DEEP DIVE – AMERICA’S NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE

For half a century, the American Left has done its best to cancel the future.

We were promised nuclear-powered everything. Clean electricity too cheap to meter. Cities in the desert. Ocean liners and maybe even airplanes running on atoms. Nuclear rockets cutting the trip to Mars to months instead of years.

Instead, Democrats gave us rolling blackouts, German-style “energy transitions,” and a never-ending string of hysterical predictions that never came true and for which no one apologized (even if they remembered them at all).

This wasn’t an accident. It was policy. It was bureaucracy. And above all it was power: the Left discovered that it could use fear to stampede the herd. And if you use that to control what and how much energy people may use, you can control everything they do.

But as Barack Obama told us, elections have consequences. For the first time since Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace, the United States is on the verge of a genuine nuclear renaissance. Donald Trump has torn a hole in the regulatory wall that strangled nuclear for fifty years. Big Tech and AI are suddenly demanding more electricity than the entire U.S. grid can presently provide. And the world is awakening to the fact that our enemies, particularly China, are sprinting ahead on the very technology our ruling class told us to fear.

It matters. Nuclear doesn’t just keep the lights on. It unlocks missile defense, space settlement, desalination, re-industrialization — the entire future my generation was told could never be.

How the Left’s 50-Year War on Nuclear Froze American Progress

From 1954 to 1974, the old Atomic Energy Commission licensed 133 civilian reactors. That was America doing what America does: scaling an epochal technology in record time.

Then the Democrats passed the Energy Reorganization Act, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was born.

In the half century since the NRC took over, it has approved exactly two new reactors that actually made it to operational status. Not 200. Not 133. Two.

It typical Deep State fashion, the NRC’s bureaucrats weaponized their political biases. They used fear to create demands for “safety”, and then turned “safety” into a weapon against the very thing they were supposedly regulating.

You can see it in the rules. Take the infamous Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model and its bastard child, ALARA — “As Low As Reasonably Achievable.” In English, LNT says any amount of radiation is harmful; ALARA says regulators must drive that risk as close to zero as possible, no matter what that costs.

Never mind that background radiation varies wildly around the planet with no corresponding cancer spike. Never mind that you get more radiation on a flight from New York to L.A. — or from eating a banana, or from shopping in New York’s Grand Central Station — than from living next to a nuclear plant for a year. Once LNT and ALARA hardened into doctrine, the NRC effectively gave itself a “zero bananas allowed” mandate.

The results were as predictable as they were intentional:

• Licensing timelines stretched from a few years to a decade or more.
• Applicants were billed by the hour to navigate a constantly shifting rulebook.
• Multi-billion-dollar projects were killed by forced last-minute design changes, litigation, or both.
• Costly workers and equipment were forced to stand idle while the NRC imposed reviews and changes, again and again, mid-construction.

Meanwhile, environmental NGOs learned there was big money in opposing energy. Groups that present themselves as “defenders of nature” in fact became the shock troops of an anti-energy, anti-industrial crusade, funded in no small part by America’s enemies but also by grants from the Democrat-run bureaucracy.

Just the top ten U.S. “green” NGOs alone take in roughly $1.8 billion a year. Their executives routinely make north of half a million dollars annually. That money doesn’t come from planting trees. It comes from stopping pipelines, refineries, gas stoves – and especially nuclear plants. And until the fracking boom — which the left also opposed — it came at the cost of intractable dependency on foreign energy.

Tie that to an Enemedia complex that sensationalizes Three Mile Island (where no one died), Chernobyl (a Soviet design no Western company would have ever built), and Fukushima (where the tsunami, not radiation, killed people), and you get fifty years of cultivated radiophobia.

So America, the country that invented practical nuclear power, froze. We kept the old plants — which allies like Germany did not — but we stopped building. We let our domestic uranium mining and enrichment industries wither and became deliberately dependent on Russia (as we did in the Obama years for rocket engines and manned space flight). We lectured the world about “climate change” while blocking the one technology that can actually deliver gigawatts of carbon-free baseload power.

But unlike the West, our enemies weren’t stupid.

China now gets nearly 90% of its energy from hydrocarbons and uses more coal than the rest of the world combined. But the biggest growth story has been natural gas and nuclear. Beijing has roughly thirty gigawatts of nuclear capacity just under construction and is on track to be the world’s largest nuclear operator in less than five years.

For fifty years, America chose to stagnate. Then Trump walked in.

Trump’s Nuclear Jailbreak

They do three big things.

First, they set an unapologetic goal: a four-fold expansion of America’s nuclear fleet by 2050.

Not vague “net zero” rhetoric. Hard numbers: ten new large reactors online by 2030; at least three advanced reactors — small modular or microreactors — licensed and tested by 2026; nuclear capacity quadrupled by mid-century. The Department of Energy has announced plans to finance the first ten new reactors with low-interest loans, specifically for credit-worthy hyperscalers and other serious buyers putting real equity on the table.

The orders also direct the Department of Defense to treat nuclear-powered data centers and advanced reactors on military bases as “defense-critical infrastructure.” Translation: if you build a reactor on a base to power AI facilities or missile defense, you get fast-tracked, not buried in the ludicrous fifteen-year NRC morass that killed civilian nuclear power.

Second, Trump tackles the fuel bottleneck.

Advanced reactors, especially microreactors, need HALEU — high-assay low-enriched uranium. Thanks to decades of neglect, the only countries producing HALEU at scale are Russia and China. As of 2023, roughly 99% of fuel used in U.S. reactors was imported, much of it from Russia.

Trump’s orders, combined with DOE initiatives, are jump-starting an American HALEU industry. Companies like General Matter — started because my friend Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund literally couldn’t find a domestic enrichment company to invest in — are building new centrifuge capacity staffed by alumni of SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, and our national labs.

Standard Nuclear and others are ramping production of the staggering breakthrough TRISO fuel — tiny ceramic-armored “pebbles” that can’t melt down and effectively build the containment dome into each particle. TRISO allows microreactors that are walk-away safe and small enough to truck or barge anywhere on Earth.

Third, Trump takes a flamethrower to the NRC’s worst dysfunctions.

Yes the orders streamline the approval process. But even more importantly, the orders explicitly call for revisiting LNT and ALARA. They don’t dictate a scientific answer, but they do force the bureaucracy to admit what the science has long suggested: at low doses, radiation risks are vanishingly small, often indistinguishable from background, and treating them as existential threats is bad policy and terrible economics intended to kill the industry, not protect the public.

This reform alone could shave years and billions off new reactor projects, as well as DOE cleanup megaprojects that currently spend fortunes chasing “dose reductions” smaller than what you’d get from standing in the sun.

Trump’s policy doesn’t just say “we like nuclear.” It attacks the three real choke points — licensing time, radiation standards, and fuel — at the same time.

Big Tech’s Power Hunger

The timing couldn’t be better.

For years, politicians pretended data lived “in the cloud.” Now we’re discovering what that really means: a global forest of very physical buildings filled with very real servers that drink electricity like a fleet of aluminum smelters.

According to Deloitte, U.S. data centers currently use roughly 33 gigawatts of power — roughly the same as 27 million homes. By 2035, as AI and cloud services scale, that number could hit 176 gigawatts, more than five times today’s load. And that’s just the data centers. Add in the push for electric vehicles, the explosive growth of industrial robotics, and reshored manufacturing, and the demand curve begins to look like a Falcon 9 launch.

Where is that power going to come from?

Not from solar panels that sleep half the day and sulk through winter. Not from wind farms (bird blenders) that produce nothing on a still, hot afternoon. Not from fantasy “conservation” schemes that somehow reduce power use while electrifying everything.

The people who actually have to keep these data centers running understand this.

Amazon is pouring more than a billion dollars into nuclear projects, including a brand-new data center campus in Pennsylvania next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant. Microsoft has a deal with Constellation to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 specifically to feed its AI clusters. Google and others are negotiating similar arrangements and investing in SMR startups. Meta just announced nuclear power deals totaling 6.6 gigawatts of new production.

They’re doing it because nuclear is the only power source that checks all the boxes:

• Always on — baseload, not weather-dependent.
• Extremely energy-dense — a pellet the size of a gummy bear replaces 140 barrels of oil.
• Carbon-free (if you care about that).
• Siting-flexible — SMRs and microreactors can be put wherever the need is.

But the real payoff from a nuclear renaissance isn’t just that we keep the lights on for ChatGPT. It’s what abundant, reliable, high-density power lets us do next.

What Nuclear Really Unlocks

Nuclear is not just another way to spin a turbine. It’s the missing keystone for several civilizational leaps we’ve talked ourselves out of for fifty years.

1. Golden Dome and the End of Mutual Assured Destruction

Trump’s Golden Dome will initially be missile-based, like Israel’s Arrow system. But directed-energy weapons — high-power lasers and related systems — are the future. In time, they will make incoming missiles and drones obsolete the way ironclads made wooden ships obsolete.

Israel’s Iron Beam already shoots down rockets for a couple dollars a shot. Scale that up, integrate it with systems like Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, THAAD, AEGIS, etc., and you get layered, nearly limitless missile defense. The logical next step is nuclear-powered missile defense clusters, on land and at sea, enabling Reagan’s dream of “better a shield than a sword.”

But there’s a catch: lasers are power hogs. You’re not going to run that shield wall on solar panels and wishful thinking. It will take reactors. Lots of them.

You want to end Mutually Assured Destruction and truly protect our people? You need nuclear — not for the warheads, but for the power plants that make the warheads irrelevant.

2. Space, At Last: Nuclear Thermal and Nuclear Electric

The Department of Energy’s new infographic about nuclear thermal propulsion is extraordinary if only in that our government hasn’t dreamed, much less promoted, such things in my living memory.

Even so, it rather timidly suggests these engines could shave “up to 25%” off Mars transit times. That’s bureaucratic understatement.

The Energy Department here understates the case: every indication is that nuclear thermal propulsion could cut travel times by as much as 50%, and that’s just the beginning.

Double the specific impulse of chemical rockets, design the mission intelligently, and you can cut crewed trip times to Mars by nearly half while hauling more cargo and maintaining better abort options. Pair that with nuclear electric systems — highly efficient engines powered by reactors — and the entire inner Solar System becomes reachable in weeks or a few months, not multi-year odysseys.

That changes everything:

• Regular transportation, crew rotation, and resupply to Mars, the Asteroid Belt, or virtually anywhere else you want to go.
• Large-scale in-space mining, manufacturing, and construction.
• Real, permanent space settlements — cities, not one-off landings.

Nuclear upgrades Starship from an already-impressive DC-3 all the way to a 747, making it the backbone of a rich, populous cislunar and interplanetary economy. It also means plenty of power for real work — and real living — once you get there, a “luxury” our astronauts have always lacked.

3. Unlimited Fresh Water

Nuclear also means the end of water scarcity.

High-capacity reactors and SMR clusters will be able to power massive desalination projects on every ocean coastline. They can pump freshwater hundreds of miles inland and thousands of feet uphill. Mix that with emerging atmospheric water technologies like David Stuckenberg’s Genesis Systems and you’re not just talking about reducing the pressure on declining water tables. Turning deserts green is within reach.

Think about what that means:

• The Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico — places defined by scarcity — can become lush, irrigated, permanently habitable, and agriculturally rich.
• For the first time in human history, food scarcity can be eliminated.
• Nations will no longer hit a “water ceiling” that caps their growth or forces them into conflict with their neighbors over control of rivers.
• Cities can plan for abundance instead of rationing.

And once again: you aren’t going to run multi-gigawatt desalination plants on windmills.

4. Re-Industrialization, EVs, and Ten Billion Robots

Finally, nuclear is the only realistic way to marry Trump’s re-industrialization agenda with the electrified, automated economy that’s coming whether Deep State bureaucrats grasp it or not.

If you actually intend to:

• Deploy millions of electric vehicles,
• Run vast robotized warehouses and factories,
• Power the ten billion robots Elon Musk keeps talking about,
• Not to mention onshore heavy industry,

you need a grid that makes California’s current system look like a model train set.

Hydrocarbons will continue to matter enormously; I am not arguing for their abolition, and I don’t buy the Left’s CO₂ panic. But politically, and technologically, the winning strategy is obvious: use nuclear to shoulder more of the relentless baseload demand and free up our oil and gas for where they’re irreplaceable — aviation, chemicals, fertilizers, plastics, and exports to break Russia and Qatar’s grip on Europe and Asia.

That is the Trump Doctrine in energy: abundance at home, leverage abroad.

The Climate Scam and the China Contrast

None of this happens in a vacuum. Needless to say, the climate-industrial complex is fighting for its life.

Bill Gates — hardly a MAGA guy — recently detonated a rhetorical grenade in their midst. In a long essay, he bluntly rejected the “doomsday view of climate change” and argued that obsessing over near-term emissions cuts is distracting from what actually improves human welfare. The catastrophist script Bill McKibben and company have been reading from for thirty years is wrong, and their policy priorities are locking a billion people into poverty.

Cue the outrage. U.S. NGOs alone are now spending on the order of nine billion dollars a year on climate propaganda, much of it dedicated to “mitigation” — i.e., trying to strangle hydrocarbons and nuclear at the same time. That money funds salaries, grants, conferences, alarmist studies, activist campaigns, and yes, generous executive pay packages. If the world stops believing “the end is nigh unless we outlaw your gas stove,” a very lucrative gravy train dries up.

Did you think no one stands to gain from the “Green New Deal”? How did you think a poor public servant like Al Gore made nearly half a billion dollars? There’s a lot of money in those bird blenders, and solar farms, and carbon capture plants: “alternative” means someone has to supply, own, and operate replacements for the incumbent infrastructure. And as they get rich from government forcing you to pay for all that, they recycle yet more cash into the NGOs out shilling for them.

Yet the same people who tell you climate change is an existential threat turn around and oppose the one technology that can provide round-the-clock, carbon-free power at scale: “degrowth” and “deindustrialization” are central to the left’s agenda. Meanwhile, China — their supposed climate hero — quietly burns more coal than anyone on Earth while also racing ahead on natural gas and nuclear.

Yet America has finally caught on.

What America Must Do Now

Trump has kicked the door open. Big Tech’s power demand is pulling nuclear through it. China and Russia are reminding us that if we don’t lead in nuclear, they will.

Finishing the job will require several concrete steps.

1. Turn the executive orders into law.

Radiation standards, licensing timelines, and the basic pro-nuclear posture of the federal government cannot be left to the whim of the next Democrat administration. Congress needs to:

• Mandate realistic dose thresholds and end LNT as the untouchable dogma.
• Impose hard deadlines on NRC reviews, with automatic approvals when agencies miss them.
• Explicitly fast-track advanced reactors for defense-critical uses: missile defense, data centers, ship propulsion, forward bases, and space.

2. Build out domestic fuel and fabrication at scale.

Companies like General Matter and Standard Nuclear are a strong beginning. But we need far more: a full, redundant domestic supply chain for uranium mining, conversion, enrichment (including HALEU), and especially TRISO and other advanced fuels — not just for ourselves, but to supply our allies and thus end their dependency on Russia and China.

3. Make exports a pillar of American power.

Trump’s deals with the UK, Hungary, and Saudi Arabia point the way. Every time a country chooses a U.S. reactor instead of a Russian or Chinese design, it locks itself into our standards, our fuel ecosystem, and decades of strategic partnership. Civil nuclear exports should be treated the way we treated arms exports in the Cold War: a central tool of alliance-building.

The Future We Were Promised

The Left used nuclear fear to steal fifty years of our future. It’s time to build the future they told us to abandon.

America does not lack the technology for a nuclear renaissance. We never did. Eisenhower was right in 1953: peaceful power from atomic energy was “no dream of the future.” We proved the capability seventy years ago. The tech has only gotten better: safer, smaller, cheaper.

What we lacked, for a long bitter stretch, was the political will to use what we created. We let a bureaucracy drunk on theoretical risk and a climate-industrial complex drunk on grant money dictate that the safest, densest, most scalable energy source in human history was somehow too dangerous to touch.

We must seize the moment. If we do, nuclear will not just keep our lights on. It will power the AI that runs our factories and robots. It will feed the lasers that make nuclear missiles obsolete. It will drive the engines that open the entire inner Solar System to human development and settlement. It will turn deserts into gardens and restore depleted water tables. It will free American oil and gas to dominate global markets and secure our allies and ourselves.

America’s nuclear renaissance has begun. Now we have to make sure no one shuts it down again.

Rod D. Martin is a technology entrepreneur, futurist, hedge fund manager, and professor. Fox Business News calls him a “tech guru”, Britain’s Guardian labels him a “philosopher-capitalist”, and Gawker describes him as a “brilliant nonconformist.” He was a senior member of PayPal’s pre-IPO startup team and is a member of the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy.