Are Trump and AI driving a nuclear power boom?

Summary

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Episode Overview

Title: Are Trump and AI driving a nuclear power boom?
Podcast: Short Wave (NPR)
Hosts: Regina Barber, Jeff Brumfiel
Date: July 20, 2026
Theme:
This episode explores the recent surge in U.S. nuclear power development, driven by skyrocketing energy demands from artificial intelligence (AI) and spearheaded by new policies introduced under President Trump. The hosts unpack why these changes are happening now, the technological and regulatory shifts fueling the nuclear renaissance, safety and transparency concerns, and what the future might hold as small modular reactors pop up nationwide.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Surge in Energy Demand & Role of AI

• AI Is Driving Massive Energy Demand:
  • Jeff Brumfiel explains that U.S. energy demand is projected to jump by 130% by 2030, largely due to the needs of AI and big tech ("Because of AI, US energy demand is going to skyrocket..." — Jeff Brumfiel, [02:59]).
  • Big tech companies want more electricity but insist on clean sources to meet climate commitments.

A New Nuclear Race

• Small Modular Reactors at the Forefront:
  • Unlike traditional mega-reactors, this revival is centered on small, experimental reactors, many developed by startups and funded by venture capital ("...this time around is people are thinking smaller...these small experimental nuclear reactors." — Jeff Brumfiel, [03:38]).
  • Advantages include operating at higher temperatures and a reduced risk of meltdown.

Triggers and Political Drivers

• Trump-Era Policy Builds Momentum:
  • President Trump’s 2025 executive order propelled this initiative, mandating at least three new reactor designs achieve "criticality" (operational self-sustaining chain reaction) by July 4, 2026 ([04:36]).
  • The goal was surpassed, with four reactors coming online, including one just after midnight on July 4 ([06:23]).

"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."
— Jeff Brumfiel, [06:32]

How They Did It So Fast

• Bypassing Traditional Oversight:
  • The Department of Energy (DOE) used its authority to regulate certain experimental reactors, sidestepping the usually meticulous Nuclear Regulatory Commission ([07:38]).
  • DOE rewrote its own safety and environmental rules to speed up the process—condensing hundreds of pages of requirements, softening environmental language, and consolidating security policies.

"They consolidated over 500 pages of security rules into a single 23 page document."
— Jeff Brumfiel, [09:09]

Safety, Transparency, and Public Concerns

• Expert and Public Critiques:
  • Ed Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists warns about the dangers of rule-bending:

"Of course, if you bend all the rules, you can do things quickly. But... if you want to do things right, you have to go by the book."
— Ed Lyman, [10:25]

• Katie Huff (former DOE nuclear head) highlights lack of public engagement:

"The public should expect as much openness from the government as is possible, not just as is convenient or as is... appropriate for your timelines."
— Katie Huff, [11:01]

• Concerns abound about environmental impact, security, and a Manhattan Project-like rush that could compromise public safety.

Government & Industry Justifications

• DOE and Companies Respond:
  • DOE insists safety remains top priority, arguing that reducing unnecessary bureaucracy will spark innovation without increasing danger.
  • Industry representatives (e.g., Isaiah Taylor, Valor Atomics) say more real-world testing boosts future reactor safety; data from these test units will inform safer commercial reactors ([12:19]).

What Happens Next

• Future Rollout:

  • More test reactors are due this fall ([12:46]); their data will feed into Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) oversight.
  • The NRC is also revising its rules, and these decisions will shape whether small reactors become common near data centers.

• Lingering Questions About Economics:

  • Jeff Brumfiel cautions that nuclear remains expensive, even at a small scale, and it’s unclear if it can match the cost-effectiveness of renewables, batteries, or gas ([13:37]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "It's thanks to a program that President Trump launched a little over a year ago."
  Jeff Brumfiel introduces the political driver for the nuclear boom ([01:06]).
• "You see, since the 70s, nuclear reactors have been overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission... they've kept the industry relatively safe... but everything's been very, very slow. So this new pilot program was set up in part to bypass the [NRC]."
  Jeff Brumfiel, [07:38]
• "We learned over... the past eight years that if you want to do things right, you have to go by the book."
  Ed Lyman, [10:25]
• "In the best world, the public should expect as much openness from the government as is possible..."
  Katie Huff, [11:01]
• "This is really actually where safety comes from. It comes from testing and being robust in your hardware and getting experience."
  Isaiah Taylor (Valor Atomics CEO), paraphrased by Jeff Brumfiel, [12:19]

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Timeline of Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------| | 00:21 | Regina Barber introduces the "summer of nuclear" | | 02:53 | Why AI is causing a spike in energy demand | | 03:38 | The small modular reactor revolution | | 04:36 | Trump’s executive orders and “criticality” goal | | 06:20 | Four reactors beat the deadline | | 07:38 | How regulatory changes expedited construction | | 09:01 | Details on DOE’s rule changes, transparency lapses| | 10:25 | Ed Lyman and public concerns about safety | | 11:01 | Katie Huff on government openness | | 12:18 | Industry’s view: testing boosts future safety | | 12:46 | Next steps: more test reactors, NRC’s new role | | 13:37 | Economic hurdles for small nuclear |

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Conclusion & Outlook

• The U.S. nuclear sector is moving faster than ever, driven by urgent AI-related energy needs and Trump-era policy changes.
• The rise of small, experimental reactors is enabled by regulatory shortcuts and industry enthusiasm for innovation.
• Key experts urge caution, highlighting transparency, safety, and environmental security risks.
• While more reactors will be tested and data gathered for commercial deployments, the big open question is still economics—can "modular" nuclear compete with other energy sources?

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Transcript

[Narrator/Announcer]

Support for this podcast and the following message come from National Geographic's new series, out of Time with Tom Hiddleston premieres Wednesday, July 22nd at 8, 7 Central on National Geographic and streaming next day on Disney and Hulu. You're listening to Shortwave from npr.

[Regina Barber]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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

[Regina Barber]

So as part of TechCamp, 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 and Right, Jeff.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

Yeah, that's right. And more are expected to come online soon, in part because of everybody's favorite topic, artificial intelligence.

[Regina Barber]

Yup.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

It's thanks to a program that President Trump launched a little over a year ago.

[Ed Lyman]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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

[Regina Barber]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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?

[Regina Barber]

You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from npr.

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[Regina Barber]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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.

[Regina Barber]

It's huge.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

And you know, the big tech firms, they have these climate commit 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.

[Regina Barber]

But what makes this current nuclear revival different?

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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 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.

[Regina Barber]

That's a big one.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

So, yeah, yeah, that's big in the nuclear industry. And so 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, you know, I think that there really haven't been reactors of this type before.

[Regina Barber]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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 prove 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.

[Regina Barber]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

Right, right, right. So. So in the nuclear world, going critical roughly means just turning your reactor on, basically working. 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.

[Regina Barber]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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

[Regina Barber]

Okay.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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.

[Regina Barber]

Did they do it? They did it. They did.

[Katie Huff]

Wow.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

In fact, four reactors came online.

[Regina Barber]

They even went past their estimate. Yes, fascinating.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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 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 the possibility that this new program is setting the nuclear industry up to be less safe in the future.

[Regina Barber]

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?

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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

[Regina Barber]

Yeah, you two, like, broke that story, right?

[Jeff Brumfiel]

That's right.

[Regina Barber]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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. 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.

[Regina Barber]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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.

[Ed Lyman]

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 have to go by the book.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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. 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.

[Katie Huff]

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.

[Regina Barber]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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

[Regina Barber]

Okay.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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

[Regina Barber]

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

[Jeff Brumfiel]

Well, there's 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 a data center or a bunch of data centers, you might see a little cluster of these small modular reactors. But I do want to say one more thing, Gina.

[Regina Barber]

Okay.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

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.

[Regina Barber]

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.

[Jeff Brumfiel]

Yeah, it's definitely a very exciting time.

[Regina Barber]

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 podcast. This way you won't miss a new episode like next week's Tech Camp episode about a universal vaccine. We one vaccine to rule them all. This episode was Produced by Burleigh McCoy and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact checked by Jeff Brumfel 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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