Draft Executive Orders Aim to Speed Construction of Nuclear Plants

New York Times

09-05-2025

The Trump administration is considering several executive orders aimed at speeding up the construction of nuclear power plants to help meet rising electricity demand, according to drafts reviewed by The New York Times.
The draft orders say the United States has fallen behind China in expanding nuclear power and call for a 'wholesale revision' of federal safety regulations to make it easier to build new plants. They envision the Department of Defense taking a prominent role in ordering reactors and installing them on military bases.
They would also set a goal of quadrupling the size of the nation's fleet of nuclear power plants, from nearly 100 gigawatts of electric capacity today to 400 gigawatts by 2050. One gigawatt is enough to power nearly 1 million homes.
'As American development of new nuclear reactor designs has waned, 87 percent of nuclear reactors installed worldwide since 2017 are based on Russian and Chinese designs,' reads one draft order, titled 'Ushering In a Nuclear Renaissance.'
'These trends cannot continue,' the order reads. 'Swift and decisive action is required to jump-start America's nuclear renaissance.'
The four draft orders are marked 'pre-decisional' and 'deliberative.' They are among several potential executive orders on nuclear power that have been circulating but it is not clear which, if any, might be issued, according to a person familiar with the discussions, who spoke on a condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
It also was not immediately clear who had written the draft orders or what stage of internal administration discussions the documents reflected. The White House declined to comment on whether any orders would ultimately be issued.
In one of his first acts in office, President Trump declared a 'national energy emergency,' saying that America had inadequate supplies of electricity to meet the country's growing needs, particularly for data centers that run artificial intelligence systems. While most of Mr. Trump's actions have focused on boosting fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, administration officials have also supported nuclear power.
'Our goal is to bring in tens of billions of dollars during this administration in private capital to get reactors built, and I'm highly confident we will achieve that goal,' Chris Wright, the energy secretary, said at a hearing before a House appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday.
In recent years, nuclear power has been attracting growing bipartisan support. Some Democrats endorse it because the plants don't emit planet-warming greenhouse gases, although environmentalists have raised concerns about radioactive waste and reactor safety. It also gets backing from Republicans who are less concerned about global warming but who say nuclear power plants could strengthen U.S. energy security.
Tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon that have ambitious climate goals have expressed interest in nuclear power to fuel their data centers, since the plants can run 24 hours a day, something wind and solar power can't do.
Yet building new reactors in the United States has proved enormously difficult.
While the nation still has the world's largest fleet of nuclear power plants, only three new reactors have come online since 1996. Many utilities have been scared off by the high cost. The two most recent reactors built at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia cost $35 billion, double the initial estimates, and arrived seven years behind schedule.
In response, more than a dozen companies have begun developing a new generation of smaller reactors a fraction of the size of those at Vogtle. The hope is that these reactors would have a lower upfront price tag, making them a less risky investment for utilities. That, in turn, could help the industry reduce costs by repeatedly building the same type of reactor.
So far, however, none of these next-generation plants have been built.
One of the draft executive orders blames the sluggish pace at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent federal agency that oversees reactor safety and must approve new designs before they are built. The draft would order the agency to undertake a 'wholesale revision' of its regulations and impose a deadline of 18 months for deciding whether to approve a new reactor.
The draft order also urges the agency to reconsider its safety limits for radiation exposure, saying that current limits are too strict and go beyond what is needed to protect human health.
It is unclear whether the president could order sweeping changes at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which Congress established to be independent from the White House. In recent months, Mr. Trump has sought to exert greater authority over independent agencies, setting up a potential showdown in the courts.
Some pronuclear groups have said that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is already beginning to streamline its regulations in response to a bipartisan bill passed by Congress last year. But skeptics of nuclear power say they fear that pressure from the White House could cause the agency to cut corners on safety.
'That's my number one worry,' said Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a frequent critic of the industry. 'We're talking about new reactor technologies where there's a lot of uncertainty, and the NRC staff often raise a lot of good technical questions. To short-circuit that process would mean sweeping potential safety issues under the rug.'
The draft orders suggest other possible steps, including having the U.S. military use its deep pockets to finance next-generation reactors. One option under consideration would be to designate certain A.I. data centers as 'defense critical infrastructure' and allow them to be powered by reactors built on Department of Energy facilities, which may allow projects to avoid review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Another order would call on the secretary of energy to develop a plan to rebuild U.S. supply chains for enriched uranium and other nuclear fuels, which in recent years have largely been imported from Russia.
It remains to be seen whether such steps would be enough to usher in a wave of new reactors, experts said. Under the Biden administration, the Energy Department also made a major push to expand nuclear power in the United States, with some signs of progress. Yet some of the federal offices that led that effort are now being thinned out by firings, buyouts and budget cuts.
For instance, the Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, which provided nearly $12 billion in loan guarantees to help finance the Vogtle reactors, is poised to lose more than half its staff, according to several current and former employees. Those losses, pronuclear groups have said, could hobble a key program for financing new reactors.
'The big question is how you build up a big order book of new reactors so that costs start coming down and supply chains get built up,' said Joshua Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank. 'There are a lot of moving parts that have to come together.'