Last mentioned: Feb 24, 2026
Executive Order Issued
Pritzker formalizes the state's SMR strategy and creates the Nuclear Energy Development Office.
Moratorium Lifted
Gov. Pritzker signs HB 2473, allowing for the construction of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
CEJA Signed
The Climate and Equitable Jobs Act provides $694M in subsidies to keep existing nuclear plants operational.
Construction Moratorium
Illinois imposes a ban on new nuclear power plant construction until a federal waste solution is found.
Governor JB Pritzker has issued a landmark executive order to streamline the deployment of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) across Illinois. The directive establishes a dedicated state office to coordinate regulatory oversight and workforce development, positioning the state to maintain its lead in carbon-free baseload power.
This page surfaces every story mentioning Small Modular Reactors (SMR) across our climate coverage. We track each entity's appearance over time so readers can trace how the narrative evolves — which developments are isolated incidents, which build into longer arcs, and which reframe how operators in the space think about the entity. Story selection uses the same multi-source verification gate applied across the rest of our coverage.
Read our editorial methodology for how we identify, deduplicate, and score entity references. Our glossary defines the technical terms used across stories on this page, and our trends index contextualizes individual developments against the longer-running climate beat. Cross-entity comparisons live on our compare view.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Story count | Number of distinct stories where Small Modular Reactors (SMR) was a primary or referenced actor. |
| Recency clustering | Whether mentions are concentrated in a recent window (a news cycle) or distributed (a sustained arc). |
| Sentiment distribution | Aggregate sentiment of the stories mentioning this entity, weighted by impact score. |
| Cross-niche links | When the same entity surfaces in our sibling networks, we link to those views to enrich context. |