Donald Trump took a huge step toward ensuring America's energy future by signing four executive orders that gave the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) a long-overdue overhaul.
Currently, it takes about 12 years to plan, design, and construct a nuclear power plant, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Getting all the license approvals takes an average of five years.
One of Trump's executive orders directs the NRC to streamline its rules so that it takes just 18 months to approve applications for a new reactor.
Another order directs the Energy and Defense departments to explore placing reactors on federal land, thus bypassing the NRC entirely. It would also allow those departments to develop their own faster, more efficient approval process for building nuclear reactors.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum participated in the signing ceremony in the Oval Office.
“This is a huge day for the nuclear industry,” said Burgum, adding: “Mark this day on your calendar. This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of overregulation.”
It may be hard to believe, but in the 1950s, when the first commercial nuclear reactors were coming online, some analysts wondered if it would even be worth billing customers for electricity, given how cheaply the reactors could produce energy to power the grid.
That was before the NRC got rolling. The capital costs involved in building a plant, and the Byzantine operating rules formulated to run it, make nuclear power cost-effective, but still expensive.
Only three nuclear power plants have come online since 1996. Two of the plants built in Georgia cost $35 billion and ran seven years behind schedule. No wonder even giant power companies are scared off from building nuclear power plants.
Regulators gotta regulate, but NRC bureaucrats haven't conducted a major reform of their licensing process since 1989. Trump's executive orders are long past due.
Those orders come at a most opportune time. A new generation of smaller, mini-reactors is about to hit the market with the promise of safe, cheap, abundant energy for businesses such as data centers that will need the energy to power the AI revolution.
In recent years, 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. They might also be based on a design that could be repeated often, as opposed to custom-built, to reduce costs.
So far, however, none of these next-generation plants have been built, although projects are underway in Wyoming, Louisiana and Tennessee.
Some nuclear proponents and companies have blamed the sluggish pace on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must approve new designs before they are built. Critics say that many of the regulations that the agency uses were designed for an earlier era and are no longer appropriate for advanced reactors that are designed to be less susceptible to meltdowns.
The unprecedented effort to reopen two mothballed nuclear plants, Palisades in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, is the direct result of the voracious appetite for electricity AI data centers require and will require in the near future. Both plants aim to come online before 2030.
Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez, the largest operator of nuclear power plants in the U.S., says the biggest problem has been delays caused by bureaucratic red tape.
“We’re wasting too much time on permitting and we’re answering silly questions, not the important ones,” Dominguez said.
Two other executive orders dealt with increasing our supply of uranium.
The president’s orders also aim to jump-start the mining of uranium in the U.S. and expand domestic uranium enrichment capacity, the official said. The orders also aim to speed up reactor testing at the Department of Energy’s national laboratories.
Investment in nuclear power is growing in the U.S. after a long period of financial turmoil for the industry, including the shutdown of a dozen reactors in recent years as the industry struggled to compete against cheap and abundant natural gas.
NRC reform and other efforts to speed up our nuclear energy production come just in the nick of time. AI data centers are going to need massive amounts of electricity to continue to grow and mature the technology to the point at which it can truly be useful.
Trump may have just put a large down payment on that future.
