Adds comment from NEI, paragraph 3, background on loan office at Energy Department throughout

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON, May 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Energy is considering a plan to finance billions of dollars for components of large nuclear reactors that can take a long time to secure, the head of the industry group Nuclear Energy Institute said on Tuesday.

Items such as reactor vessels and steam generators can take years to secure, and the effort would attempt to reduce the time it takes to build large AP1000 nuclear plants. The DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"It's going to help several U.S. utility companies that are interested in AP1000 deployment," Maria Korsnick, president and CEO of NEI, said at her organization's conference in Washington about the financing plan.

President Donald Trump has set a goal of quadrupling U.S. nuclear power capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050, an aggressive target considering the last reactors built in the U.S. were about seven years delayed and billions of dollars over budget.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said that the biggest use of his Office of Energy Dominance Financing will be for nuclear power plants.

The office has hundreds of billions of dollars in financing aid, including loan guarantees for projects that struggle to get bank loans. During Trump's first term, the only use he made of the division, known then as the Loan Programs Office, was for financing reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia.