Washington wants a hand in Türkiye's next reactors. How big a hand is the open question.
At a roundtable for foreign press in Washington on 9 July, Thomas Hardy, acting head of the US Trade and Development Agency, said the agency is exploring cooperation with Türkiye on small modular reactors, the compact nuclear units the industry is betting on for the 2030s. Anadolu Ajansı asked him where Türkiye sat in USTDA's plans, and the SMR line was his answer.
Read the words carefully. Hardy said he met Türkiye's energy and natural resources minister this year and that the two reached a consensus on the "potential key role" the agency could play as Ankara weighs SMR investment. Potential. Could. Nothing is signed, no study is funded, no dollar figure is on the table.
What Hardy did offer was a nudge to watch this space. "I would be keeping an eye out in the near future for announcements for USTDA both in the public and private sector in nuclear," he said. He also placed the whole thing in its real stage of maturity: US industry is early, only a few SMRs have gone in anywhere, and there is, in his phrase, "a long road ahead."
The agency builds nothing itself. It funds feasibility studies and technical groundwork that help a country reach an investment decision, then steers American firms toward the contract once one exists. Hardy put the job plainly: to "seed the ground" so Türkiye can decide when the reactors are ready for commercial, fleet-scale deployment. Part of that, he said, is helping Turkish counterparts write the regulations an SMR rollout would need.
Why Türkiye, and why now. Ankara wants nuclear for base-load power, the steady round-the-clock supply wind and solar can't guarantee, and Turkish officials made that case to him directly. Hardy credited the agency's long run in Türkiye's geothermal and digital projects for the Energy Ministry's interest in closer work.
Here is the context it sits inside. Türkiye's first nuclear plant, Akkuyu on the Mediterranean coast, is a Russian build: four Rosatom reactors totaling 4,800 megawatts, the first unit due to start up this fall and eventually covering about a tenth of the country's power. That plant ties Türkiye's nuclear debut to Moscow, and everything since has been an effort to spread the risk.
You can see the spread taking shape. Türkiye has courted US and South Korean partners for a proposed second plant at Sinop on the Black Sea, and in June it agreed to study Canada's CANDU reactor technology as part of the trade talks in our Türkiye and Canada free-trade piece. On the private side, the conglomerate IC Holding has tied up with US firm ARC Clean Technology on a plan for up to 20 small reactors, 10 of them in Türkiye. Ankara's stated target is 20 gigawatts of nuclear by 2050, a fifth of it from SMRs.
The USTDA track is the newest thread and the thinnest so far. A friendly meeting, a shared sense that the agency could help, a promise of announcements later. For a country trying to buy its way out of single-supplier dependence, an American foot in the door is worth having. Whether it becomes a study, a contract, or just a warm readout is the thing to watch when those announcements land.