Doing more with less?
Although the Trump administration aims to accelerate nuclear energy through executive orders, in practice, it has not allocated new funding yet, said Matt Bowen, an expert on nuclear energy, waste, and nonproliferation at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. In fact, the initial White House budget proposed cutting $4.7 billion from the Department of Energy, including $408 million from the Office of Nuclear Energy allocated for nuclear research in the 2026 fiscal year.
“The administration was proposing cuts to Office of Nuclear Energy and DOE more broadly, and DOGE is pushing staff out,” said Bowen. “How do you do more with less? Less staff, less money.”
The Trump administration places the blame for the nuclear sector’s stagnation on the NRC, which oversees licensing and recertification processes that cost the industry millions of dollars each year in compliance. In his executive orders, Trump called for a major reorganization of the NRC. Some of the proposed changes, like streamlining the approval process (which can take years for new plants), may be welcomed because “for a long time, they were very, very, very slow,” said Charles Forsberg, a nuclear chemical engineer at MIT. But there are worries that the executive orders could do more than cut red tape.
“Every word in those orders is of concern, because the thrust of those orders is to essentially strip the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of its independence from the executive branch, essentially nullifying the original purpose,” said Lyman.
Some experts fear that with these new constraints, NRC staff will have less time and fewer resources to do their jobs, which could impact power plant safety in the future. Bowen said: “This notion that the problem for nuclear energy is regulation, and so all we need to do is deregulate, is both wrong and also really problematic.”
The next few decades will tell whether nuclear, especially SMRs, can overcome economic and technical challenges to safely contribute to decarbonization efforts. Some, like Gehin, are optimistic. “I think we’re going to accelerate,” he said. “We certainly can achieve a dramatic deployment if we put our mindset to it.”
But making nuclear financially competitive will take serious commitment from the government and the dozens of companies, with many still skeptical, Shirvan said. “I am quite, I would say, on the pessimistic scale when it comes to the future of nuclear energy in the US.”
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.