The U.S. House of Representatives kept some tax credit incentives for new nuclear projects in its tax break and immigration megabill because the industry would die out without them, said U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Ooltewah.
Fleischmann, whose district includes Chattanooga and a nuclear hub in Oak Ridge, advocated for the House committee overseeing tax legislation to preserve incentives for nuclear projects passed in a giant climate bill signed by former President Joe Biden.
“Once they realized that it literally would have been the death knell to the new nuclear industry, it was preserved. My hope is that it would be preserved in the Senate,” Fleischmann said in an interview with the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
Nuclear projects would have ‘collapsed’ without tax credits, Fleischmann says
Fleischmann voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed by then-President Biden in 2022 after passing the House and Senate with no Republican support. He said at the time Democrats were “packing their climate agenda” into the bill in an interview with Fox Business.
“This is just bad legislation at a very, very difficult time in American history, so we’ve got to see it go away,” he told the TV network in 2022.