Trump wants to boost U.S. energy with nuclear power surge

When it comes to energy sources, the word “nuclear” still scares many people, says Caleb Jasso, a senior policy adviser at the Institute for Energy Research. But the word—and what it represents—could soon get rebranded in a much more positive way.

President Donald Trump is working to deregulate and promote investment in the nuclear energy sector, something experts say could reinvigorate the industry while providing massive benefits to the United States. The same experts are calling for Congress to act so that real progress can occur.

“Hopefully [these executive orders are] a step in the right direction of a rebranding of nuclear energy with a free market push to where people don’t necessarily think [of a] nuclear power plant as, ‘It’s going to melt down in my backyard,’” Jasso said.

The American people don’t need to worry about having another Chernobyl in their backyard or the prospect of bad actors getting their hands on a nuclear weapon, said James Coleman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was referencing the 1986 explosion of a nuclear reactor at a power plant in Ukraine that exposed hundreds of thousands of people to dangerous levels of radiation.

“The problem that happened at Chernobyl is, in many ways, very unique to the kind of reactor that was,” Coleman said, adding that only the Soviet Union used that type of reactor. “We never used anything like that in the U.S. because it was unsafe in many respects.”

The nuclear material in most civilian reactors cannot be used to build a nuclear bomb or cause a nuclear explosion. “Creating a nuclear weapon is actually very difficult, and it really depends mostly on the ability to refine and create those precise explosives,” Coleman explained. “Basically, there’s no possibility that a nuclear reactor would cause a nuclear explosion.”

In May, Trump signed four executive orders related to nuclear power. One of the orders seeks to increase the amount of nuclear energy produced in the United States and incentivize individuals to choose nuclear engineering as their career. One of the orders looks to speed up the approval process for building civilian nuclear reactors, while another focuses on speeding up the government testing process for nuclear technologies. The last of the four orders seeks to make nuclear reactors a key energy source for national security sites such as military bases and artificial intelligence facilities.

“I think the economics of the nuclear industry are more favorable than we’ve seen in decades,” AEI’s Coleman said. Sprawling data centers and artificial intelligence engines have created an increased demand for electricity, and other energy sources are hitting roadblocks in providing it, he said.

“If it’s wind and solar, they’re having a hard time getting the power lines built that they would need to go forward,” Coleman explained. “If it’s natural gas, you’re talking about challenges with natural gas turbines necessary for opening [up new sites for] new generation.”

Wind and solar energy sources also come with other problems, Coleman said. They have to have redundant energy systems so that customers don’t lose electricity on cloudy or very windy days. And many also fear that drilling for and processing natural gas could harm the environment.

“But the good news is that nuclear power—if we’re able to develop it, and hopefully get the cost down over time—it can provide extremely clean, extremely safe power,” Coleman said. “[It] will help us have the electricity we need … without any carbon emissions.”

Nuclear power is widely considered the safest energy source behind solar power, Coleman said. Nuclear power also generates relatively little waste, he added, and it never turns off the way that wind or solar power do. And that can come in handy for an artificial intelligence data center, said Jonathan Cobb, a senior communication manager at the World Nuclear Association.

“AI—the data servers and the computing power that is needed by that—will become quite significant going forward over the next two, three decades as that expands. And that’s why we’re seeing a lot of companies involved in that sector looking to nuclear energy,” Cobb said.

Public support for nuclear energy appears to be increasing. Roughly 61% of Americans support nuclear energy to some degree, according to a recent Gallup poll. About 35% of Americans still oppose nuclear energy either somewhat or strongly, the same report said. Back in 2016, a majority of U.S. adults opposed nuclear energy. Views were more evenly divided in 2019 and 2022, Gallup explained. Since then, support seems to have gradually increased.

Getting the cost down—especially for companies looking to invest in nuclear reactors—is a major hurdle, Coleman explained. But Trump’s executive orders could help. The high costs of going through the regulatory process in recent decades have kept out many companies looking to build nuclear reactors.

“The last new nuclear reactor came online last April,” said Will Rampe, a policy analyst at the Institute for Energy Research. “And prior to that, there hadn’t been a new one since 2016.”

The labyrinth of red tape that investors have to wind through to get a nuclear reactor approved has led not only to stagnant development but also to an exodus of nuclear experts from the United States, said Jasso, a colleague of Rampe.

Cutting regulations, on its face, could look like it would make a nuclear meltdown in Americans’ backyards more likely. But Jasso said the regulations haven’t been keeping people safe, and they aren’t needed to ensure future safety. “Cutting through unnecessary bureaucracy should not, in anybody’s mind, equate to taking shortcuts,” Jasso said. “By doing so, you are not putting at risk something like a Chernobyl.”

Technology has also improved significantly since nuclear reactors first began appearing on the map, Rampe said. So it is easier to keep the public safe from a possible nuclear disaster now than it was decades ago. And companies investing in private nuclear reactors also have a financial interest in making sure they don’t harm the public, he added. Keeping the government intimately involved with the nuclear energy sector doesn’t make things safer, Rampe said. It just slows the process down.

But before the government exits stage left and surrenders the spotlight to the free market, experts say that Congress needs to embed Trump’s executive orders into the federal legal code.

“Ultimately, executive orders don’t change the law, right? They’re basically directions to the agencies,” Coleman from AEI said. “And so to change the law [to] provide new funding for nuclear, preserve existing funding, change the permitting process for nuclear, all of those things, those need to be done by Congress.” But Coleman acknowledged that it was difficult to predict whether Congress would seek to eliminate regulations in the nuclear energy sector.

“I would say that it’s probably the most optimistic moment for nuclear power in the last 40 years,” Coleman said. “But that doesn’t mean that we know that a lot of nuclear is going to get built. It’s a big, open question.”