Trump's nuclear vision collides with Trump's actual policies

Politico

a day ago

With help from Gabby Miller
With a slate of splashy executive orders Friday, president Donald Trump promised to 'usher in a nuclear energy renaissance …providing a path forward for nuclear innovation.'
By streamlining the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, exploring building reactors on federal land and ordering the quadrupling of the U.S.' nuclear energy capacity, the administration moved to, as Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement, 'unshackle our civil nuclear energy industry and ensure it can meet this critical moment.'
That all should be music to the ears of the burgeoning pro-nuclear revival, which has seen energy and infrastructure wonks across the political spectrum advocate for nuclear energy as a cleaner, scalable alternative to fossil fuels.
But it also raises a question that is becoming familiar in the second Trump administration: How is this all supposed to happen amid Trump's radical cutbacks to research — to say nothing of government oversight or safety rules?
As with similar administration goals on supercomputing, or innovation, or artificial intelligence, these big promises aren't happening in a policy vacuum. They're happening amid an all-fronts rollback of America's massive research and regulation infrastructure. Even some of those cheering the nuclear EOs are worried that Trump's bone-deep cuts to the federal government could doom the nuclear revival before it kicks off.
The Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit cheerleader for advanced nuclear reactor development, took the moment to urge GOP-controlled Washington to 'adequately resource and staff DOE to meet this moment.' President and CEO Judi Greenwald wrote in a statement that Trump's cuts — actual and proposed — at the Department of Energy 'undermine the Department's efforts and make it harder to implement these executive orders.'
The progressive pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute, in its own response to the EOs, enumerated the new staffing levels it would require just to license new plants, and worried that the EOs focused on regulatory overhaul 'threaten to reduce the NRC's workforce, independence, and resources.'
Many of these nuclear boosters have noted — echoing the Secretary of Energy himself, in a hearing last week — that continued nuclear innovation could hinge on Congress continuing to fund the Loan Programs Office, an increasingly high-profile sub-office of the DOE responsible for funding experimental nuclear projects. Thomas Hochman, infrastructure director at the Foundation for American Innovation, in a conversation with POLITICO claimed some momentum for the pro-nuclear cadre's cause of the moment, saying, 'if things go the right way in Congress [the LPO] will continue to have authority.'
Some nuclear-watchers are more explicitly worried that the EOs could backfire — specifically, that the Trump administration's anti-bureaucratic mission of overhauling the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could lead to the kind of disaster that would threaten the fragile new bipartisan consensus around nuclear power.
In an op-ed for The Hill published this morning, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Toby Dalton and Ariel Levite argued that the ADVANCE Act, passed in 2024, has already gone a long way toward overhauling licensing processes for new reactors and that the Trump administration risks gilding the lily.
'What Americans need is confidence that any nuclear power plant built and operated in the U.S. is safe, secure and ultimately beneficial to American and host community prosperity,' Dalton and Levite wrote, while concluding 'the net result of these executive orders, coupled with the additional impact of other administration actions to reform governmental regulatory processes to align with White House policies, is to risk public trust in nuclear energy.'
The nuclear revival has largely been inspired by the massive thirst for energy that cutting-edge technologies carry with them, from enormous AI data centers to semiconductor manufacturing to even cryptocurrency mining. Nuclear is an attractive, relatively clean option for solving these problems, with an attractive retrofuturist sheen to boot.
It's always been a risky bet, though, given its unique safety concerns and steep costs — and that was in the pre-Trump days of relative policy stability. As even its allies have pointed out, the Trump administration's lurching, unpredictable approach — taking big, sometimes contradictory swings at issues of 'American greatness' — could backfire in a major way, especially when public safety is a factor.
But with so much wind at their sails, and relatively few bipartisan, technocratic wins to be had in the early Trump era, nuclear supporters are still willing to be cautiously optimistic.
'I don't think any of that stuff is sort of like, you know, so complex as to be unachievable,' Hochman said. 'The worst possible outcome is just that nothing really gets done.'
Gabby Miller contributed to this report.
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Two anonymous Republicans said the cuts will target NPR, PBS and the foreign aid agencies that the Trump administration has already cut deeply. The package will comprise only a portion of the $1.6 trillion in yearly discretionary spending planned by Congress, and it falls far short of the trillions of dollars Elon Musk promised to cut from the federal budget with DOGE.
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