Will the Next President Get Nuclear Right?

The next administration’s energy challenge may be catching up with the homework assigned by the current one

By Matthew L. Wald

Nuclear energy doesn’t usually figure prominently in Presidential elections. It doesn’t rank high on the list of concerns for most voters—like inflation, reproductive rights, or managing the Mexican border—and a candidate who promises to get more reactors built won’t necessarily win a lot of extra votes. On the other hand, there are votes to be lost, among the “we’re-all-gonna-die” anti-nuclear crowd that still turns out at demonstrations now and then.

The nuts and bolts of implementing laws on the books that would help nuclear energy–that is, the administration’s actual business of administering–may be a more important issue.

Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has said a lot about nuclear energy. In 2020, the  Washington Post attempted to list the position of each candidate in the Democratic primaries on nuclear energy. It put Harris in the category of “Unclear/no response.” As a Senator, Harris voted against the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act in committee, citing safety concerns about the San Onofre reactors. More recently, at a September 25^th campaign event in Pittsburgh, Harris listed nuclear among other clean energy technologies.

Trump’s position is also vague. In an interview with Elon Musk in August 2024, Trump confused nuclear power with nuclear weapons. His campaign website states:

 President Trump will support nuclear energy production, which reached a record high during his administration, by modernizing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, working to keep existing power plants open, and investing in innovative small modular reactors.

It also calls for domestic uranium mining. But carbon dioxide emissions are not a factor; Trump often says that human-caused climate change is a “hoax.”

There are reasons that each candidate should like nuclear. Harris may like it as part of a climate program, and Trump as part of a nationalistic drive towards energy independence, although the United States has largely achieved this with fracking.

Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has acknowledged “all these crazy weather patterns,” and said, “if you really want to make the environment cleaner, you've got to invest in more energy production. We haven't built a nuclear facility, I think one, in the past 40 years.” Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, favored lifting Minnesota’s moratorium on new reactors.

But effective government is different from attempts at public persuasion. The administration of government programs, especially government contracting for procurement programs and subsidy programs, is governed by a welter of laws and procedures. There are opportunities for both expediting and slow-walking the process. Only time will tell if the next administration is up to the task of modernizing the U.S. nuclear sector for the 21^st century.

Once Upon a Time, on the Campaign Trail

But there is not much indication that either candidate is enthusiastic about nuclear.

The last time that nuclear energy figured prominently into a presidential campaign was in 2008, when Senator Barack Obama of Illinois promised Nevada Democrats that he would kill the Yucca Mountain waste repository in exchange for support in his race against Hillary Clinton. He won and he did.

Congress is a different case, and candidates often have something to say about nuclear energy in the areas in which they are running. As the Huffington Post recently pointed out, Democrats running for U.S. Senate in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, and Texas have spoken favorably of nuclear energy, something that is more often heard from Republicans.

But a president doesn’t always have a strong influence over nuclear energy. In the late 1980s, when the Long Island Lighting Company finished the Shoreham nuclear reactor, local governments said it was impossible to meet evacuation requirements and they wanted it shut down. President Reagan, a former paid spokesman for General Electric, which had designed the reactor, worked hard to assure it would open. That didn’t work. The plant operated for a few days of start-up tests and then was decommissioned. New York consumers are still paying the more than $5 billion bill for the project.

There are some policy questions on the horizon. One is the future of the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which received $2.5 billion under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The program was created to pay half the cost of two advanced reactors, and smaller sums for reactors not as close to commercialization. But since that time, the cost of steel, concrete and labor have all gone up. So too has the cost of borrowing money. The industry is hoping that the Energy Department will “re-baseline” the amount that the government will match and that Congress will appropriate more.  

There are some other presidential decisions ahead. An executive order by Biden, now in force, requires that the Federal government’s operations run on clean electricity by 2035, which would create a market for new nuclear. Trump, if elected, seems likely to rescind that order.

But the administration, aside from urging Congress to pass or kill legislation, does more; it also administers the laws that Congress has already passed. And in the last few years, Congress has passed many laws that now require the Department of Energy to issue contracts or write checks to assist nuclear projects, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reform its operation.

Among the initiatives:

HALEU

Most advanced reactors are designed to run on fuel enriched to nearly 20 percent, in contrast to the 5 percent enrichment that is commonly used now. The fuel is known as High Assay Low-Enriched Uranium, or HALEU. But fuel producers have been reluctant to invest in making that fuel because they are not sure that the advanced reactors will be built. So, Congress told the Energy Department to buy the higher-enriched uranium in an intermediate form suitable for various kinds of reactors to get the ball rolling and then sell it to the owners of advanced reactors.

In January, the Department of Energy announced that it wanted proposals for $2.7 billion in uranium enrichment services. It recently issued a list of four qualified contractors. This is a meaningful step forward, but it has yet to award contracts, negotiate terms, and take delivery. The next administration could slow-walk these steps or speed them up. The pace at which the Energy Department issues requests for proposals, evaluates submissions and makes decisions can be highly variable.

Gen 3+ and SMR

Almost all contemporary reactors are known as Generation 3, but there are more advanced models that still use low-enriched uranium and ordinary water but are designed to rely more heavily for safety on natural forces like gravity and heat dissipation instead of pumps and valves. Those are known as Gen 3+. Some of these designs are Small Modular Reactors, known as SMRs.

The Energy Department recently announced that it would accept applications until January 17, 2025 to share in $900 million available for 50/50 matching grants to support such projects. It will have to analyze the submissions, choose among them, possibly defend against lawsuits from disappointed applicants, and negotiate terms. The grants will be milestone-based, meaning that the recipients will have to demonstrate, to the Energy Department staff’s satisfaction, that they have met interim goals.

Money for this program has been authorized but not funded. Congress would have to vote to supply the money, which would be easier with support from the White House. Neither candidate has specifically addressed this question.

NRC Modernization

The ADVANCE Act (Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy) prompts the NRC to speed up the licensing of new reactors, including those with technologies that it is not as familiar with. The act also requires the NRC to develop a regulatory framework for fusion, issue guidance on licensing micro-reactors, and increase staff.

The NRC is an independent agency and the changes do not appear to require complicated bidding and contracting, as Energy Department mandates do. But it is notoriously slow to modernize. The commission would probably do better at modernizing if the White House rides herd on the commissioners, pushing, for example, for a workable licensing framework for advanced reactors. 

And, with one of the five commission seats becoming vacant every June 30^th, the next President will have to decide which nominees to back. Currently, there is one vacancy. The party that holds the White House designates the chair, and usually has dibs over three of the five seats.

With one exception—a rogue chairman—the White House has historically left the NRC to manage its own affairs. It isn’t clear that a Harris administration would break that pattern. And what Trump would do is even harder to predict.

Who Will Do the Work?

Laws are sometimes harder to implement than to pass. For one thing, it takes an agency that is fully staffed with competent bureaucrats—a real challenge.

Although Trump is proposing to move large numbers of civil servants into a category where he could dismiss them easily, a less obvious problem is filling top jobs that are already in the President’s purview. The Partnership for Public Service and the Washington Post track 817 important jobs that are filled by the President, with Senate confirmation. By their count, in Biden’s first six months, he nominated 304; Obama nominated 348 and Bush nominated 308. Trump, in contrast, nominated 213.

Anecdotal evidence is that lower-level jobs, many not subject to Senate confirmation, were filled more slowly in the Trump administration than in those of the presidents who preceded him or followed him.

Trump has already opted out of the government’s usual transition process, in which both major party candidates send over personnel who get security clearances and are briefed by incumbent officials on major issues. Some of the Department of Energy’s civilian nuclear energy work involves classified information.

But Democratic administrations have trouble getting things done too, and the obstacles to getting money out the door aren’t confined to nuclear. Congress voted massive stimulus bills in 2020 to keep the United States out of recession as the Covid pandemic set in with the CARES act. But two years later, more than $100 billion hadn’t been spent yet. By April of 2024, nearly $92 billion still hadn’t been spent. This was more than a year after President Biden declared that the Covid emergency was over.

It is also true that some of the demand for nuclear energy, current or future, doesn’t come directly from Washington. The electricity industry predicted a nuclear renaissance around 2008, not because of Congress, but because the price of natural gas had risen to $12 per million BTU. Many plants were proposed, but only two, Vogtle 3 & 4, made it across the finish line, partly because the price of natural gas fell to $2 per million BTU with the commercialization of fracking in shale.

That technique, which has changed the shape of the grid, is based on technologies nurtured by the Department of Energy for years, including supercomputing, directional drilling and 3d-seismic, but this certainly wasn’t a policy decision.

Now, the country is facing sharply higher estimates of load growth. Some of that is from policy initiatives, like subsidizing building owners to switch their heating systems to electric-driven heat pumps from natural gas, oil or propane, or programs to encourage electric vehicles. Some of it comes from the growth of data centers, which is a commercial trend, not a government program.  

And tech giants including Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all announced that they plan to put money into nuclear energy. So has Dow, the chemical company.

The commercial and policy ducks are in a row; an important task for the next president is to get the administrative ducks to line up too.