In May, President Trump sat in the Oval Office flanked by executives from America's nuclear power industry.
"It's a hot industry. It's a brilliant industry," the president said from behind the Resolute desk.
It's also an industry that's having a moment. Billions of dollars in capital are currently flowing into dozens of companies chasing new kinds of nuclear technologies. These are small modular designs that can potentially be mass produced in the hundreds or even thousands. Their proponents say these advanced designs promise to deliver megawatts of power safely and cheaply.
But there's a problem, Joseph Dominguez, the CEO of Constellation Energy, told the president.
New nuclear plants keep getting caught up in safety regulations.
"Mr. President, you know this because you're the best at building things," Dominguez, whose company runs about a quarter of America's existing nuclear reactors, said. "Delay in regulations and permitting will absolutely kill you. Because if you can't get the plant on, you can't get the revenue."
Now, a new Trump administration program is sidestepping the regulatory system that's overseen the nuclear industry for half a century. The program will fast-track construction of new and untested reactor designs built by private firms, with an explicit goal of having at least three nuclear test reactors up and running by the United States' 250th birthday, July 4, 2026.
If that goal is met, it will be without the direct oversight of America's primary nuclear regulator. Since the 1970s, safety for commercial reactors has been the purview of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But the NRC is only consulting on the new Reactor Pilot Program, which is being run by the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy.
The existing staff of that office recently asked outsiders for help. In an email seen by NPR, the Office of Nuclear Energy requested volunteers from universities to assist in speeding up safety reviews. "DOE is currently evaluating creative ideas to help manage anticipated resource constraints," read the November 17 email, which was addressed to members of the National Organization of Test Research and Training Reactors.
In an email to NPR, the DOE said that approximately 30 subject matter experts are reviewing the proposals. "The request for additional support staff from academia was to gauge if there were disciplines that could further augment federal staff and help expedite reviews," the statement read.
"DOE upholds the highest standards of safety in our work with the nuclear industry," it added. Four projects have already met with DOE to present their preliminary design reviews and the first approvals could come early next year.
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The new pilot program may be an unproven regulatory path run by an agency with limited experience in the commercial sector, but supporters say it's energizing an industry that's been moribund for decades.
"This is exactly what we need to do," said Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, a small nuclear startup headquartered in Hawthorne, Calif. "We need to make nuclear great again."
Valar and other companies plan to build smaller reactors than those currently used in the nuclear industry, and that makes a Chernobyl or Fukushima-type accident impossible, noted Nick Touran, an independent nuclear consultant. "The overall worst-case scenario is definitely less when you're a smaller reactor," he said.
Critics, however, worry that the tight July 4 deadline, political pressure and a lack of transparency are all compromising safety. Even a "small" release of radioactive material could cause damage to people and the environment around the test sites.
"This is not normal, and this is not OK, and this is not going to lead to success," warned Allison Macfarlane, a professor at the University of British Columbia who served as chairman of the NRC under president Barack Obama. "This is how to have an accident."
AI's need for speed
The AI boom needs a lot of electricity. According to the International Energy Agency, the energy needs of large data centers in the U.S. will skyrocket by about 130% between now and 2030. Many technology companies are committed to buying energy that doesn't contribute to global warming, and that, in turn, has sparked huge interest in nuclear power. Companies like Amazon and Google have turned to nuclear power to quench their insatiable need for electricity.
Nuclear power also occupies a political sweet spot. Unlike renewable technologies, nuclear power has not drawn the ire of the Trump administration. That may be in part because it has strong backing from Trump-aligned Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Both Thiel and Andreessen are among the many Silicon Valley elite who have invested in nuclear startups in recent years.
The investment is seeking to disrupt an industry that has remained largely unchanged for decades. Tech companies and investors are backing new designs, said Touran. They're pouring money into small nuclear reactors. These reactors are designed to be mass produced and collocated with data centers, directly powering the sites. By one estimate, more than $6 billion in private equity, venture capital and public investments have gone into reactor development in recent years. The money has led to "dozens and dozens of new companies," Touran said.
As those companies prepare to test their designs, their path is now being helped by the executive order Trump signed on the day he met with the nation's nuclear executives. The order explicitly placed oversight of commercial test reactors with the Energy Department, and it required Energy Secretary Chris Wright to "approve at least three reactors pursuant to this pilot program with the goal of achieving criticality in each of the three reactors by July 4, 2026."
This past June, with the deadline for building three new nuclear reactors looming a little over a year away, Energy Department officials in charge of the Reactor Pilot Program met with the heads of companies in Washington, D.C.
Right from the start it was clear that, unlike the slow and deliberate safety culture that has dominated nuclear power for decades, this new program would be all about speed.
"Our job is to make sure that the government is no longer a barrier," said Seth Cohen, a lawyer at the Department of Energy responsible for implementing Trump's executive orders. Cohen said the officials responsible for overseeing safety would do "whatever we need to ensure that the government is not stopping you from reaching [nuclear] criticality on or before July 4, 2026."
A new regulator
Before the executive order, the Energy Department did not regulate the safety of commercial nuclear reactors. That job fell to another body: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The commission was set up in 1975 by Congress as an independent safety watchdog, said Allison Macfarlane, the former NRC chair. Part of the reason the NRC was formed was because the predecessor to the DOE, known as the Atomic Energy Commission, oversaw both safety and promotion of nuclear power at the same time.
"This was a very strong conflict of interest," Macfarlane said.
But in recent years, companies, particularly those trying to build new kinds of reactors, had become frustrated with the NRC, Macfarlane said. "The promoters of these small modular reactors were becoming very vociferous about the NRC being the problem," she said.
In 2022, the NRC rejected a combined license application for Oklo, a new nuclear startup. Oklo had submitted an application to build and operate its small reactor, called the Aurora powerhouse. But the NRC denied the application because it contained "significant information gaps in its description of Aurora's potential accidents as well as its classification of safety systems and components."
Oklo was told it could resubmit its application to the NRC, but it never did.
Then at the May signing of the executive order, Oklo's CEO Jacob DeWitte appeared behind President Trump applauding the new reactor program at DOE.
"Changing the permitting dynamics is going to help things move faster," DeWitte said to the president. "It's never been more exciting."
Oklo had another connection to the Energy Department — the Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, was a member of Oklo's board of directors until he took the helm at the DOE. Wright stepped down following his confirmation in February.
In August, a little over a month after that initial meeting between industry executives and the DOE, the Office of Nuclear Energy announced the 11 advanced reactor projects had been selected for the Reactor Pilot Program. Three of Oklo's reactors were part of the new pilot program, including a test version of the reactor design rejected by the NRC.
Bonita Chester, a spokesperson for Oklo, said the company had won its awards through DOE's "open competitive opportunities." It had already been working with the department for several years, in part because the government had operated a reactor similar to the design Oklo is pursuing.
Oklo had been working on additional safety analyses required by DOE, and moreover, Chseter said in an email to NPR, the company intends to complete an NRC licensing process for operation of its first Aurora reactor just as soon as it's built.
"We've continued safety and accident analyses continuously — before, during, and after 2022," she said.
Hopes and fears
Other supporters of the DOE's new Reactor Pilot Program say the NRC was never equipped to review the type of advanced reactors many of the latest nuclear startups hope to build.
"The NRC is not built for R&D," said Isaiah Taylor of Valar Atomics. "R&D has to be done in the real world, you actually have to turn reactors on."
Valar's design looks far different from the reactors that are running today. It will use a special type of fuel together with a high-temperature gas to generate heat and electricity. Taylor said gathering real data will speed development and increase safety over the long-term.
"Innovation drives safety," he said.
(Valar is also party to a lawsuit against the NRC arguing the commission does not have the authority to regulate small reactors. In his interview, Taylor told NPR the company intends to file for an NRC license "when we're ready.")
Government labs run by the DOE have built experimental nuclear reactors for decades, and the agency has an established program for reviewing safety, added Jordan Bramble, the CEO of Antares, a nuclear startup that hopes to build microreactors for space and military applications.
"We believe that licensing through a DOE pathway is absolutely the best way to build prototype reactors, and you absolutely have to build prototype reactors before you build commercial reactors," Bramble said.
Both Valar and Antares say they intend to have their test reactors running by the July 4 deadline.
"Safety remains paramount as we expedite the process," the DOE said in its email. In a separate statement, the NRC said it had detailed a dozen staff to the program to help with the reviews.
But critics question whether the pilot program will really produce safe nuclear reactors.
The July 4, 2026 deadline puts enormous pressure on the program, said Heidy Klaaf, the chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, which recently published a report warning that AI development could undermine nuclear safety.
"I think these manufactured timelines are actually incredibly concerning," Klaaf said. "There's no timeline for assessing a new design and making sure it's safe, especially something we haven't seen before."
Then there's the question of public transparency. The NRC makes many of the documents around its decisions available publicly. It also frequently allows the public to comment as well, added Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. The new pilot program is far more opaque and "is really an attempt to subvert the laws and regulations that go around commercial nuclear power," he said.
While many of the test reactors are small and tout themselves as inherently safer than existing nuclear power plants, they are still capable of leaking radiation in an accident, Lyman noted. "If they are located closer to populated areas, if there aren't any provisions for offsite radiological emergency planning… then you are potentially putting the public at greater risk, even if the reactors are small," he said.
Perhaps most worrying, said former NRC Chair Macfarlane, is how the DOE's safety assessment might be used to build more small reactors across the country, once the pilot reactors are built.
While the NRC remains the body in charge of licensing reactors for commercial purposes, a recent memorandum of understanding between the NRC and the DOE called on the commission to establish "an expedited pathway to approve advanced reactor designs that have been authorized and tested by DOE."
In other words, once the DOE has approved a pilot reactor, the NRC now has to use its own sped-up process for approving the commercial version.
In its email to NPR, the DOE said "Safety standards will be upheld and maintained as the top priority regardless of which regulatory body is utilized for authorization or licensing."
Th NRC said in its statement it was prepared to accept the DOE's findings. Assuming the safety analysis is sound, "the NRC will build on that work, not repeat it" when it undertakes commercial licensing.
But Macfarlane is unconvinced. She said relying on the hasty DOE analysis for the construction of potentially dozens or even hundreds of small reactors around the U.S. is the real risk.
"They can look at what the DOE did, they can take it as a piece of input, but they have to do their own separate analysis," she warned. "Otherwise none of us are safe."
Reach out to Geoff Brumfiel through encrypted communication on Signal at gbrumfiel.13
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