Earlier this month, a federal judge quietly dismissed a labor lawsuit that had drawn almost no media attention.

But the legal papers filed in the case—Dorrell v. Constellation Energy Corp.—raise serious questions about a nuclear power industry now positioning itself as both reborn and ready to power a generation of AI data centers and an American population using more electricity than ever.

The proposed class action, filed in July 2025 and amended that November, accused 45 nuclear companies and a consulting firm of violating federal antitrust law by conspiring to hold down the pay of the workers who run the nation’s reactors. The named defendants operated most, but not all, of the country’s 54 commercial nuclear plants.

The most damaging allegations do not come from the plaintiffs—three former nuclear-industry workers—but from the industry’s own former human-resources and labor-relations managers, quoted in the complaint.

An unnamed former labor manager at Exelon Generation Company said there was “significant collaboration and information sharing between nuclear power companies … with regards to compensation rates and union contracts,” and that companies shared that information “all the time” for the “specific reason” of “trying to screw the union.”

A former HR executive who worked at both Progress Energy and Duke Energy told the plaintiffs that compensation decisions at a nuclear utility were “never made in a silo.” The companies, she said, would “all work together to make sure [they] were in alignment” on pay. Before proposing salary-range adjustments, she would “pick up the phone” and trade “average salary, minimum and maximum, and incentives” with her counterparts at rival companies. The purpose, she said, was blunt: “we didn’t want to pay outrageous salaries.”

Other insiders described the machinery in operational detail. A former Exelon Generation labor manager said he “initiated and conducted bi-annual surveys to gather current and future compensation data from, and exchange current and future compensation data between, approximately 20 other companies in the nuclear power generation industry,” then distributed the results twice a year as “excel spreadsheets that contained detailed disaggregated and deanonymized current and future compensation data, organized by both company and plant”—an exchange that, he said, “allowed Exelon to avoid paying higher hourly wages than it actually paid.”

A former Workforce Relations Manager at Nuclear Management Company, the Xcel-owned operator, said “one of the big projects” of the Nuclear Human Resources Group “was to put together a library of CBAs,” explaining, “We shared our collective bargaining agreements among ourselves” so companies “had an idea of what other companies were doing outside of our own.” And a former labor-relations manager at Entergy Operations, describing the group’s annual meetings, put it simply: “[O]f course, wages would be discussed.”

According to the complaint, this was not a matter of employers watching the same labor market and independently reaching similar conclusions. It described an organized system: companies exchanged confidential union agreements through a password-protected repository, prepared twice-yearly reports comparing current wages and planned increases, discussed compensation at industry meetings, shared figures directly by phone and email, and took part in recurring pay surveys.

Colleges awarded 454 nuclear engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2022, and the commercial nuclear industry hired only 35 of those graduates.

The complaint pointed to identical results as evidence the sharing affected pay. In 2020, it alleged, Exelon paid non-licensed nuclear operators at its Oyster Creek plant $43.84 an hour—the same rate, to the penny, that Florida Power & Light paid non-licensed operators at its St. Lucie and Turkey Point plants. A year earlier, it alleged, the two companies paid electrical maintenance workers an identical $43.63 an hour. It also identified matching 2.5 percent raises across unrelated plants in both 2019 and 2020.

A peer-reviewed 2025 analysis by Idaho, Argonne, and Oak Ridge national laboratories found that adding 200 gigawatts of nuclear capacity would require about 215,000 construction workers at peak and up to 80,000 metric tons of uranium per year. A May 2026 USC Marshall/NCEA forecast by Vinoski and Hiatt found that the nuclear engineering workforce and skilled trades would need to roughly double. The same research identifies NRC operator licensing, with its 18- to 24-month training period, as the main limit on the speed of expansion.

The United States now has 94 operating reactors, three restarts underway, two unfinished AP1000 reactors, and about a half-dozen advanced designs in construction or licensing. The federal target is 400 gigawatts. Yet the latest ORISE Nuclear Engineering Enrollments and Degrees Survey found a shrinking education pipeline. Colleges awarded 454 nuclear engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2022, and the commercial nuclear industry hired only 35 of those graduates.

Those workers cannot be created overnight. Reactor operators require federal licenses; plant employees face extensive background, security, drug and psychological screening; and much of their training has little equivalent elsewhere. Roughly a third of the proposed class is unionized.

Most of the defendants fought the federal lawsuit, and for now they have prevailed. On August 5, U.S. District Judge Adam B. Abelson dismissed both antitrust claims, finding that they were brought outside the Sherman Act’s four-year statute of limitations and that the complaint did not adequately plead the exceptions that might extend that deadline. He also found the workers had not alleged enough facts to support their claim of per se wage-fixing.

The ruling did not establish that the alleged conduct never happened. Most of the dismissal was without prejudice, leaving the three named workers free to amend their complaint and try again. Only one piece—the information-exchange claim against the Tennessee Valley Authority—was dismissed with prejudice.

By the time of the ruling, the case had already narrowed. The plaintiffs had dropped four defendants in the fall of 2025—Exelon Corporation, Talen Energy, Omaha Public Power District and the consulting firm Human Resource Consultants, LLC—recasting them in the amended complaint as unnamed coconspirators. And in May 2026, three companies under the NextEra Energy umbrella—NextEra Energy, NextEra Energy Resources and Florida Power & Light—agreed to settle the claims against them. A settlement is not a judicial finding that the allegations were true, and such agreements typically include a denial of wrongdoing; but it meant part of the case ended outside the courtroom while the remaining companies fought on.

That contradiction goes to the heart of the industry’s revival. Nuclear reactors cannot run on investment announcements and soaring electricity demand. They require licensed operators, engineers and technicians—highly screened, extensively trained people entrusted with maintaining complex plants and responding safely when something goes wrong. These are precisely the workers the lawsuit alleged the industry spent years trying to pay less. Without them, even the most heavily financed reactor project is little more than concrete, steel and an unmet promise.

Those workers cannot be created overnight. Reactor operators require federal licenses; plant employees face extensive background, security, drug and psychological screening; and much of their training has little equivalent elsewhere. Roughly a third of the proposed class is unionized.

A successful motion to dismiss is not a resolution of that deeper problem. If nuclear power is to grow over the next decade, companies will need experienced workers to keep today’s reactors running and a new generation willing to build careers in the field. That requires competitive pay—and trust. An industry asking workers to help deliver its revival cannot afford the perception that, behind closed doors, its leading companies worked together to hold down their compensation.