Are Trump and AI driving a nuclear power boom?

A race started by President Trump is leading to the rapid construction of new, experimental nuclear reactors. If they work, they could power data centers for artificial intelligence. But critics worry that the breakneck pace is compromising safety and public trust. NPR correspondent Geoff Brumfiel talks about the potential risks and benefits, and whether this may lead to a new nuclear age. Read more of Geoff’s coverage of the U. S.’s new nuclear reactors here https://www.npr.org/2026/06/29/nx-s1-5847944/new-nuclear-reactors-america-250-safety-concerns. If you like this episode, check out our episode about what happens inside a top-secret U. S. nuclear facility? Interested in more science and tech news? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. It includes perks like bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Speaker 01

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here, and you may not have realized it, but this is the US's summer of nuclear.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  The reactor is critical.

• 0:29Speaker 03

  First advanced reactor to ever make power by startup. We turned on a brand new advanced reactor. We made neutrons and we sustained efficient chain reaction.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  So as part of Tech Camp, we're looking at the technological frontier for innovations that could change everything. And over the past few months, small nuclear reactors have been starting up at sites around the country. Right, Jeff?

• 0:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. And more are expected to come online soon, in part because of everybody's favorite topic, artificial intelligence. It's thanks to a program that President Trump launched a little over a year ago.

• 1:07Speaker 05

  I've signed an order directing an approval of many new nuclear reactors.

• 1:12Speaker 04

  But the speed at which these new reactors are getting built has some people really worried.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  So today on the show, NPR correspondent Jeff Brumfield is tracking Trump's nuclear race.

• 1:23Speaker 04

  And we're going to talk about it. What are the risks? What could be the benefits? And is it actually going to lead to a new nuclear age?

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  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 3:05Speaker 01

  So Jeff, I guess the first thing to talk about is why the US needs more nuclear power. Like, what's the thinking here?

• 3:12Speaker 04

  You know, it comes back to what we talk about a lot these days, which is artificial intelligence. Because of AI, US energy demand is going to skyrocket by about 130% between now and 2030, which is just four years. I mean, not very long.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  It's huge.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  And, you know, the big tech firms, they have these climate commitments. And so they need more juice, but they don't want to be burning oil or gas. And so there's all sorts of talk around nuclear, restarting old nuclear plants and building new nuclear plants. And that's where this whole nuclear race comes in.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  But what makes this current nuclear revival different?

• 3:50Speaker 04

  So what's happening this time around is people are thinking smaller, interestingly enough. They're thinking of building these small experimental nuclear reactors, many designs that are either completely new or haven't been tried in decades. And these are reactors that can be built with venture capital. They have some technical advantages that we haven't seen before. They can operate at higher temperatures, less likely to melt down.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  That's a big one.

• 4:15Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, yeah, that's big in the nuclear industry. And so the, the sort of flow of this VC money combined with the new tech is getting everyone very excited. And of course, the goal is to maybe build lots of these little reactors at data centers so you don't need to take power off the grid. But I should say, this technology is still largely unproven. You know, I think that there really haven't been reactors of this type before.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  So what was the catalyst that like started this new nuclear, like small reactor race?

• 4:49Speaker 04

  It happened in May of last year. President Trump held an Oval Office event with some top nuclear executives. And he signed a series of orders that were designed to sort of help the nuclear industry in various ways, including one about reactor testing at the Department of Energy. It called for the creation of a pilot program that would approve at least three new reactor designs. And I'm going to read from the executive order here, quote, "with the goal of achieving criticality in each of the three reactors by July 4th of 2026."

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Okay, that just happened, but I don't know what criticality means in this, in this instance, right?

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Right, right. So, so in the nuclear world, going critical roughly means just turning your reactor on. Basically, it means you're, yes, it means not only just working, but you're producing enough nuclear fissions within your fuel, you're splitting enough atoms, that the fuel kind of gets this self-sustaining chain reaction going, that if you wanted to, you could turn up the power and generate, you know, electricity. But you're just sort of getting that, that past that critical point where a nuclear burn begins.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Okay, criticality, but that date that you gave me, that's like now.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  Right, right. And remember, Trump said this like a little over a year ago.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  So, you know, we're talking about taking at least, again, at least three nuclear reactors from paper to actual nuclear fuel in reactors burning within roughly 12 months. And I'm not sure the US has ever been able to do this before.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Did they do it?

• 6:33Speaker 04

  They did it.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  They did it?

• 6:35Speaker 04

  They did.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  In fact, four reactors came online.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Wow. They even went past their estimate.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Fascinating.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  They beat it by one. One of them went online at like 12:30 in the morning on July 4th, just squeaked in under the deadline. You know, Department of Energy officials, they, they compared this to like a Manhattan Project type event, you know? But I gotta say, that kind of hints at some of the other sides of this that people are really worried about. Because if you know about the Manhattan Project, well, or even if you don't, turns out they did a lot of environmental damage when they started making nuclear weapons back in the day very, very quickly without a lot of oversight. And so there are people who are worried about, you know, the possibility that this new program is setting the nuclear industry up to be less safe in the future.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Okay, so I don't know a ton about like creating nuclear power for commercial use, but I do know that these reactors and things require a lot of time to build. You got to pour the concrete, you got like a lot of specialized equipment installed. Like, how on earth did companies do this in a year?

• 7:50Speaker 04

  So first, these are really small test reactors. They're not, you know, the giant ones that you see, you know, in The Simpsons. Yes, exactly.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  And they're not hooked up to the grid or anything like that. They're proof of concept reactors. But even then, these reactors had to go through engineering and safety reviews. And that's where this Department of Energy program I spoke about comes in. You see, since the 70s, nuclear reactors have been overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They're kind of the ultimate safety bureaucrats. And they've had this really, really good track record with one little blip, Three Mile Island. Other than that, things have been great, right? We haven't had a lot of accidents, we haven't had a lot of incidents. They've kept the industry relatively safe. But everything's been very, very slow.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  So this new pilot program was set up in part to bypass the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It turns out the Department of Energy is allowed to regulate certain kinds of experimental reactors. So first of all, they kind of got around the NRC that way. But that's not all the Energy Department did. In January, myself and Short Wave's very own Arun Nair reported that they actually rewrote their own internal rules for nuclear safety and security to help speed along the approval of these reactors.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you two like broke that story, right?

• 9:15Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So tell me more about what the Department of Energy did to speed everything along.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Right. So I've actually pulled up my story here, and I'll just give you a few examples. So in the old rules, they said things like groundwater must be protected from radiological contamination. And in the new rules, they say things like, "consideration must be given to avoiding or minimizing potential radiological contamination from groundwater from nuclear energy authorized facilities and radiological activities." So changes to environmental rules was a big one. Another huge one was security. They consolidated over 500 pages of security rules into a single 23-page document.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  So those are but two examples of over 750 pages of rules that were cut from these internal nuclear orders that the Department of Energy used to regulate its own people.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Wow. Okay, so I can imagine after you reported this, that some people were concerned about safety.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. So first and foremost was Ed Lyman. He's from the Union of Concerned Scientists. And, you know, he was worried about safety. He is worried about environmental protections. Security was also a big one for him.

• 10:38Speaker 08

  Of course, if you bend all the rules, you can do things quickly. But we learned- Over, you know, again, the past eight years, that if you want to do things right, you have to, you know, you have to go by the book.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  And, you know, other people I spoke to were very concerned about the lack of public engagement because the Department of Energy was sending these new orders in draft form to the companies they were supposed to be overseeing. But at no point were they even telling the public they were doing this.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  So I spoke to Katie Huff, who used to run the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy. She's now at the University of Illinois.

• 11:13Speaker 09

  In the best world, the public should expect as much openness from the government as is possible, not just as is convenient or as is, you know, appropriate for your timelines. And if it's possible to share with the companies at this point, then there is a really important question about why it's not public.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  So what do the government and those companies say about all this?

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Right. So the Department of Energy gave me a very lengthy, point by point response to my reporting, which I actually appreciated.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  And the bottom line, they said, is that safety is their number one priority and that these changes help unstick this long stuck nuclear industry. Quote, "The reduction of unnecessary regulations will increase innovation in the industry without jeopardizing safety." When I've spoken to industry folks, I've heard something similar. So, for example, Isaiah Taylor, CEO of a company called Valor Atomics, they actually just got their reactor up and running in Utah in mid-June and were powering a little AI microchip that they run a website off of. It's kind of cute. Isaiah told me he thinks building these test reactors are actually going to make things more safe.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  This is really actually where safety comes from. It comes from testing and being robust in your hardware and getting experience.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  So, so really like getting the data before they build the commercial reactors, he says they can take that to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who will eventually oversee this, and they could build a much safer reactor with some actual data. And I, you know, it's an interesting argument.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so we've met this deadline. Now what happens?

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Well, there are still several companies to go. We should see more reactors going critical this fall, which will be interesting. As I just mentioned, you know, the next thing they all have to do is take the data from these test reactors and go through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the much more independent safety body that oversees commercial nuclear power plants. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is actually rewriting its rules, too. And so it'll be interesting to see how that all plays out. I'll be watching that very closely. And then, assuming they get approval, there's the potential that these reactors are going to start appearing all over the country. Wherever there's

• 13:41Speaker 04

  a data center or a bunch of data centers, you might see a little cluster of these small modular reactors.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  But I do want to say one more thing, Gina.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Which is, I don't know if they have proven yet that these reactors are actually economically viable. And so I think there's been this assumption that regulation is what's holding the industry back. But nuclear power is very expensive, even when you're doing it on a smaller scale. You still need operators, nuclear engineers, a lot of specialized equipment. And so I think it remains to be seen whether this is going to be, say, as economically viable as renewables and batteries or natural gas or other things that are powering data centers today.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your reporting on these small nuclear reactors. I'm going to look forward to more information in the fall.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's good. It's definitely a very exciting time.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Short waivers. I hope you liked that episode. And if you did, make sure you follow us on the NPR app or wherever you're listening to our podcasts. This way you won't miss a new episode. Like next week's tech camp episode about a universal vaccine, one vaccine to rule them all. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact checked by Jeff Brumfield and Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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