NRC staff draft EIS favors licensing Fermi America's Texas AP1000s

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff have issued a draft environmental impact statement (EIS) that preliminarily recommends a combined license for Fermi America's four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Project Matador near Amarillo, Texas. It is an environmental finding, not a licensing decision. The plant would supply 4 GW to campus data centers. Comments close November 23, 2026.

Key facts

• NRC staff's preliminary recommendation is to issue the combined license (COL), "contingent upon successful completion of the safety review."
• The 45-day comment period ends November 23, 2026, under Docket ID NRC-2026-0100 and Dockets 52-051 through 52-054.
• Each of the four AP1000 units is rated at 3,415 MWt and at least 1,000 MWe net. They would sit on an 881-acre site within the 5,236-acre campus, next to DOE's Pantex Plant.
• The units would use dry cooling, with 160 fans per unit and no cooling water. Process water demand is estimated at 1.4 million gallons per day from municipal supply.
• The draft rates construction impacts on transportation and recreation as LARGE. It projects up to 8,200 workers on site at the construction peak.
• The safety review has no schedule yet. The site-specific final part of the application is targeted for December 31, 2026.

What happened

The NRC published the notice in the Federal Register on October 9, 2026 (91 FR 64702). Michelle Hayes, chief of Advanced Reactor Licensing Branch 2 in the Office of Advanced Reactors, signed it on October 5. The draft itself, ADAMS accession ML26261A417, is dated September 2026. It weighs the proposed action, issuing a COL for Project Matador Nuclear (PMN) Units 1–4, against alternatives that include a no-action option in which the NRC denies the application.

Staff say the recommendation draws on four inputs: their own independent environmental review, their assessment of the applicant-prepared EIS, consultation with federal, state and local agencies and Indian Tribes, and the comments received during scoping. The NRC is also using the EIS to meet its obligations under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, rather than running a separate process.

The impacts the draft rates above SMALL are concentrated in the construction years. Land use is rated MODERATE during building, because prime farmland would become industrial land. Air quality is rated SMALL to MODERATE, because emissions at peak construction could at times be noticeable. Housing is MODERATE. The draft rates transportation LARGE because traffic would exceed the capacity of Farm to Market Road 683. Recreation is also LARGE, because construction workers would outstrip the area's short-term housing.

The workforce numbers explain why. Fermi estimates 2,200 construction workers per unit, with unit starts staggered by about two years across a roughly 12-year build. Operations would need 600 workers for Unit 1 and 230 for each additional unit, plus 1,000 more during refueling outages.

Why it matters

The draft is a test of the NRC's applicant-prepared EIS pilot, which uses NEPA's sponsor-preparation provision, 42 U.S.C. 4336a(f). Fermi Inc., Fermi America's parent, says in its second-quarter Form 10-Q that Project Matador was the first project to complete the pilot's required steps. The NRC's July schedule letter estimated the remaining environmental work at about 1,000 staff hours and $175,000 in contractor support. The pilot is designed to shift the drafting to the applicant, with NRC staff verifying the result. NNN covered the wider push in the NRC's NEPA streamlining proposal, and argued in Core Analysis that the licensing path is now part of what developers sell.

The cooling choice matters in the Texas Panhandle. The draft finds that wet cooling towers and ponds would need a large water supply, which would be challenging in the area's semiarid climate. The nearest surface source of potentially sufficient capacity, the Canadian River, is about 15 miles away, and local groundwater use is subject to conservation district requirements. For comparison, the draft cites Palo Verde's spray ponds, which need about 15,000 gallons per minute of makeup water per unit. Air-cooled condensers avoid that demand, but the fans draw 20–40 MW per unit.

The project also stands out among data-center nuclear plans because it uses large reactors. The draft describes the units as behind-the-meter baseload for the campus's private grid. It is the only AP1000 project in NNN's data-center tracker.

Background

Fermi filed Part 1 of the application on June 17, 2025 and Part 2 on August 20, 2025. On September 5, 2025, the NRC accepted both parts and assigned the four dockets. At that point the project was called the "President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus." Fermi renamed it on February 20, 2026, describing the change as administrative. In the same letter, Fermi moved its final applicant EIS package from February 28 to April 27, 2026. The scoping notice followed on March 20.

The schedule has slipped once already. The NRC's July 21 letter set the draft EIS for August 2026 and the final EIS for December 2026. The draft arrived in September and was noticed in October. Fermi Inc.'s 10-Q plans to commission one unit per year from 2033 to 2036, about a year later for the first unit than its earlier plan. It also reports that Hyundai Engineering & Construction finished a front-end engineering design study in July 2026. Fermi's figure for total campus generation varies by document: the 10-Q says about 11 GW, while its October 9 release says 17 GW.

The AP1000 has held an NRC design certification since 2006, and Fermi's application references it. Units already operate at Vogtle in Georgia, as NNN's AP1000 explainer details. Our licensing hub covers how a Part 52 COL bundles construction and operation. For the wider pipeline, see every US plant under construction.

What's next

Comments are due November 23, 2026. The NRC project page targets responses in November and a final EIS in December. Part 3 of the application, the site-specific safety analysis, is due December 31, 2026. Once it is accepted, the NRC will publish a formal notice of opportunity for hearing and set the safety review schedule. The NRC has said it will finish the review within 18 months of a complete application, under Executive Order 14300. The mandatory hearing and the Commission's decision are still unscheduled.