- Trump seeks to quickly track new nuclear licenses.
- Order instructs the regulatory agency to rule on new licenses in 18 months.
- Department of Defense to have a prominent role in ordering reactors.
US President Donald Trump on Friday ordered the nation’s independent nuclear regulatory commission to reduce the rules and fast-track new licenses for reactors and power plants and tried to shorten a multi-year process to 18 months.
The requirement was part of a party of executive orders signed by Trump on Friday, aiming to increase the US’s nuclear energy production in the midst of a boom in demand from data centers and artificial intelligence.
License to reactors in the United States can sometimes take over a decade, a process designed to prioritize nuclear security, but which have deterred new projects.
“This is going to turn the clock on again over 50 years of exceeding an industry,” said US domestic secretary Doug Burgum, who heads the White House Energy Dominance Council, in the oval office.
The movements include a significant revision of the nuclear regulatory commission, including examining staffing levels and instructing the energy and defense departments to work together to build nuclear plants in federal countries.
The administration imagines the Department of Defense, which takes a prominent role in ordering reactors and installing them on military bases, a senior official in the White House said.
The orders also seek to revive uranium production and enrichment in the United States.
CEO of US nuclear power operator Constellation Energy, Joseph Dominguez, said the president’s actions would help normalize the regulatory process.
“We are wasting too much time to allow, and we answer silly questions, not the important ones,” Dominguez said during the signing event.
The United States and other nations have increased nuclear control in recent decades, partly in response to reactor events such as Meltdown at the Chernobyl plant in the former Soviet Union in 1986, and the partial degradation on the Three Mile Island plant in the United States in 1979.
Developers are now also looking for implementing advanced nuclear technology such as small modular reactors (SMRs) that can potentially be built quickly and at less cost than traditional plants, but which can constitute new security challenges.
“Review and reduction of NRC’s independence can lead to the hasty implementation of advanced reactors with security and security errors,” said Ernest Moniz, former American energy secretary and a nuclear physicist supporting the industry.
“A major event, like those in the past, would increase legislative demands and put core energy back for a long time,” he said.
Trump had declared a national emergency in January as one of his first actions in office and said the United States had inadequate supplies of electricity to meet the country’s growing needs, especially for data centers operating artificial intelligence systems.
Most of Trump’s actions have focused on increasing fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, but administrative officials also support nuclear power, which in recent years has attracted growing top species support.
Some Democrats support Nuclear because the plants do not emit planetary -heating greenhouse gases, even when environmentalists have raised concerns about radioactive waste and reactor security.
Republicans who are less concerned about global warming support it because they say nuclear power plants could strengthen US energy security.
However, costs and competition have been a major obstacle to new nuclear projects, and it is unclear if Trump’s orders will be enough to overcome them.
Nuscale SMR.N, the only US company with an SMR design, approved by regulators, exposed its project in 2023 to rising costs and competition from plants that burn ample natural gas.
Vogtle, the last US reactor that came online, meanwhile was about $ 16 billion over the budget and was delayed by years.
The loan program office that the administration wants to use to finance reactor projects that banks are unwilling to support has been severely affected by Trump’s job.
