Too Many Trees, Not Enough Forest: Notes on the Recent Nuclear Energy Executive Order

President Trump’s May 23, 2025, executive order (EO) calls for a massive expansion of nuclear power in the United States, aiming to quadruple production by 2050. It blames the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for the sharp decline in nuclear plant construction after 1978, following the Three Mile Island accident. Safety standards tightened, regulatory delays increased, and regulatory uncertainty grew, as nuclear construction slowed essentially to a halt. But tighter regulation is not the only reason for this: nuclear plants became increasingly expensive and higher risk, with massive cost over-runs and delays, with many expensive new designs competing for a shrinking market.

The EO claims that “Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks.” And there is certainly some truth to that. Over time, the regulatory process has focused more narrowly on a set of specific safety checklists, and that hinders innovation.

Regulatory costs are also an issue. Congress imposes stringent cost recovery on NRC applicants, requiring that they pay NRC staff time on an hourly basis, which is especially burdensome on smaller (and more innovative) companies.

The NRC also manages the safety of nuclear plants after designs are approved, monitoring and assessing their construction and operations. It has, especially since TMI, focused tightly on safety as its primary mission. For example, the NRC has, as the EO states, consistently required very low radiation exposure in licensing: “The NRC utilizes safety models that posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure.” Alternative approaches, however, argue that there is a threshold below which radiation exposure is safe, but these have been ignored.

Against this background, the EO calls for the following policies (EO, Section 2):

1. To reestablish the United States as the global leader in nuclear energy;
2. To facilitate increased deployment of new nuclear reactor technologies, such as Generation III+ and IV reactors, modular reactors, and microreactors, including by lowering regulatory and cost barriers to entry;
3. To facilitate the expansion of American nuclear energy capacity from approximately 100 GW in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050;
4. To employ emerging technologies to safely accelerate the modeling, simulation, testing, and approval of new reactor designs;
5. To support the continued operation of, and facilitate appropriate operational extensions for, the current nuclear fleet, as well as the reactivation of prematurely shuttered or partially completed nuclear facilities; and
6. To maintain the United States’ leading reputation for nuclear safety.

The basic thrust of the order is relatively simple: reform the NRC to ease regulatory burdens, incorporate industry development into its mission, reduce licensing uncertainty, shorten approval timelines, and limit duplication by elevating DOD and DOE roles.

These are largely worthy objectives. They follow on fairly directly from previous congressional efforts to reform the NRC through the NEIMA and the ADVANCE Act. However, while further NRC reform is necessary, the changes proposed in the EO won’t be nearly enough to transform the industry.

The United States doesn’t have hundreds of new nuclear plants largely because nuclear power plants are highly capital intensive, so the cost of the energy produced is also very high and hence uncompetitive with fossil fuels and (increasingly) solar and wind. Those capital costs also make investment in nuclear energy very risky: a shift in interest rates, an unexpected delay, problems in the supply chain—they can all cause devastating financial difficulties for a nuclear investment. So private investors are reluctant to engage.

The EO attacks one dimension of the problem: the delays and uncertainty caused by existing NRC regulation, although the EO ignores the recent efficient approval of innovative new designs through the NRC’s waiver process, as well as a major proposed rulemaking published by the NRC in late 2024 that will implement a risk-informed technology neutral regulatory framework (largely in line with EO objectives). Still, more reform will be needed, for example, to support the iteration of designs, which is a normal part of the innovation process but is hard to address within existing pathways. However, the EO also supports a reduction in staffing at the NRC. Given that some of the proposed timelines for action are extremely aggressive even with existing staffing, staff reductions will make any acceleration much more difficult. Meeting target deadlines will likely require more staff, not fewer.

More importantly, the EO does not address other critical elements of nuclear development.

• R&D: Nuclear badly needs new designs and new approaches, as the existing technology is not price competitive, and – we believe – will not be price competitive regardless of whether the United States builds a handful of big new reactors. But DOE funding for nuclear R&D is slashed by 24 percent under the Administration’s proposed 2025 budget.
• Development: The gap between a nuclear prototype and a commercially viable product is huge, expensive, and not well funded by private investors. TerraPower’s technology has been under development for almost 20 years, and it plans to deploy its first reactor 5 years from now. Congress previously addressed this gap through supportive funding via the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), but that function will apparently be broken into pieces and funding eliminated. Key new players like TerraPower, Kairos, NuScale, and X-energy have all received substantial funding. Without that support, essential new nuclear designs won’t reach the market.
• Scale-up: Small modular reactors have more promise than existing large reactors because they can be scaled up and at least in part can benefit from factory production to reach scale, which is the key to sustained cost reductions that could make SMRs competitive. But that still takes a decade or more even after commercial launch, so private investors see promising technology but also a long runway of high up-front costs, massive risks, and uncertain demand. The Loan Program Office, if suitably reformed to focus only on scaleup, could help reduce the risks and encourage private investment at no significant cost to the government, since the support would come in the form of loans rather than grants. Nuclear will need it.

As nuclear scales up, international markets and standards will also become much more important; a slimmed down NRC might well not have the staff to address this in the face of more urgent short-term needs. And as we argued in a previous paper, the Administration must develop and operate a functional strategy that covers all stages of industry development, until the market is ready to take the technology and run with it.

So the EO’s focus on regulation is important and useful, especially in the highly regulated nuclear power sector, but it’s just a small piece of building a competitive nuclear industry in the United States. Unfortunately, on all other fronts, nuclear policy seems poised to move quickly into reverse.