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With cheap natural gas and more efficient wind and solar power developments offering stiff competition, keeping existing nuclear plants operating and building new facilities that run north of $10 billion is becoming increasingly fraught.

“You have a major wave of [plant] retirements starts around 2030 [and]  when you look at the planning and permitting processes involved, we don’t have a lot of time,” Moniz testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Having a strong, robust nuclear sector will be an important part of achieving a highly decarbonized electricity sector by mid-century.”

While expensive to build and operate, nuclear plants offer an advantage to other carbon-free forms of energy: they produce steady, reliable electricity whether or not the sun  shining or the wind is blowing.

But even if the power industry opted to shift towards more nuclear, the lead times are long. Building a new nuclear plant takes eight years on average and costs between $10 and $12 billion.

With so much of the country operating under deregulated markets where the cheapest form of power wins out, federal officials are in many ways limited in how much change they can make.

But that could soon change. President Obama’s controversial Clean Power Plan – now being challenged in the federal courts – would force many coal plants out of the market, theoretically creating an opening for nuclear reactors. Also, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is reviewing its regulations to potentially raise rates for nuclear power, Moniz said Wednesday.

“Regulatory approaches today were fundamentally developed a long time ago in a very different regulatory system and physical reality,” Moniz said in an interview after the hearing.