move the project past a critical decision point that previous proposals to Romania never reached. All those European partners in 2009? They never got here. China never got here. The fact that a formal, shareholder-approved investment decision exists, with a detailed engineering basis from a completed FEED study, is real progress. It does not guarantee construction starts on schedule, but it is not nothing. 💡
Does Romania’s conditional FID represent the model other European countries should follow, or is it a cautionary tale about how political alignment can move faster than project economics?
Why the rest of Europe is paying close attention
Romania may seem like an unlikely lead actor in Europe’s nuclear future, but that framing underestimates the country’s role in a specific regional dynamic. Romania is a member of the Three Seas Initiative, the grouping of Central and Eastern European countries sitting between the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black seas, many of whom are urgently looking for energy infrastructure that does not depend on Russian gas or Chinese capital. 🌍
The stakes are clear:
Poland is building its first nuclear program, also with American technology (Westinghouse)
Czech Republic is proceeding with a Westinghouse PWR at Dukovany
Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Slovakia are all in various stages of nuclear expansion or extension discussions
None of these countries wants to be the second one to commit to a new technology before someone else has proven it
Romania, if Doicești actually gets built and operates as designed, becomes the proof of concept for the entire region. Energy Minister Bogdan Ivan was direct about this: the shareholder meeting documents frame the FID as consolidating Romania’s position “at the forefront of the new European nuclear industry.” That framing is deliberate. Romania wants to be first, and being first comes with serious strategic benefits — preferred supplier relationships, accumulated regulatory expertise, and the geopolitical prestige of showing the region how to build energy independence on American technology.
This is also, it bears saying, exactly what US energy diplomacy has been seeking for years. The US-Romania Strategic Dialogue statement from December 2025 commits both countries to continued cooperation on SMR deployment, Cernavodă Units 3 and 4, and Black Sea energy development with American companies. The whole package, taken together, describes a country that has comprehensively reoriented its energy infrastructure around a Western technological and financial framework. That did not happen by accident.
The question Romania’s nuclear bet ultimately raises is this: if Doicești operates on schedule in 2033 and delivers power at the projected cost, how quickly do the other Three Seas countries sign their own NuScale agreements, and what does that mean for the global nuclear supply chain that will have to build all of them?