The Trump administration has indicated a willingness to promote domestic nuclear energy production, though several industry experts say there are a number of obstacles that must be cleared first. [emphasis, links added]
Immediately after returning to the White House, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on “unleashing American energy,” aiming to bolster domestic fossil fuel production, which the U.S. primarily relies on, and cut “undue burdens” on the nuclear energy sector.
While the move signaled increased attention on the industry’s development, several policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that many obstacles must be addressed before nuclear power can become a major source of energy in the U.S.
“In this country, we’ve made it so difficult that it’s almost impossible to build a nuclear power plant,” JD Foster, former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget, who would routinely sit in on meetings regarding nuclear regulatory policy, told the DCNF.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Agency is one of the slowest moving entities in the universe when it comes to assessing new technologies and nuclear power.”
Foster and others in the nuclear energy arena pointed to several hurdles for the industry, including a long and stringent permitting process, a measly specialized workforce, nuclear waste management, federal regulations, and public fears surrounding radiation.
Although former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama pursued an expansion of nuclear technology for its effective and reliable energy output, the U.S. remains primarily reliant on fossil fuels.
Biden, for example, signed the bipartisan ADVANCE Act into law in June 2024, which was designed to bring down the costs of nuclear licensing, create new opportunities for old industrial sites to host reactors, and allocate additional resources to the NRC.
Despite this, nearly all nuclear power currently produced in the U.S. comes from reactors built between 1967 and 1990, according to the World Nuclear Association.
We’ve made it so difficult that it’s almost impossible to build a nuclear power plant…
Trump, who has a long track record of supporting nuclear energy development during his first term, has indicated that he is open to exploring avenues to expand the industry’s innovation.
Less than one month after returning to office, Trump established the National Energy Dominance Council and tasked its advisors with informing him on how to bring small modular reactors (SMRs), which can continuously power 300,000 homes, online.
Trump’s Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Chris Wright has also expressed a desire to increase the development of nuclear energy technology.
“The long-awaited American nuclear renaissance must launch during President Trump’s administration,” Wright stated on Feb. 5 in his first secretarial order.
“As global energy demand continues to grow, America must lead the commercialization of affordable and abundant nuclear energy. As such, the Department will work diligently and creatively to enable the rapid deployment and export of next-generation nuclear technology.”
.@SecretaryWright: “It’s been decades since we’ve built any meaningful nuclear capacity in this country… But President Trump is committed to getting this nuclear renaissance – that’s been talked about for years – going…We’re going to see some plant restarts. We’re going to see… pic.twitter.com/5GpId58zBr
— U.S. Department of Energy (@ENERGY) April 2, 2025
“Nuclear is going to take hold,” Wright also said in a Fox Business interview shared by the DOE’s X account on April 2. “But it’s not going to come tomorrow, I wish it was.”
This envisioned “nuclear renaissance” lags behind a “huge” permitting problem, according to Foster.
The length of time needed to complete the permitting process varies, with the NRC application review process taking up to five years in some cases, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Read rest at Daily Caller
A nuclear Power Plant takes up less land then a whole lot of Wind Turbines and Solar Panels
When you have ignorant state governors who want to go “Carbon-free” but shut down functioning nuclear plants like what’s happened in NY and Cal you’ve got an uphill battle because of the unwarranted fear of nuclear power. We learned a lot from Three Mile Island that have been applied to existing plants while the catastrophic accident at Chernobyl isn’t possible with the nuclear designs we have operating today and the even safer plants that have been designed and tested. However, as long as you have the NRC populated by people who aren’t willing to permit new plants in a timely manner due to a CYA mentality where they want to be assured a zero percent chance of any kind of accident no matter how minor.
In a prior life I was a reactor operator in the Navy’s nuclear program serving on a new construction prototype plant in upstate NY and on two different nuclear submarines.