By Kennedy Maize
Looking at the current hoopla over a U.S. nuclear power revival brings to mind the words of renowned U.S. philosopher and athlete Lawrence “Yogi” Berra: “It’s deja vu all over again.”
A nuclear revival faces tough going in 2026. A key attribute favoring nukes — no greenhouse gas emissions — has dematerialized in a Trump administration that disdains global warming. Trump is keeping aged, infirm coal plants running, pushing more coal, oil, and natural gas, and stealing Venezuela’s oil, while offering praise and promises for new nukes.
What brought nuclear to its knees 30 years ago — public support, costs, inflexibility, fuel supply, waste — appear no closer to solution today. Here’s a look at some of the hazards for a healthy nuclear rebirth.
Public support: From the 1950s to the 1990s, nuclear power went from “too cheap to meter” and “Atoms for peace” to public outrage at costs and decades of uneven performance. Congress tried a renaissance in 2005, leading to the V.C. Summer failure and Vogtle embarrassment.
The fear of a warming world has underpinned much of the recent argument for a nuclear reset. Nuclear plants provide lots of power round-the-clock without emitting carbon dioxide. Among those touting this nuclear benefit was the Breakthrough Institute, combining a zeal for combatting climate change with a case for nuclear.
That’s changed as Donald Trump has declared global warming, a favorite epithet, a “hoax.” The Breakthrough Institute now effectively says of Trump’s revanchist views, “never mind.” Founder Ted Nordhaus argues in a recent Washington Post op ed that Trump’s views on global warming are irrelevant. He writes, “The Trump administration’s effort to revitalize the U.S. nuclear sector is as close as we’ve seen to a moon shot” on climate, regardless of the administration’s lack of climate concerns.
While Nordhaus’s rebrand on Trump’s retreat from a war on a warming world, the public views on nukes are largely unchanged, mostly mild opposition or indifference. There’s no groundswell for atomic energy.
Cost: The first nuclear go-round priced itself out. Too cheap to meter was a joke. As plants went into service, the defining theme became “rate shock.” In the early days of the nuclear adventure, legendary utility pioneer Philip Sporn (1896-1978) warned the Atomic Energy Commission that nuclear plants would prove too expensive to compete with coal. He was right.
Now we are told that “small modular reactors” will solve the problem, with no evidence behind the claim. Nobody knows what a small modular reactor actually is. None are available to test the claims. NuScale’s first, 55-MW design, which won Nuclear Regulatory Commission design approval, proved too small to be economically viable. An upgrade to a 77-MW design increased the cost. The customer rebelled.
Designs now range to 300 MW and beyond. These plants are bound to be expensive. Can they compete economically with solar and wind, currently by far the least costly suppliers of new generation? That’s a difficult hurdle.
The Trump administration used political capital tearing down Biden’s legislation aiding renewables, substituting his fossil and nuclear preferences. In a recent interview in Nuclear Engineering International, Derek Coleman of the UK consultancy Baringa’s US Energy & Power Markets Advisory took a look at the impact of the Trump policy shift.
Baringa found that while switching from Biden policies to Trump’s “had a dramatic effect on some forms of generation, for nuclear it failed to shift the dial at all.” When it comes to nukes, Coleman said that “the headwinds are outside federal government support.”
The tidal wave of data centers demanding copious power leads to increased claims for larger power supplies, including nuclear. According to Coleman, “The hyperscaler businesses [i.e. AWS, Google etc], have shown they are in an arms race. They are looking for growth at all costs.” He added that “they are willing to take the risk of the bubble bursting.” Stranded investments would result. Should retail electric customers also eat that risk?
Inflexibility. The administration and the industry tout nuclear as “firm” and “dispatchable,” in contrast to “intermittent” renewables. That’s misleading. Nuclear is firm. It can and must run continuously. It is not dispatchable, but is either fully on or fully off. Nuclear plants cannot follow the electrical load, undercutting their value. Firm is not a feature but a bug.
The NEI article notes that while nuclear output is firm, “it is less clear that it can help meet the country’s need for dispatchable capacity – capacity that can act in a flexible way to meet the demands of the grid operator, whether that flexibility is required over timescales of seconds, hours or days.”
The only proposed reactor that recognizes this problem is Terra Power’s Natrium project in Wyoming, a 345-MW sodium-cooled fast reactor not using the heat produced to make steam to power a steam turbine generator. Reactor heat would be stored on site in a molten salt thermal “battery,” then used to make steam and follow load.
Fuel supply. Many of the advanced reactor designs eschew conventional nuclear fuel, enriched to less than 5% U-235. Instead, they plan for “high assay, low-enriched uranium” or HALEU. Most want fuel enriched to just short of 20% U-235. HALEU doesn’t exist at commercial scale.
Earlier this month (Jan. 5) DOE awarded $900 million each to three possible future HALEU suppliers: Centrus Energy Corp., General Matter, and Orano Federal Services. The awards were the conclusion to a solicitation begun in 2023 in the Biden administration to develop HALEU fuel. All three had qualified for the final award in late 2024.
Centrus, based in Bethesda, Md., a D.C. suburb, is the direct descendent of the former U.S. government-owned uranium enrichment program, which DOE privatized in 1992, originally named the “U.S. Enrichment Corporation.” It inherited a troubled centrifuge enrichment facility under development in Ohio. Centrus has produced a small amount of HALEU under a $115 million no-bid contract awarded in the first Trump administration in 2019.
Orano USA, also based in Bethesda, is the scion of French state-owned nuclear fuel cycle giant Orano SA, created in 2017 through the breakup of the vertically-integrated Areva. In 2024, the U.S. affiliate announced that it will develop a $5 billion advanced centrifuge project on DOE land at Oak Ridge, Tenn., known as “Project IKE,” hoping to produce low-enriched uranium in 2031.
General Matter is a secretive San Francisco firm formed in 2024 by billionaire investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel and an associate, Scott Nolan, apparently for the purpose of pursuing the Biden program, which carried over into Trump’s second coming.
The company has no track record. Its only business deal to date was acquiring a lease to 100 acres of land at the DOE’s long-abandoned gaseous diffusion enrichment plant in Kentucky, a relic of the Manhattan Project, for undisclosed terms.
General Matter has not revealed what enrichment technology it will pursue.The web site offers a pedestrian description of uranium enrichment and says, “General Matter performs this enrichment step.” That assertion is false.
Waste. The U.S. has no nuclear waste policy. That woeful 80-year-old condition remains unchanged.