Nuclear Conversion

Trump’s executive orders will be the most consequential endorsement of nuclear by a US president since Eisenhower’s Atoms For Peace speech 72 years ago.

President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Atoms for Peace speech at the UN on December 8, 1953. Credit: IAEA/YouTube.

There’s a vast difference between politics and policy. Doing politics — making speeches, giving TV interviews, and drafting talking points — is child’s play. Policy, on the other hand, is where dreams go to die, particularly when it comes to energy.

Over the past few days, the politics and policies around nuclear energy have shifted faster than at any other period in the post-Chernobyl era. Here are a few examples:

Germany, the world’s long-time anti-nuclear poster child, just did a screeching U-turn. Under its new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, Germany will cooperate with France and treat nuclear as a “green” power source under EU regulations. The move comes just 25 months after Germany took its last three nuclear plants offline. As one German official said, the move is a “sea-change policy shift.”

The announcement from Berlin came just days after Belgium’s federal parliament voted by a large majority to repeal a 2003 law mandating the phase out of nuclear energy and banning the construction of new reactors.

Last week, the Danish government announced it was reconsidering its ban on nuclear power, which has been in place since 1985. The country’s former prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told the Financial Times, “Wind and solar are good as long as you have wind and sunshine. But you have to have a non-fossil base-load and it’s ridiculous to exclude nuclear power.”

On May 13, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey (a Democrat) announced a plan to repeal a state law passed by voters in 1982. Healey’s administration is pointing to a recent report by ISO New England, which found that nuclear power can reduce emissions more cheaply than wind and solar (Gee, who would’ve thought that?) Further, the move comes as offshore wind, which a few months ago was the darling of East Coast Democrats, is slowly sinking under the weight of market realities and political headwinds.

In March, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (a Democrat) signed a bill into law that allows nuclear to count as a “clean” resource to meet the state’s decarbonization mandates. As the Energy Bad Boys, Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, noted last month, Polis signed the bill despite his 2019 campaign promise to run the state solely on wind, solar, batteries, and a soupçon of fairy dust.

Before continuing, I must note that two days ago, I wrote about the challenges facing the nuclear renaissance in the US and gave five reasons why the US won’t be able to quadruple the size of its reactor fleet by 2050. I stand by that article. Nothing about the nuclear comeback will be cheap, quick, or easy. As I explained, new reactors cost too much, building them takes too long, there are too many reactor designs, and the US has to develop domestic sources of nuclear fuel.

But it’s also apparent that the politics of nuclear is changing like never before. Politics leads policy. And now, in heavily Democratic states and in European countries where nuclear bans have been in place for decades, politicians are changing their rhetoric and their policies.

This tectonic shift will gain momentum when the White House releases four executive orders on nuclear power, which sources tell me will be released later this week. The orders will be the most consequential endorsements of nuclear energy by a US president since Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Atoms For Peace speech in 1953.

Perhaps the most important of the orders is titled “Ushering In A Nuclear Renaissance.” The draft of the order I obtained begins by pointing out that the US is losing the race to deploy new reactors and that China has announced plans to:

Bring 200 new gigawatts of nuclear power online by 2035, at which point its total nuclear output will more than double that of the United States. Further, as American development of new reactor designs has waned, 87% of nuclear reactors installed worldwide since 2017 are based on Russian and Chinese designs. These trends cannot continue. Swift and decisive action is required to jump-start America’s nuclear renaissance and ensure our national and economic security by increasing fuel availability, enabling research and development, and preparing our workforce.

The order goes on to say the policy of the US is to “expedite and promote to the fullest possible extent the production and operation of nuclear energy to provide affordable and reliable energy to the American people.”

Another order provides this scalding assessment of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

Between 1954 and 1978, the United States licensed 135 civilian nuclear reactors at 81 power plants. Since 1978, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authorized only five new reactors, and of these, only two have been built. It charges applicants by the hour to process license applications, with prolonged timelines that maximize fees, throttling American nuclear power development. The NRC has refused to license new reactors even as significant technological advances promise to make nuclear power safer, cheaper, more adaptable, and more abundant than ever.

The same order directs the agency to “undertake a wholesale revision of its regulations.” It’s unclear whether or not the president has the authority to demand such a thing from the NRC, which Congress established as an independent agency.

Here’s a detail from the pending executive order titled, “Ushering In A Nuclear Renaissance.”

The other two orders focus on the Defense Department and Energy Department, and direct them to expedite the development and deployment of new reactors. One order says the Secretary of Defense shall “utilize all relevant legal authorities to site, approve, and authorize the design, construction, and operation of such advanced nuclear technologies at such Department of Defense-owned sites as necessary to support the policy of this order.”

Love Donald Trump or hate him, his administration is the most pro-nuclear in American history, and there’s no second place.

Two final points.

First, last month, while in Warsaw to celebrate the signing of a deal with US companies Westinghouse Electric and Bechtel to build Poland’s first nuclear power plant (which will use three AP-1000s), Energy Secretary Chris Wright gave a shoutout to N2N. He declared, “The two biggest ‘climate solutions’ in the coming decades are the same as they were in the last two decades, natural gas and nuclear, for the simple reason that they work. They supply affordable, reliable, secure energy.”

Second, in my piece on Sunday, I noted that the DOE’s Loan Programs Office is under enormous scrutiny and that some $15 billion in projects that got backing from the LPO under the Jigar Shah’s direction could be in jeopardy. I have since heard from a source inside the administration that the DOE will use the LPO to help finance the first tranche of new US nuclear reactors.

I’ll end with this line from Eisenhower’s landmark speech:

The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. The capability, already proved, is here today. Who can doubt that, if the entire body of the world’s scientists and engineers had adequate amounts of fissionable material with which to test and develop their ideas, this capability would rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient and economic usage?

Eisenhower was right. We have long had the capability to make peaceful power by splitting atoms. The politics around nuclear have shifted dramatically. Now, politicians and policymakers must do the hard work of implementing durable pro-nuclear policies that can turn today’s reactor designs into realities.

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