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The Trump administration released three executive orders on nuclear energy on the Friday afternoon before the Memorial Day weekend — a time often used to dump bad news. And these orders were as disastrous as they come.
With these orders, President Donald Trump has embraced a dangerous strategy to promote the most expensive power there is: nuclear. His plan for new nuclear plants would require hundreds if not thousands of reactors, cost the nation over $4 trillion, and raise electricity bills substantially.
Worse, he is weakening design and safety oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And he’s doing so just as the NRC is starting to get flooded with new experimental — and highly risky — applications for previously untested small modular reactor (SMR) designs that appear to cut costs by skimping on safety.
Scientific Americanwarned in MarchthatTrump’s policies, which would weaken regulatory oversight of nuclear, “severely increase the risk of expensive, unexpected nuclear accidents.”
Trump claims that the U.S. nuclear industry has been strangled by regulations. But if that were the case, why is it that no industrialized country is betting big on nuclear? A J.P. Morgan report in March cast doubt on the idea of a global “nuclear renaissance.”
“Wake me when we get there,” wrote Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset and Wealth Management.
The reason is cost.I have been involved with nuclear energy policy and analysis for over thirty years. When I first came to the Department of Energy in 1993, I spent two years as a special assistant for policy and planning for the deputy secretary, who oversaw all DOE energy programs. One of my duties was to review policy and analysis coming from the Office of Nuclear Energy.
I ultimately ran the billion-dollar Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which supported many of the winning and emerging solutions we have today, including solar, wind, and geothermal power as well as advanced batteries, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. These solutions — as well as overhyped, costly, deeply flawed technologies like nuclear, direct air capture, fusion, and hydrogen — are the subject of my new book, The Hype About Hydrogen: False Promises and Real Solutions in the Race to Save the Climate.
The truth is,nuclear power was overhyped from the start. It was predicted to quickly become“too cheap to meter”in 1954 byAtomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss — the Robert Downey Jr. character inOppenheimer.
In reality, new reactorshave been steadily rising in price for over fifty years — andnuclear power’s share of global power peaked at 17 percent in the mid-1990s but was down to 9.1 percent in 2024.
So, Trump’s plan would leave Americans with steadily rising electricity bills. That’s doubly true when combined with his efforts to block or defund the winning clean energy technologies like wind, solar, and batteries, which have been declining in price for decades andnow comprise a remarkable93 percent of planned U.S. utility-scaleelectric-generating capacity additions this year, with natural gas providing the rest.
One of Trump’s orders makes it U.S. policy to “Facilitate the expansion of American nuclear energy capacity from approximately 100 gigawatts in 2024 to 400 gigawatts by 2050.” That would require hundreds of the current large reactors and perhaps thousands of the experimental SMRs.
This policy would cost more than $4.5 trillion — at the price of the only U.S. nuclear plant built this century, the twin Vogtle reactors in Georgia. They cost over $35 billion for 2.2 gigawatts, which is over $15 million per megawatt. That’s vastly higher than natural gas or renewables, so it would balloon electricity bills everywhere.
Indeed,Vogtle is “the most expensive power plant ever built on earth,” with an “astoundingly high” estimated electricity cost, notesPowermagazine. Georgia ratepayers paid $1,000 before they got any power, and now their bills are rising over $200 annually.
Even worse, the U.S. nuclear strategy isnotabout trying to reverse the negative learning curve of the big 1000+ megawatt plants everyone in the world uses. It’s about placing a big bet on SMRs, which are 300 megawatts or less and have a multi-decade history of failure.
Yet it would be unprecedented in the history of energy for smaller reactors to overcome the high cost per megawatt of large nuclear plants while simultaneously abandoning the economies of scale that have driven nuclear plants larger and larger everywhere in the world. Magical thinking is needed to believe SMRs would be substantiallycheaperper megawatt and make a major contribution to either power generation or reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Even aSeptember report from the Department of Energy (DOE) — which funds SMR development — modeled a cost per megawatt over 50 percent higher for SMRs than large reactors. So, it’s no surprise SMRs show every sign of the kind of cost escalation that has plagued larger nuclear reactors for decades. That’s why a MarchFinancial Timesanalysislabeled SMRs “the most expensive energy source.”
Indeed, the first SMR the U.S. tried to build — by NuScale — was canceled in 2023 after its cost soared past $20 million per megawatt, higher than Vogtle. In 2024, Bill Gates told CBS the full cost of his 375 megawatt Natrium reactor would be “close to $10 billion,” making its cost per megawatt nearly $30 million — almost twice that of Vogtle.
Significantly, a 2023Columbia University analysis determined that“if the costs of new nuclear end up being much higher” than $6.2 million per megawatt, “new nuclear appears unlikely to play much of a role, if any, in the U.S. power sector.”
Indeed, nuclear plants also have tariff risks since they need foreign sales, foreign uranium, and foreign components to succeed.
The reality is that nuclear power in general and SMRs in particular are a dead end as a major energy or climate solution — withhigh risks of cost overruns, delays, and reliability/safety problems.
We do know the cheapest, fastest, and most practical energy and climate solutions today — especially solar energy, wind power, and batteries. But the tragedy is that these are the very technologies that Trump and the Republicans in Congress are seeking to kill in the “Big Beautiful Bill” that recently passed the House.
Trump’s energy policies are a triple disaster — they will sharply raise Americans’ energy bills, boost inflation, and undermine U.S. competitiveness in the fast-growing clean energy sector.
Joseph Romm is a former acting assistant secretary of energy and the author of “The Hype About Hydrogen: False Promises and Real Solutions in the Race to Save the Climate.”
