Kiewit Exec Sees $1B-a-Year Opportunity in Nuclear Construction
According to Construction Dive, Kiewit expects its nuclear construction business to grow into a billion-dollar-a-year line of work, with revenue in the segment roughly doubling year over year since 2022. Mike Rinehart, president of Kiewit’s nuclear solutions unit, told the outlet the Omaha, Nebraska-based general contractor now has more than 10 commercial nuclear projects underway alongside a dozen more under Department of Energy programs.
The growth is being driven by surging electricity demand from technology companies and the federal government. The DOE is offering loans of up to $17.5 billion to utilities and other energy firms to help develop 10 nuclear reactors across five sites, under a June 23 announcement. Earlier this year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its first commercial nuclear reactor construction permit in nearly a decade, to a TerraPower subsidiary backed by Bill Gates.
“Kiewit sees the nuclear business for us being a billion-dollar-a-year business or more, easily. That’s the scale that we see it at,” Rinehart said. He linked the surge to broader electrification trends beyond AI data centers, including EV adoption and the retirement of aging coal and fossil generation assets that renewables alone can’t replace at scale.
Rinehart declined to single out one segment as the biggest opportunity, pointing to small modular reactors, large reactors, and DOE-backed work as complementary rather than competing. “Not all automobiles are created the same,” he said, comparing large reactors to semi trucks and SMRs and microreactors to vehicles built for narrower, specific jobs.
On execution risk, Rinehart said the core challenge isn’t regulation but program integration — getting engineering, procurement, and construction fully aligned with regulators, local authorities, and utility owners across complex, first-of-a-kind projects. “Getting full integration and a truly seamless program to be able to manage the risk, quantify the risk and accurately report out on what’s happening on the job is the larger challenge in the industry right now,” he said.
He was notably unworried about skilled-trades labor availability, citing Kiewit’s recurring building trades task force and quarterly coordination with national trade unions. The bigger constraint, he said, is materials: standard commodities like steel, pipe, and electrical equipment such as transformers and switchgear are already stressed, and the specialized NQA-1 supply chain for safety-related nuclear components can’t support current demand. Rinehart said tier-one EPCs including Kiewit are moving toward “commercial grade dedication” — qualifying commercial-source materials through additional engineering, lab testing, and oversight to meet nuclear quality standards without waiting on a thin specialty supply base.
What It Means for Subcontractors: A billion-dollar-a-year nuclear pipeline at a single tier-one EPC signals sustained demand for skilled trades, welding, electrical, and heavy-civil subcontractors willing to work through NQA-1 quality requirements — a market many field-services firms haven’t bid into in decades. The materials bottleneck Rinehart flagged (transformers, switchgear, safety-related components) also points to opportunity for subs who can support commercial-grade dedication testing and documentation, a capability gap likely to open bid opportunities beyond the traditional nuclear-qualified supplier base.
