States’ Nuclear Energy Growth Needs Federal Action to Follow Trump’s Vocal Support
By Allison Prang, States Newsroom
President Donald Trump and his team have signaled a strong interest in continuing to strengthen federal support for nuclear power, an energy source Democratic states are increasingly open to expanding.
The administration’s loudly pro-nuclear position creates a rare point of overlap between Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, whose signature legislation funded hundreds of millions in tax credits for low-carbon energy sources, including nuclear power.
Trump during his first roughly three months in office issued multiple executive orders mentioning nuclear energy, casting his broad energy strategy as a way to expand the country’s power resources and shore up its security. State lawmakers are also pushing their own policy moves, sometimes just in an effort to set themselves up to embrace nuclear power at some point in the future.
“There are a lot of really positive signals,” said Rowen Price, senior policy adviser for nuclear energy at Third Way, a centrist policy think tank.
But Price said she’s concerned that support for nuclear power could be swept up in bigger political fights, such as many congressional Republicans’ goal of axing clean-energy tax credits in Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The administration’s broad cuts to the federal workforce could also eventually hurt the government’s nuclear ambitions, she added.
The promise of a nuclear resurgence in the United States isn’t a new goal for the industry or its backers in Washington, D.C., but how successful efforts to expand nuclear power generation will be in the U.S. — a metric that hasn’t budged from around 20% in decades — remains to be seen.
Americans’ support for the energy source, meanwhile, is just short of its record high, a recent Gallup Poll found. And more blue states have also started to embrace nuclear power, which has traditionally been more favored by Republicans, to reach climate goals and grow electricity capacity amid anticipated increases in demand.
But even as interest in states grows, the cost of building nuclear infrastructure remains an impediment only the federal government is positioned to help scale.
‘Renaissance of Nuclear’
Energy Secretary Chris Wright in April talked about the administration’s desire to elevate nuclear power by making it easier to test reactors, delivering fuel to next-generation nuclear firms and utilizing the department’s Loan Programs Office to help bring nuclear power projects online.
“We would like to see a renaissance of nuclear,” Wright said at the news outlet Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington. “The conditions are there and the administration is going to do everything we can to lean in to help commercial businesses and customers launch nuclear.”
Wright said he wants the department to help launch 10 to 20 new nuclear reactors to get the industry moving again and to bring down costs. The department’s loan office could make debt investments alongside large-scale data center companies that use massive amounts of power to build nuclear projects and then exit those deals after the projects are built, allowing the office to recycle that funding, he said.
The department recently announced that it approved a third loan disbursement to reopen the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Covert, Michigan, which Holtec has been working on doing for the last few years.
Last month, the department said it was reopening $900 million in funding to help companies working on small modular reactors after changing some of the Biden administration’s guidance on the program.
Federal Workforce Cuts
Third Way’s Price noted that a portion of staffers at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — which she described as already “tightly constrained” — are eligible for retirement either now or in the next five years.
Workforce cuts at the Energy Department and elsewhere could also hurt efforts to grow the nuclear power sector, she said.
“Frankly, all of the verbal support from this administration for nuclear only matters if they’re actually going to put forward and implement policies that support it,” Price said. “We need to make sure that they do it.”
An Energy Department spokesperson said in an email that it “is conducting a department-wide review to ensure all activities follow the law, comply with applicable court orders and align with the Trump administration’s priorities.”
The agency said it didn’t have a final count on how many staffers have left the department through its resignation program, but noted that it doesn’t necessarily approve all requests. The department didn’t comment on how many staffers focused on nuclear energy have been laid off.
Nuclear programs were among those affected by the Trump administration’s pausing of federal programs and funding, said David Brown, senior vice president of federal government affairs and public policy at Constellation Energy, which runs the biggest fleet of nuclear plants in the country. But Brown said that even so, the industry is coming out on top.
“I think what we are seeing is that as they work through their various review(s) of programs that they’re greenlighting the nuclear stuff,” Brown said.
Federal Support Crucial, but Politics Tricky
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill could also change the outcome for industry, for better or worse.
Wright, in his remarks last month, said he hopes Congress will take action to help expand nuclear energy, and said lawmakers could do so in the budget reconciliation package on which the U.S. House has started to work.
Republican House members have not yet released text of the sections of the package that will deal with energy policy. Wright said support for nuclear power could be included in the reconciliation package, but some advocates are also worried that the package, or the annual appropriations bills, are the exact kind of political battles that efforts to support nuclear power, like the tax credits, could get tied up in.
Some state lawmakers point to financial support from the federal government as essential for the industry to grow, even if states make their own headway to build support for nuclear power.
Colorado state Representative Alex Valdez, a Democrat who sponsored a bill signed into law this session to include nuclear in the state’s definition of clean energy, said he hopes the administration follows through on its admiration of nuclear power with funding for states.
“Generally, states do not have the financial resources the federal government does,” Valdez said. “It’s going to be the federal government that puts their investments behind these things, and that’s what’s going to enable states as a whole to be able to move forward on them.”
Since we can’t afford to give kids more than two dolls or five pencils we sure as heck won’t be able to afford nuclear power, the most expensive option out there. And who gets the nuclear waste?