The Senate voted nearly unanimously Tuesday evening to pass major legislation designed to reverse the American nuclear industrys decades-long decline and launch a reactor-building spree to meet surging demand for green electricity at home and to catch up with booming rivals overseas.

The bill slashes the fees the Nuclear Regulatory Commission charges developers, speeds up the process for licensing new reactors and hiring key staff, and directs the agency to work with foreign regulators to open doors for U.S. exports.

The NRC is also tasked with rewriting its mission statement to avoid unnecessarily limiting the benefits of nuclear energy technology to society, essentially reinterpreting its raison dtre to include protecting the public against the dangers of not using atomic power in addition to whatever safety threat reactors themselves pose.

Its monumental, said John Starkey, the director of public policy at the American Nuclear Society, a nonprofit of academics and industry professionals that advocates for atomic technology in the public interest.

The NRC, he said, is a 21st century regulator now.

This has been a long time coming, Starkey said.

In a rare show of bipartisan unity on clean energy, the House of Representatives voted 365 to 36 last month to pass its version of the legislation, called the ADVANCE Act. All but two senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) supported the bill in Tuesdays vote or abstained, with a final tally of 88-2. The proposal will now go to the White House, where President Joe Biden is all but certain to sign it into law.

It is widely considered the most significant clean-energy legislation to pass since the presidents landmark Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Republicans and Democrats recognize the development of new nuclear technologies is critical to Americas energy security and our environment, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the bills lead sponsor, said on the Senate floor Tuesday evening. Today, nuclear power provides about 20% of our nations electricity. Importantly, its emissions-free electricity that is 24/7, 365 days a year.

In a joint statement with the ranking Republican colleagues on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) called the legislation a much needed modernization of our nuclear regulatory framework.

The U.S. led the world in developing nuclear energy in the 1950s and went on to build by far the largest fleet of power plants, with more than 110 reactors providing more than one-fifth of Americas electricity. But as growth in electricity demand slowed in the 1970s and public concern over radiation issues grew, utilities struggled to afford the high cost of building new reactors.

As climate change put a new premium on nuclear energys massive output of low-carbon electricity, the U.S. looked to restart its reactor program in the early 2000s. But right as the cost of first-of-a-kind projects ballooned into the billions of dollars, the U.S. saw a drilling boom that increased the domestic supply of cheap natural gas. Coupled with inexpensive wind turbines and solar panels from overseas, U.S. nuclear companies lost deals to supply power. As a result, more than a dozen reactors have shut down over the past decade and just two new reactors were built.

That pair of reactors, which just came online last month at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia, cost more than $30 billion. As the expenses mounted, other projects to build the same kind of reactor elsewhere in the country were canceled.