Duke Energy operates 11 nuclear units across six sites in the Carolinas — a fleet that produces more than half of the region's electricity year in and year out. In 2025, that fleet posted its best capacity factor on record, north of 97%.

In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Steven Capps, Duke Energy's senior vice president and chief nuclear officer, walks through what's behind that performance and what comes next. Capps frames Duke Energy's nuclear strategy as "today, tomorrow, and the future," and the conversation moves through all three.

Topics covered:

• How Duke Energy pushed its fleet capacity factor above 97% in 2025, and the role of risk management alongside maintenance and capital investment.

• The subsequent license renewal program now extending Oconee and Robinson to 80-year operating lives, with Brunswick next in line and the rest of the fleet to follow.

• Capacity uprates underway at McGuire and Catawba that, combined with measurement-uncertainty-recapture work at Oconee and Brunswick, will deliver roughly 300 MW of additional nuclear capacity — what Capps describes as "the equivalent of a small modular reactor."

• The mechanical reality of an uprate: increased thermal megawatt ratings, more highly enriched fuel, and the secondary-side components — feedwater heaters, moisture separator reheaters, large pumps and motors — that have to be replaced to accommodate the change.

• Duke Energy's decision-making framework for new nuclear, tentatively reflected in the integrated resource plan in 2037, and why economics, not technology choice, is the gating factor.

• Career advice for engineers considering nuclear, from someone who has held more than 10 different roles across his own engineering career.

Capps grew up about 10 miles from Oconee Nuclear Station, earned a mechanical engineering degree at Clemson, and joined Duke Energy after graduation. Twenty years at Oconee, a decade at McGuire, and most recently roles in Duke Energy's corporate organization have shaped his view of where the fleet — and the industry — go from here.