Two of the overall goals are to quadruple US nuclear energy (add 300 GW to about 100GW) within 25 years. There is also the goal of reducing new nuclear reactor approval times to 18 months.
Within 240 days of the date of the executive order, the Secretary of Energy and other relevant agencies will have to present a plan to speed up and increase nuclear energy buildout.
Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy, in consultation with the Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Director of OMB, shall develop a plan to expand domestic uranium conversion capacity and expand enrichment capabilities sufficient to meet projected civilian and defense reactor needs for low enriched uranium (LEU), high enriched uranium (HEU) and high assay, low enriched uranium (HALEU), subject to retention of such stockpiles as are necessary for tritium production, naval propulsion, and nuclear weapons.
Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense as appropriate, shall update the Department of Energy’s excess uranium management policy to align with the policy objectives of this order and the Nuclear Fuel Security Act, factoring in the national security need to modernize the United States nuclear weapon stockpile. The Secretary of Energy shall prioritize contracting for the development of fuel fabrication facilities that demonstrate the technical and financial feasibility to supply fuel to qualified test reactors or pilot program reactors within 3 years from the date of such applications.
Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy, in coordination with the Attorney General and the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, shall utilize the authority provided to the President in section 708(c)(1) of the Defense Production Act of 1950 (DPA) (50 U.S.C. 4558(c)(1)), which has been delegated to the Secretary of Energy pursuant to Executive Order 13603 of March 16, 2012 (National Defense Resources Preparedness), to seek voluntary agreements pursuant to section 708 of the DPA with domestic nuclear energy companies. The Secretary of Energy should prioritize agreements with those companies that have achieved objective milestones (e.g., Department of Energy-approved conceptual safety design reports, the ability to privately finance their fuel, or the demonstrated technology capability) for the cooperative procurement of LEU and HALEU, including as needed by the Federal Government for tritium production, naval propulsion, and nuclear weapons.
Funding for Restart, Completion, Uprate, or Construction of Nuclear Plants. (a) To maximize the speed and scale of new nuclear capacity, the Department of Energy shall prioritize work with the nuclear energy industry to facilitate 5 gigawatt of power uprates to existing nuclear reactors and have 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.
Within 180 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy, in coordination with the Administrator of the Small Business Administration, shall, subject to the availability of appropriations, prioritize funding for qualified advanced nuclear technologies through grants, loans, investment capital, funding opportunities, and other Federal support. Priority shall be given to those companies demonstrating the largest degrees of design and technological maturity, financial backing, and potential for near-term deployment of their technologies.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I don’t think any nuke plant build has started in the last 10 years in Merika. Some builds that were abandoned were restarted … Vogtle 3 and 4 are now running.
A fundamental problem for nuclear is unwarranted overregulation by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that significantly drives up costs of all types. If the NRC simply followed recent law, nuclear efforts would be proportionate to the underlying risks. However, that is not what occurs with mundane activities subject to hugely disproportionate costs.
The nuclear industry needs to insist the NRC follow the law, rather than pushing compliance costs onto the taxpayer by way of government grants and subsidies of various types. Ditto for the Trump administration. Fix the root cause.
The NRC executives could quickly solve the issue, but many of the entrenched bureaucrats are unwilling to give up their power. If the matter cannot be reasonably quickly resolved, then the industry needs to grow a backbone and drag the NRC into court.
Last administration had similar goals and words on paper.
I think the electric company is just fine billing me $300 to $600 a month and doesn’t want to triple capacity to charge me less.
Market cap of local nuke owner/operator is like 1.2x the cost of Votgle expansion.
Every 5 years something new going to revive nuclear power. This last hype cycle was “the data centers”.
I was reading about Gen4 on Netscape navigator 25 years ago. 15 more years and I’ll be retired.
The catch is, it’s not enough to have one administration adopt pro nuke policies. You need to somehow assure capital sources that pro nuke policy will be maintained afterwards for decades.
Nobody wants to risk investing in a plant that a subsequent government might order shut down and maybe even demolished, well before the investment has been paid back. We are NOT a high trust society anymore.
Maybe a law mandating that the government must reimburse investors on extremely generous terms in such an event could do the trick. But nothing the Executive branch can do would provide such assurances.
The other obvious requirement is that regulatory churn has to end. Once a plant design has been approved, that approval must be final. No changing regulations in mid-build, requiring expensive modifications and stretching out schedules.
As in many other domains, it’s not obvious that writing executive orders actually achieves achieves anything with issues like this.
Is nuclear competitive with solar or wind ? I know this is a constant energy output but does it still worth it ?
Yes, constant energy output is essential for modern civilization. I also challenge the idea that wind and solar are cheap. Everyone I know who lives in an area that pushed wind and solar has seen their utility bills go up, not down. Like the old saying: The proof is in the eating of the pudding.
Solar and Wind aren’t competitive with nuclear on a purely technical basis except for off grid. The only reason they are in fact competitive is decades of over regulation and mis regulation of nuclear driven by the political success of the antinuclear movement (which was heavily subsidized by fossil fuel companies).
The new surge in demand for powering big AI centers is likely helping drive this.
If you ask pronuclear people, what do you expect?
Nuclear propaganda claims always very cheap energy. But most of them are just only paper projects, it doesn’t exists in the real world.
And real reactors are plagued by delays that create huge costs increments.
Yes, it’s NOT an unavoidable problem. Most of the problems comes from the lack of standardization. If you need most of the project to be custom made, and a very narrow chain of suppliers, it’s expected problems to arise.
That’s the reason when a lot of reactors of the same time are build in a short time, it tends to meet the schedules a lot better. Supply chain usually get better with experience and repeat, and any problem can be used as a experience to be avoided in future projects.
The problem is… we don’t need so much reactors. Besides our current reactors are far from perfect, so anybody propose something new, supposedly better, but again it ends the same way. Without experience.
And the loop is repeated again and again, turn nuclear unprofitable and more expensive each time due the lack of investment in a specific model.
That’s the reason there are so much promises around SMRs. If you can build really small SMRs that remains cheap on its own, there are chances to build a lot more reactors.
BUT, don’t sell the idea yet. The reason we did huge reactors until now is not just an arbitrary thing. Not everything on nuclear energy scales with size, so you can’t expect SMRs to maintain the same profitability than a huge reactor built on time.
Security plans, fuel management, catastrophic failures… doesn’t scales with size (the same probability of problems regardless of the size, but a lot less energy produced, so higher cost per energy unit).
That’s the reason some people has proposed hybrid approaches, like huge plants made of lots of SMRs, so an SMR array share the same costs of these problems. Although that doesn’t work against catastrophic failures, so they need to compensate with better passive security measures.
Anyway. Pro-nuclear always will claim is cheap, but the real situation is the opposite. It’s not unsolvable, but overoptimism and lack of realism doesn’t help.
For example, if they acknowledge the problem, they could propose a leveled plan, telling clearly the people that at the firsts stages the plan will be expensive.
Build lots of different nuclear reactors never build before IS EXPENSIVE AND DELAYS ARE EXPECTED. Tell people otherwise only will result in disappointment and lack of trust.
On other side, pronuclear tends to overcriticize renewables just because are the cheapest nowadays and very difficult contender.
If long term cheap storage is added to the equation, nuclear will be just unnecessary.
Still an interesting technology, maybe convenient for some places, and sure a necessity on long term for space exploration of the outer solar system.
Besides nuclear energy generates lots of convenient isotopes for other uses. But that could be solved with minor nuclear plants.
Without a lot of advancements and a new approach, I would say the tendency of nuclear energy is dwelling.