On Breaking Nuclear Things

What to make of the Trump Administration’s Nuclear Dominance Agenda

By Ted Nordhaus

For a few years now, I’ve sent out a regular update to Breakthrough’s nuclear supporters on the status of efforts to commercialize a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the pace of change, for better or worse, has been head-spinning and not always easy to keep track of, much less make sense of. So I thought this would be a good time to share my take on what the administration’s evolving strategy appears to be and what it portends for the future of the nuclear sector in the United States with a wider audience. What follows is an edited version of my August update. Paid subscribers are welcome to provide reactions, feedback, and alternative takes in the comments.

In my last update, in the spring, I observed that while there was enormous uncertainty about how the second Trump administration intended to proceed on nuclear, the one thing that seemed certain was that one way or another, the administration intended to break things:

When I speak of the uncertainty around the administration’s agenda, I mean that not just in the normal sense of uncertainty about what a new administration is going to try to do and how it is going to do it. This is a norm-breaking administration and I think that it is likely, for better or worse, to break a lot of long-standing norms around how nuclear is regulated, built, and financed. I say that with no foreknowledge of what that might entail. It’s just a hunch. But I don’t think I’m alone in that assessment and we should not be surprised if this administration goes way out of the box and attempts to break things in order to get nuclear built very quickly.

Almost everything that has transpired since I wrote those words has proven them prescient. In May, the administration issued a sweeping series of executive orders directing the NRC to revamp its entire regulatory code in the next 18 months, reevaluate its linear no-threshold radiological health model, and establish a numerical limit for low dose exposure to ionizing radiation. It has directed the Departments of Energy and Defense to make federal sites available for new reactors and invoked the Defense Production Act to designate data centers as critical infrastructure, allowing reactors approved by DOE and DOD to sell commercial power to those facilities.

Later in May, the administration permitted a new uranium mine in Utah in two weeks. In June, President Trump removed a Democratic NRC commissioner, former chair Chris Hanson, from the commission while DOGE forced the resignation of a Republican commissioner and the agency’s executive director and senior deputies.

Then this month, the Department of Energy named 10 new reactor developers who will demonstrate their first reactors at a new pilot site at the Idaho National Laboratory, with several expected to have demonstrated reactors operating next year. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, has signed contracts with Radiant Energy, X-energy, and Oklo to deliver mass-manufactured reactors to military bases.

Like many of the administration’s initiatives, it’s not clear that all of this is legal. It is also not clear if that will matter. The clear imperative is to create new facts on the ground as quickly as possible—new reactors, mines, fuel fabrication facilities, and similar. Despite a lot of skepticism from many quarters, there is a decent chance they will succeed with some number of demonstrations or first of a kind micro-reactors deployed within the next few years.

There has been a lot of concern that the Trump Administration intended to eliminate the NRC entirely, or to reorganize it under the auspices of the Department of Energy. But that, for the moment at least, does not appear to be the plan. By law, commercial reactors must be licensed by a vote of no fewer than three NRC commissioners. Attempting to license commercial reactors without the commission would result in a legal nightmare, handing nuclear opponents a strong legal basis to challenge every new reactor license, or relicensing, across the country. The administration has just nominated a new commissioner, Ho Nieh, to the commission, lending further credence to the notion that it is not planning to get rid of the NRC entirely. Nieh was, until 2021, the director of the NRC’s Nuclear Reactor Regulation division, and was widely regarded as among the most committed senior leaders at the agency to regulatory modernization.

So there does appear to be some method to the madness. The administration’s approach will be to expedite licensing and deployment of new advanced reactors, primarily micro-reactors, by licensing them under the authorities of DOE and DOD and then deploying them initially at military bases, while very substantially revamping the NRC licensing and regulatory frameworks at the same time. Once these technologies are demonstrated, and the first reactors deployed at military installations, firms will apply to the NRC for commercial licenses under the new rules, allowing broader commercialization.

This appears to be the basis of the controversial statement attributed to the DOGE lead at the NRC that he expected the agency to “rubberstamp” reactor designs. Generously, this statement might be interpreted to mean that NRC will have data from operating reactors at military bases to evaluate, and a much simpler, downsized licensing framework that the agency will be using to expeditiously license reactors that have already been proven through initial military deployments. Less generously, the word means exactly what it means, and the Administration expects the agency to not look too hard at the safety or efficacy of new reactor technologies. The truth likely lies somewhere in between.

One lesson from this is just how much the imaginations of not only nuclear opponents, but also most mainstream proponents, were constrained by the legacy technologies, institutions, politics, and history. The effort to reboot the US nuclear sector was happening slowly and now all at once. We at Breakthrough have long argued that the federal government could drive rapid innovation and development of new nuclear technology. We even authored a report in 2019 arguing that early deployment of microreactors through federal procurement and advanced market commitments would be the fastest and cheapest public policy to get advanced nuclear technology commercialized and moving down a cost curve. But I’d be lying if I said that I saw the current effort coming.

That doesn’t mean that any of it will necessarily go well. As I noted in my last update, all the policy support in the world won’t matter if a new wave of nuclear developers can’t figure out how to deliver new technology on time and on budget and, in the case of small and micro-reactors, succeed in mass manufacturing reactors and achieving big productivity gains so they get cheap enough to compete in competitive energy markets. Notably, a number of the developers named by DOE to deploy microreactors at INL do not appear to have done even basic engineering of their proposed designs. It is not at all clear how some firms will manage to deploy actual reactors that achieve criticality in the next year, much less how they will do so safely.

There is also, without question, a fine line between right-sizing nuclear safety regulation and bypassing regulation and safety evaluation entirely. A wave of failures and accidents, even if they don’t result in significant releases of radiation, could hinder public and policy-maker support for nuclear energy. And there is significant risk that efforts to take a chainsaw to the NRC will create more regulatory uncertainty than it eliminates, at least in the short term.

But whether this administration gets any or all of it right, the current moment should establish that when political leaders get truly serious about nuclear energy, it is possible to go much faster than has historically been the case in the US and most other countries. As a result, and for better or worse, the business, economic, technological, and political landscape for nuclear energy is likely to look radically different in the coming years than it does today. What exactly it looks like, and whether the sector will be better able to meet America and the world’s energy needs than it is today is anyone’s guess.