A Nuclear Renaissance?

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With all the drama in the news over the past couple of months, such as the war in Iran and the all-important Reflecting Pool, one of the most consequential moves the Trump administration is taking has barely gotten any notice: the Trump push to build not one, not two, but 10 nuclear power plants as quickly as possible.

Trump understands the importance of American energy dominance, which is one of the most powerful reasons why American competitiveness against our First World competitors is going as well as it is, despite many headwinds. As Europe has been systematically dismantling its energy infrastructure and deindustrializing, even under Biden, America has had far more rational energy policies than any country in Europe. Biden slowed down America's oil boom somewhat and wasted countless dollars on stupid Green Energy "investments," but power here is still cheap compared to many countries.

Under Trump, our energy policies have supercharged the race to increase energy independence and expand cheap, abundant, and reliable energy. Supercharged may be a strong word, given how many regulations and NIMBYism make any progress slow, but it is not inappropriate.

One of the keys to supercharging our energy production is reincorporating nuclear power as a growing power to the grid, despite a massive slowdown in nuclear generation expansion since the 1970s.

The Trump administration is so eager to see a nuclear power renaissance that it is starting to fund billions of dollars for reactor orders https://t.co/bEiKjg7S3O
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) June 24, 2026

There are many reasons the construction of new nuclear plants stalled, after a boom that saw nuclear energy rise to over 20% of total generation. Local opposition, massive anti-nuclear propaganda campaigns, the push for "renewables," and the fact that each plant was bespoke and always came in late and way over budget due to obstacles that always get thrown in the way of construction.

Trump is determined to change the equation.

The Trump administration is so eager to see a nuclear power renaissance that it is starting to fund billions of dollars for reactor orders.
In a new deal expected to be announced Tuesday, low-interest loans amounting to $17.5 billion from the Energy Department will be available for utilities to finance equipment orders for the Westinghouse AP1000, the company’s flagship nuclear reactor, a version of which China is building at industrial scale.
The loans are intended to speed up construction of 10 reactors in the U.S. Five loans will be available for projects with two reactors each, the Energy Department said.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the conditional loans were part of a broader Trump administration mission to “unleash the next American nuclear renaissance.”
They “will also help accelerate the timeline of building those large-scale reactors by up to three years, lowering construction costs and ensuring the United States is able to deliver on President Trump’s bold and ambitious energy addition agenda,” Wright said.
The hope is that new AP1000s could come online starting in 2035, said Dan Sumner, chief executive of Westinghouse Electric.
“It really kick-starts fleet-scale nuclear development in the United States,” Sumner said.
Seven utilities have already signed formal letters of intent for the five available project loans, according to the Energy Department, which didn’t name the utilities.

For the past couple of decades, American presidents have touted nuclear energy as a vital source of power, either for reliability or out of concern for global warming supposedly caused by carbon emissions. But politically, "renewable power" has gotten all the attention, despite its near-uselessness for achieving the goal of reliable, cheap power. It's not that solar is inherently bad, but it really isn't appropriate for grid-scale power. It ought to be a niche product, not a national priority. Wind...people love the idea, and landowners who rent land for windmills like the cash flow, but if you read Beege, you already know that the problems are far greater than anybody acknowledges.

The biggest problem, after environmental regulations that make building a power plant cumbersome and vastly more expensive than necessary, is the lack of standardization. Building safe nuclear plants is not inherently more difficult than building sophisticated semiconductor plants, but doing so with nearly clean sheets for every plant certainly is. It's not that there isn't some standardization, but building a nuclear reactor could and should be done in mass production.

We aren't there yet, but jump-starting the process, as Trump is pushing, will get us much closer. Building ten plants instead of one will have an enormous impact on costs, just as increasing experience always does. That's why each tranche of the F-35 gets cheaper. Building by onesies and twosies is disastrous. B-2s cost so much because we only built 20; the B-21 should see much more manageable per-aircraft prices.

The same could happen with nuclear power, as long as federal policies don't change, as they so often do.

One major factor that makes this time different is the massive growth in power needs that springs from the AI revolution. Powerful actors, tied to both political parties, demand that power production increase dramatically. Microsoft managed to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island, an impressive achievement in itself. The billions of dollars that will flow into Pennsylvania citizens' and the government's pockets sure don't hurt.

Unless we start churning out modular reactors at a rapid pace, nuclear will never be the cheapest power out there. Costs will come down with a proliferation of plants, but it is the most reliable baseload power and not subject to price fluctuations as gas is.

Abundant and reliable energy is the foundation of a modern economy; literally everything else in the economy depends on it. Even service industries are built on the invisible flow of energy, and the computing we rely on for everything from our laptops to the internet and communications is as dependent on it as a massive factory.

People aren't conscious of how vital cheap and reliable energy is to their existence until it is gone. Price increases drive inflation, and unreliable power disrupts our lives in ways that few other things do.

Can Trump pull it off? Let's hope so.

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