Only three sites nationwide will be selected. Oklahoma is a finalist.
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Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus
Nuclear is more than a power plant. Universities, private companies, national laboratories and government partners work together: research, manufacturing, and the fuel lifecycle. Making fuel, using it, handling what comes back with recycling efforts and proper disposal.
A campus designs, builds, tests, licenses and trains, and the work that goes on there will impact Oklahoma's citizens and economy for generations to come.
Communities helping shape what gets built is part of Oklahoma's specific proposal to the U.S. Department of Energy — the places that host the campus help decide what the campus becomes.
It is not a single reactor with a fence around it.
The legislature ordered a feasibility study on nuclear energy in Oklahoma.
The Department of Energy asked states whether they wanted to host a campus.
The Corporation Commission asked whether this is possible here.
The state filed its response to the request, twenty-three answers long.
Oklahoma signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Energy.
Twenty-eight applications from twenty-six states. Five are left, and Oklahoma is one.
Now — as of
The Department of Energy selects three of the five finalists.
The clean sheet
Oklahoma is starting fresh on Nuclear. There is no aging fleet to keep running, no forty-year-old design decision to work around. A clean sheet is the chance to build it right the first time — current technology, current standards, and people trained for what is being built now.
The approach
This project brings benefits to the state of Oklahoma as a manufacturing, research, and education opportunity, and Oklahoma means to do it right from the outset — transparency and teamwork, with our communities and with the nation at large.
The whole state
A lifecycle campus pulls in aerospace, advanced manufacturing, materials and the supply chains underneath them — sectors Oklahoma already has and already builds in. It is a statewide industrial and research proposition rather than a power project with other things attached to it.
From oil and natural gas to wind energy, Oklahoma has been at the center of America's energy story.
The Nellie Johnstone No. 1 came in near Bartlesville — the first commercial oil well in what would become Oklahoma.
SourceEncyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture; Discovery 1 Park, Bartlesville
George Keeler noticed oil seeping from the ground near the Caney River in 1875. He and three other Bartlesville citizens spent years securing drilling rights from the Cherokee Nation before breaking ground. On April 15, 1897, a nitroglycerin charge brought in the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 at 1,320 feet.
It was capped until 1899, when the railroad finally reached Bartlesville and gave the oil somewhere to go. The well produced more than 100,000 barrels, and the boom it started drew Frank and L.E. Phillips from Iowa in 1904 to found Phillips Petroleum.
The Glenn Pool strike near Tulsa held the state at number one for the next twenty-one years. Statehood arrived in the middle of the boom.
SourceEncyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture
Robert Galbreath found his site on the Ida E. Glenn farm in 1901 and waited four years to lease it, until restrictions on Indian allotments eased. He and Frank Chesley drilled in complete secrecy to avoid the chaos that had followed the Red Fork discovery, completing the well on November 22, 1905 at 1,481 feet.
Glenn Pool's production made Oklahoma the leading oil producer in the United States by 1907 — a rank the state held for the next twenty-one years.
Oklahoma Natural Gas opened the valves on a line from the Osage leases to Oklahoma City on December 28, 1907.
SourceEncyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture
Oklahoma Natural Gas Company was incorporated on October 9, 1906 to pipe gas from the northeastern fields to Oklahoma City, which was then burning manufactured gas. It spent the spring and fall of 1907 laying line from Glenn T. Braden's Osage leases through Sapulpa to the capital, and opened the valves on December 28, 1907.
The field that made Oklahoma a gas state at scale came later and further west. Development of the Hugoton-Panhandle field began in the 1920s and spread north across the Oklahoma Panhandle; by the 1930s Phillips Petroleum was producing Hugoton gas in Texas County, from one of the largest natural gas discoveries in the country and a principal source of the nation's helium.
Six towns' electric companies combined into one utility: 4,107 kilowatts, 3,608 customers. A thousandfold growth followed.
SourceEncyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture; Tulsa Historical Society
Public Service Company of Oklahoma was incorporated on May 29, 1913, combining small electric companies in Vinita, Tulsa, Atoka, Coalgate, Lehigh, and Guthrie. Total capacity: 4,107 kilowatts. Total customers: 3,608.
Its oldest component, the Vinita Electric Light, Ice, and Power Company, had been chartered in 1889 — eighteen years before statehood. By the end of the century that same utility was delivering 4,083 megawatts to 509,000 customers. A thousandfold increase, from one company.
The Mesonet was funded with oil-overcharge settlement money. The instrument it built is what later found the wind.
SourceOklahoma Mesonet, History of the Mesonet; Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture
OU and OSU joined forces in 1987 and approached the Governor's Office. In December 1990 the Oklahoma Mesonet was funded with $2.0 million in oil-overcharge money from a court settlement, with each university adding nearly $350,000 for a total of $2.7 million.
The first towers went up in late 1991; 108 stations were operational by the end of 1993, and the network was commissioned on January 1, 1994. A 2009 National Research Council report called it the gold standard for statewide weather networks. Paired with resource mapping from the Oklahoma Wind Power Initiative, it is what made wind development in the state possible.
Oil revenue paid for the instrument that found the next resource — thirteen years before the first commercial turbine turned.
Devon Energy, of Oklahoma City, put horizontal drilling and slickwater fracturing in the same well. Every shale play since runs on that pairing.
SourceAmerican Oil & Gas Reporter; Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas; Continental Resources
Mitchell Energy had spent years working out a cheap slickwater fracture treatment for vertical wells in the Barnett Shale. Devon Energy, headquartered in Oklahoma City, bought the company in January 2002 and drilled its first horizontal Barnett wells that June and July, pairing Mitchell's fracture recipe with the horizontal architecture Devon had used offshore. The first five wells outproduced anything the field had seen.
The technique came home. Continental Resources, also of Oklahoma City, opened the SCOOP play in southern Oklahoma in October 2012, and the STACK followed in the Anadarko Basin northwest of the capital. Two decades from a combination nobody had tried to plays named for the counties they run under — and the same state doing the drilling.
Western Farmers Electric Cooperative signed the state's first wind contract in January and was commercial by December.
SourceU.S. Department of Energy, WINDExchange
Western Farmers Electric Cooperative signed Oklahoma's first wind power purchase agreement in January 2003, began taking test energy from the 74.25 MW Blue Canyon site that November, and declared it commercial on December 23 — a rapid undertaking driven by the pending expiration of the production tax credit.
Eleven months from signature to commercial operation, on a technology with no track record in the state.
Oklahoma passed California on wind capacity in the last quarter of 2016. It has 12,748 megawatts installed today.
SourceAWEA quarterly market reports; U.S. Energy Information Administration; Oklahoma Renewable Energy Council
Oklahoma added nearly 1,200 megawatts of wind capacity in the final quarter of 2016, passing California for third place nationally. It then held second behind Texas until 2020.
Today the state has 12,748 megawatts installed and ranks third in electricity generated from wind, producing roughly 9% of the national total. Wind generation grew nearly tenfold between 2010 and 2023 and accounted for almost all of Oklahoma's growth in net generation over that period.
SB 130 became law in May 2025 and directed the Corporation Commission to hire an outside firm. The study was delivered in March 2026.
SourceOklahoma State Senate; Enrolled SB 130; ASME; American Nuclear Society
Senate Bill 130, the Oklahoma Energy Initiative Act, became law in May 2025. It directed the Corporation Commission to engage an outside firm for a technical and legal feasibility study on nuclear generation in the state, and the legislature appropriated $375,000 for the work. The report reached the governor, the Senate Pro Tem, and the House Speaker by the March 9, 2026 deadline.
The precedent is older than it sounds. Shippingport, Pennsylvania reached criticality on December 2, 1957 and fed the Pittsburgh grid sixteen days later. Its reactor was joined to a steam plant designed and built by entirely separate firms — a conventional turbine hall with a new source of heat. That is still how it works.
Oklahoma is one of five finalists for a federal nuclear campus. Up to three states will be selected by the end of the year.
SourceU.S. Department of Energy; Oklahoma Department of Commerce
The Department of Energy reviewed 28 applications from 26 states and named five finalists — Oklahoma, Idaho, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Utah — each signing a memorandum of understanding to begin site evaluations for a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus. Governor Stitt signed Oklahoma's on July 27, 2026.
Up to three states will be selected by the end of the year. State officials have been clear that this is not a final site selection.
Oil beneath the ground. Wind across the plains. Now Oklahoma has the opportunity to help lead the next generation of nuclear technology.
