The Big Tech Campaign to Fast Track Nuke Energy. Senators Whitehouse and Booker Take the Lead in Congress
The ADVANCE Act passed 393-13 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate, where only Markey and Sanders voted no. Both senators have repeatedly opposed building new nuclear plants due to environmental concerns, such as the ongoing absence of a long-term solution to the nation’s roughly 100,000 tons of radioactive waste.
Last May, Trump signed a series of executive orders to radically overhaul nuclear safety oversight, citing the ADVANCE Act as justification for transforming the NRC’s culture, directing the agency to approve new reactors within 18 months, and consult with DOGE on a wholesale revision of its regulations. Since then, the administration has secretly overhauled nuclear safety rules, proposed to severely cut inspections and radiation standards, exempted new reactors from environmental reviews, and triggered an exodus of 400 NRC employees since Trump took office.
CAPITOL HILL CITIZEN, By Peter Castagno, May 2026
In September 2014, a Google engineer hosted a private meeting at the company’s Mountain View headquarters. The guests included a nuclear energy investor and staff from the influential think tank Third Way.
By the end of the meeting, the small group agreed to “fund a bit of work in DC” to influence policy in favor of nuclear energy. That meeting set in motion a decade-long campaign that would transform Democratic politics on nuclear energy – and leave the regulatory framework governing atomic safety vulnerable to the most aggressive deregulatory assault in its history.
The Trump administration leveraged the bipartisan legislative architecture that Democrats helped build to gut the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Ross Koningstein – Google’s former director emeritus of nuclear energy R&D – hosted the Mountain View gathering.
As he explained in a 2024 article, the tech giant quietly supported Third Way, the Clean Air Task Force, ClearPath and other advocacy groups for over a decade, helping lawmakers craft pro-nuclear legislation.
Third Way and its partners have since taken credit for “creating an entirely new policy discussion around advanced nuclear energy,” helping draft overhauls to nuclear policy, and working “behind the scenes” to shift Democrats’ nuclear views.
In the early years of this effort, public support for nuclear energy was at a low point. In 2016, Gallup found a majority of Americans opposed nuclear energy for the first time since it began surveying the issue in 1994. Only 34% of Democrats favored it. By 2025, that figure climbed to 46% of Democrats – a 12-point change in less than a decade.
That shift coincided with a surge of Silicon Valley nuclear investment and advocacy. Jeff Navin, a lobbyist for Bill Gates’ small modular reactor (SMR) startup TerraPower, described 2015 as a pivotal year for nuclear support in Capitol Hill.
At that year’s Paris Climate Talks, Gates announced the Breakthrough Energy Coalition with co-investors including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Richard Branson. Peter Thiel, another top Silicon Valley nuclear investor, published – The New Atomic Age We Need – a New York Times op-ed within the same 48-hour window.
Breakthrough Energy has since grown into a $4 billion juggernaut spanning venture capital, philanthropy, and policy advocacy, with $7.9 million in direct lobbying expenditures since 2020
Breakthrough Energy has since grown into a $4 billion juggernaut spanning venture capital, philanthropy, and policy advocacy, with $7.9 million in direct lobbying expenditures since 2020.
Taken together, Breakthrough entities and the Gates Foundation have given more than $60 million to the key pro-nuclear groups that reshaped policy, the majority since 2022.
This includes more than $20 million to Third Way, over $10 million to the Clean Air Task Force, more than $9 million to ClearPath, and nearly $4 million to the Breakthrough Institute. Laying the groundwork for Trump Third Way’s ties to Gates go beyond receiving more than $20 million from his philanthropies.
The think tank’s most recent 2024 tax filing lists lobby firm Boundary Stone Partners as its top contractor for ‘strategic consulting.’ Third Way has paid Boundary Stone Partners over $2 million since 2020, while the lobby group was simultaneously providing “comprehensive legislative and strategic support” to Gates’ nuclear firm TerraPower, which paid it $900,000 in lobby fees over the same period.
Former Office of Nuclear Energy chief of staff Andrew Richards, who led Boundary Stone Partners’ nuclear practice until March 2025, is now TerraPower’s vice president of government affairs. Jeff Navin, Boundary Stone Partner’s co-founder, has long helped coordinate Third Way’s nuclear strategy. He was Terra- Power’s director of external affairs until last April.
Navin and Josh Freed, Third Way’s energy and climate chief, approached the White House together to set up its first nuclear energy summit. Before joining Third Way, Freed was a senior advisor to the Gates Foundation. Gates has also exerted influence directly. He told Bloomberg in 2022 he had quietly lobbied elected officials including former Senator Joe Manchin, for years on federal climate policy, helping secure tax incentives for nuclear energy in the Inflation Reduction Act.
The billionaire told the former West Virginia senator that coal workers could potentially transition into building reactors for TerraPower – he donated $2,900 to Manchin in May 2022, months before the IRA’s passage. Manchin would later lead the ouster of Democrat NRC commissioner Jeff Baran, who frequently raised concerns about safety issues of experimental SMRs like TerraPower.
TerraPower’s client case study for Boundary Stone Partners notes it successfully lobbied for bills, including the 2024 ADVANCE Act. The law required the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to rewrite the language of its mission statement to promote the benefits of civilian nuclear expansion.
Victor Gilinsky, who served as a NRC commissioner in the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, observed the bill showed “every sign of having been written by interested parties and with little vetting” in a 2024 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists op-ed. He warned the subtle shift in language could open the door to severe consequences, eroding the agency’s independence to expedite licensing of experimental reactors.
“TerraPower foresees selling hundreds of such reactors for domestic use and export,” Gilinsky wrote in a 2024 analysis. “The new law is largely directed at clearing the way for the rapid licensing of such reactors by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It does so in part by providing additional resources but also—more ominously – by weakening the agency’s safety reviews and inspections in the name of efficiency.”
The ADVANCE Act passed 393-13 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate, where only Markey and Sanders voted no. Both senators have repeatedly opposed building new nuclear plants due to environmental concerns, such as the ongoing absence of a long-term solution to the nation’s roughly 100,000 tons of radioactive waste.
During his floor speech, Markey expressed skepticism that rapidly licensing experimental nuclear reactors was justified on climate grounds.
“It’s shortsighted to me to make such a herculean effort to promote new nuclear technologies when we’re yet to solve the longstanding problems resulting from our existing nuclear fleet,” Markey said in his floor speech. “To this day, the Navajo Nation is dealing with the legacy of uranium contamination, including more than 500 abandoned uranium mines and homes and water sources polluted with elevated levels of radiation.”
TerraPower-linked groups were heavily involved in pushing the ADVANCE Act through Congress and celebrated its passage, including the nation’s most prominent industry group, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI).
The NEI and Silicon Valley have deepened their relationship in recent years. Amazon is now a dues-paying member. The CEO of X-Energy, backed by $500 million in Amazon investment, sits on NEI’s board, alongside TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque and Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte – whose firm was seeded by Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. NEI’s PAC has donated hundreds of thousands to the ADVANCE Act’s Democratic champions, including a total of $66,000 to Congressman Frank Pallone (D-New Jersey), Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Pallone and several other pro-nuclear Democrats have since expressed alarm at the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law they enacted.
Last May, Trump signed a series of executive orders to radically overhaul nuclear safety oversight, citing the ADVANCE Act as justification for transforming the NRC’s culture, directing the agency to approve new reactors within 18 months, and consult with DOGE on a wholesale revision of its regulations. Since then, the administration has secretly overhauled nuclear safety rules, proposed to severely cut inspections and radiation standards, exempted new reactors from environmental reviews, and triggered an exodus of 400 NRC employees since Trump took office.
Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) each gave closing remarks at a nuclear energy summit in 2016. Third Way partnered with the Nuclear Energy Institute to host the Washington event.
In Third Way’s telling, the summit marked the beginning of a years-long partnership with lawmakers who “continued to champion” the nuclear legislation it helped write.
In 2020, the Democratic Party included support for nuclear energy in its national platform for the first time since 1972. That year, the Democratic National Committee paid digital consulting firm Bully Pulpit International more than $30 million.
From 2017 to 2023, the Nuclear Energy Institute paid the same firm $6.4 million to frame nuclear energy as “critical in the effort to lower carbon emissions” – achieving, according to Bully Pulpit, “consistent positive attitudinal shifts among DC elites and policy influencers.” Bully Pulpit was co-founded by former Obama campaign staffers.
The firm that helped elect Democrats was simultaneously taking millions from the nuclear industry to shift Democratic opinion. Booker became the face of Democrats’ nuclear shift during his 2020 presidential campaign.
He disparaged anti-nuclear Democrats, which a Gallup poll found made up 57% of the party at the time, during a 2019 interview: “As much as we say the Republicans when it comes to climate change must listen to science, our party has the same obligation to listen to scientists.” Booker’s framing is inaccurate.
On whether decarbonization requires nuclear energy, expert opinion is deeply divided – with leading experts including Daniel Kammen, Arjun Makhijani, and MV Ramana contending that 100% renewable pathways are viable. Yet this framing – disputed by leading experts – nonetheless became the political rationale for a sweeping legislative agenda Booker and Whitehouse would champion for the next half decade.
The senators were primary architects of the legislative architecture that the Trump administration has since used for maximal deregulation. This includes The ADVANCE Act and the 2019 Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA), which directed the NRC to create a new licensing pathway – called “Part 53” – for experimental reactors.
The Trump administration issued its Part 53 rule in March. It allows applicants to propose reactors in densely populated areas and use fast-tracked reviews from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy as evidence for their safety, and lacks specific guidance for carrying out systematic risk analyses.
As ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, Whitehouse has repeatedly lambasted Trump administration officials for gutting nuclear safety standards.
“Despite so much commonsense, bipartisan work, the Trump Administration has upended progress in a flamingly partisan manner,” he said at a June 2025 hearing. “In this case, by DOGE-ing the NRC in flagrant disregard for nuclear safety, for the bipartisan direction of Congress, and for the law.”
The purpose of the hearing was to consider two Trump nominees, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and EPA assistant administrator Usha-Maria Turner. Whitehouse voted against the EPA nominee due to her history of working in the fossil fuel industry: “The corruption and conflicts of interest are happening in plain view. For that reason, I will not support this nomination.”
However, Whitehouse voted in favor of Wright, a former fossil fuel executive and board member of nuclear startup Oklo. He withdrew his support a month later in protest of the Department of Energy’s “hostile takeover” of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Yet despite his vocal concerns about the dangers of ongoing nuclear safety rollbacks, Whitehouse introduced the Nuclear Refuel Act in June 2025 and voted to move it to the Senate floor in October 2025.
The bill would streamline new nuclear reprocessing facilities, which separate fissile material from spent fuel. The extracted materials are then repurposed for use as reactor fuel, but also can be used to create nuclear weapons.
As over a dozen experts explained in a July 2025 letter to elected officials, security and economic concerns have long prevented the U.S. from using plutonium for civilian nuclear fuel. Experts warned a U.S. reprocessing program could lead to the spread of nuclear weapons technology – President Carter banned the practice after India used it to make a bomb in 1974 – and weaken U.S. diplomats’ ability to discourage other countries from similarly extracting weapons-grade plutonium from their fuel.
The Senate EPW press release for the Nuclear Refuel Act featured a celebratory statement from Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte, who plans to use plutonium-bearing fuel for his breeder reactor. This comes as the Trump administration aims to transfer 20 tons of plutonium to private industry while cutting security standards meant to safeguard against the theft of nuclear materials.
Unlike Whitehouse, Markey has opposed this effort: “Oklo Inc., a nuclear technology start-up, is the main company interested in receiving plutonium from [the Department of Energy],” Markey wrote in a September letter to Trump. “Oklo is also, with DOE’s support, building a $1.7 billion reprocessing plant in Tennessee. Your Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, served on the Board of Directors of Oklo until his confirmation in February.
In 2024, Wright and his wife also made contributions to your presidential campaign totaling about $458,000 and made contributions to the Republican National Committee of about $330,400.” Whitehouse and, to a greater extent, Booker have also received generous support from nuclear interests, including at least $200,000 from Breakthrough Energy and Google leaders.
Holtec executives donated $68,100 to Booker’s committees in 2022, while the New Jersey firm was under a state criminal investigation for defrauding tax credit applications and under national scrutiny for safety violations.
That year, Booker helped pass IRA nuclear subsidies Holtec is now using to restart its Palisades plant. Whitehouse’s most recent financial disclosure reports holdings of at least $1.8 million in tech giants invested in nuclear expansion, including Google, Amazon, and Meta.
Whitehouse invests up to $5 million in Nvidia, which recently announced a partnership with Oklo for the AI-assisted fabrication of plutonium- bearing fuel.
Whitehouse and Booker also received donations from nuclear policy lobbyists, including $13,500 from KDCR Partners, a firm paid more than $4 million since 2020 by TerraPower, Breakthrough Energy, NEI, and Google to lobby on nuclear policy.
KDCR’s founder was President Clinton’s deputy assistant for legislative affairs, one of multiple veterans of Democratic administrations recruited by the nuclear industry to shepherd its agenda through the party. In the mid-2010s, the Nuclear Energy Institute retained consulting firm Kivvit – co-founded by David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign strategist and senior advisor – to help create the “Nuclear Matters” front group. As the Climate Investigations Center noted in 2016, Kivvit explained how its Nuclear Matters operation implemented a robust public affairs campaign, which includes advertising, sponsored event series, media relations, grasstops recruitment, third-party advocacy, and targeted social media engagement.”
Nuclear Matters is funded almost entirely by NEI, but it describes itself as “a national coalition of grassroots advocates, working to inform the public and policymakers about the clear benefits of nuclear energy.”
But the shell group transfers nearly its entire revenue to PR firm APCO Worldwide, which has received more than $20 million from Nuclear Matters and its parent nonprofit since 2016.
Nuclear Matters’ first president Neal Cohen was the former president of APCO, where he helped develop Phillip Morris’ PR playbook. Carol Browner – former Clinton EPA administrator and Obama climate advisor – is Nuclear Matters’ most prominent third-party recruit. The group has paid her at least $850,000 since 2018.
Browner recanted her formerly anti-nuclear views in a 2014 Forbes op-ed and announced she was joining a bipartisan “public education campaign” alongside former Senators Evan Bayh and Judd Gregg, to whom Nuclear Matters has paid $345,000.
Bayh received $1.95 million from a lobby group that represents nuclear clients during the same period. Nuclear Matters lists Third Way among its partners and the groups frequently collaborate.
Browner represented Nuclear Matters at the 2016 Third Way summit where Whitehouse and Booker gave closing remarks – in a room that also included Google’s Koningstein, Oklo’s future CEO, and TerraPower – a meeting Third Way later described as the milestone that launched a decade of successful bipartisan nuclear advocacy.
When Gates announced Breakthrough Energy at the 2015 Paris Climate Talks, he asserted the impending climate catastrophe brought an urgent need for “high risk” investments in clean energy technologies.
The billionaire struck a different tone a decade later in a public memo ahead of the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference.
Gates explained he still views climate change as serious, but not a “doomsday” level threat, and advocated a different approach to address it – one that benefits his nuclear company.
The first priority in Gates’ memo is to lower the “Green Premium” – “the cost difference between the clean and dirty way of doing things.”
Gates wrote he was hopeful he could bring down TerraPower’s 50% Green Premium, before advocating government leaders promote policies to fund and support Green Premium technologies.
Amazon-backed SMR startup X-Energy similarly noted its reliance on government support in its recent IPO filing. Yet while its technology is supported by more than a billion in public funding, X-Energy has an “Intellectual Property-driven business model” to generate “attractive free cash flow” from the use of its complex proprietary technology.
Gates built his fortune on Microsoft’s copyright and patent protections. He co-founded TerraPower with former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold in 2008, as the first spinout company of Myhrvold’s patent portfolio firm Intellectual Ventures. TerraPower – which has so far received more than $2.5 billion in government funding – already has more than 500 patents.
The Trump administration greenlit TerraPower to begin construction of its first plant in March, nine months ahead of schedule. The company credited Trump’s May executive orders and bipartisan reforms that Third Way and its partners helped create for the rapid timeline.
Experts, such as Union of Concerned Scientists director of nuclear power safety Edwin Lyman, excoriated TerraPower’s rapid approval, noting the NRC itself conceded the reactor had unresolved safety issues in its reviews.
Why Congress and senior officials must deny Trump a ‘nuclear escape’ in Iran
Bulletin, By Paul Slovic, Rose McDermott | Analysis | May 26, 2026
The most frightening possibility in the ongoing Iran war is not simply that the United States could deepen its involvement. It is that a US president whose own decisions helped create the crisis could come to see nuclear escalation as the clearest path out of humiliation, stalemate, and existential loss.
That risk should not be dismissed as fanciful.
Early in the war, Axios reported that the Pentagon was developing options for a “final blow” against Iran that could include a massive bombing campaign, the use of ground forces, and even deep operations to open the Strait of Hormuz and possibly secure highly enriched uranium buried deeply underground. The same report said some officials believed a crushing show of force might create leverage in talks or simply give President Donald Trump something with which to declare victory. The scenario under discussion is not a narrow raid but a wider escalatory pathway in which troop exposure, political embarrassment, and the desire for a dramatic concluding act could converge. That is precisely the type of setting in which nuclear danger can grow.
Recent events underscore the urgency of this concern. In late March and early April 2026, President Trump threatened strikes against Iranian energy and nuclear infrastructure if Tehran did not accept US terms, at one point warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Later that month, he posted an AI-generated image of himself holding an assault rifle under the words “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” while again pressing Iran to “get smart soon” in negotiations.
These threats illustrate how readily catastrophic violence can be recast as justified leverage, necessary for demonstrating resolve, or framed as a moral necessity rather than as an unthinkable humanitarian disaster.
Putin in Ukraine, Trump in Iran. The parallel to an earlier analysis of Vladimir Putin, threatening to use his nuclear weapons in Ukraine, is uncomfortable but real. As we have argued in Foreign Affairs, the central question is not whether a struggling Putin is rational in some abstract sense, but how known psychological forces could shape his perception of losses, humiliation, and escape routes.
Nuclear escalation becomes more likely when a leader feels backed into a corner, when military efforts are failing, and when the line between preserving personal power and preserving the state begins to blur.
The same pattern could arise for Trump in Iran: Nuclear escalation becomes more likely when a leader’s personal standing becomes fused with a nuclear objective—when retreat begins to look like humiliation. Trump has recently framed the Iran conflict in such absolute terms. Asked about Americans’ financial hardship amid rising prices, he said, “The only thing that matters, when I’m talking about Iran: They can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”
Yet the military picture appears far less decisive than that rhetoric suggests. IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi reportedly said that much of Iran’s near-bomb-grade uranium may remain buried in surviving tunnels at Isfahan, despite Trump’s earlier claims that US strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. The Strait of Hormuz has become a continuing strategic and economic crisis; Iran’s missile and nuclear assets, as well as its geographic control of oil transport, remain central to its bargaining position; and US forces have already suffered casualties. In such conditions, Trump may see further escalation not as reckless, but as necessary to rescue a failing policy, protect his image of dominance, and reclaim the appearance of control and alleged victory.
This, of course, does not mean Trump will use nuclear weapons. But it shows that the pathway of nuclear escape deserves sober attention now, before events narrow choices.
Psychology of bad choices. The danger is not only deliberate evil but the ordinary psychology of bad trade-offs under stress. Research with an Iran war scenario eerily similar to the one Trump may create shows[1] that support for nuclear strikes can rise when projected US troop casualties rise. This research also shows that psychic numbing weakens sensitivity to mass suffering, that comparative framing can make one horrific option look relatively better than others and therefore more acceptable, and that punitive dispositions are associated with greater support for nuclear use. These findings identify the psychological levers that can distort our leaders’ judgments in a crisis……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..https://thebulletin.org/2026/05/why-congress-and-senior-officials-must-deny-trump-a-nuclear-escape-in-iran/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20Trump%20admin%20s%20attack%20on%20radiation%20protection&utm_campaign=20260528%20Thursday%20Newsletter
“Our Hands Are Dirty”: Jeffrey Wernick on America’s Founding Principles, Foreign Entanglements and the Moral Cost of Empire
Invoking George Washington, John Quincy Adams and the American abolitionist tradition, Jeffrey Wernick argues that permanent foreign attachments and endless war have pushed the United States far from the values it claims to defend.
XCNEERPOST, May 28, 2026, Joshua Scheer
Jeffrey Wernick delivers a sweeping and deeply provocative meditation on American foreign policy, arguing that the United States has abandoned the very principles its founders warned were essential to preserving the republic. Drawing on George Washington’s farewell address and John Quincy Adams’ warning that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” Wernick contends that modern U.S. policy has become defined by permanent alliances, military entanglements and moral contradictions that the founders would have viewed as dangerous to both liberty and republican government.
At the center of the speech is a sharp critique of America’s relationship with Israel and the broader logic of interventionist foreign policy. Wernick argues that U.S. support for occupation, military domination and endless regional conflict cannot be reconciled with the founding ideals of consent of the governed and universal human equality. At the same time, he rejects the cynical argument that America’s own historical crimes somehow excuse present injustices. Instead, he insists that the nation’s history of slavery, colonialism and war should deepen the obligation to resist repeating those patterns — not normalize them.
Moving between constitutional argument, moral philosophy and historical reflection, Wernick frames the current moment as a crisis of American identity itself: whether the country will continue down a path of empire and permanent war, or recover what he describes as the original American tradition of diplomacy without domination, commerce without conquest and principles applied universally rather than selectively.
Transcript
Our Hands Are Dirty: A Question of American Values
Jeffrey Wernick
In 1796, George Washington gave a farewell address to the American people. In it, he gave one specific warning: avoid permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.
He didn’t say avoid trade.
He didn’t say avoid diplomacy.
He said avoid the permanent attachments — the standing commitments that would entangle America in disputes that weren’t its own, generate domestic factions whose loyalties divided, and corrupt republican judgment with what he called:
“Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists.”
That sentence was written 230 years ago. Read it again. It describes our present moment with uncomfortable precision.
Twenty-five years after Washington’s address, John Quincy Adams stood as Secretary of State and faced calls for America to intervene on behalf of the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks were a sympathetic cause. They were fighting for freedom. They wanted American support.
Adams refused.
And the words he used to refuse have come down through American history:
“She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
He went further. If America went abroad in search of monsters, he warned:
“She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
This was the American foreign policy tradition at its founding.
Not isolationism.
Commerce with all nations.
Diplomacy with all nations.
Temporary cooperation when American interests required it.But no permanent attachments.
No going abroad to fight other people’s wars.
No identification of American interests with the interests of any particular foreign country.That tradition has been almost entirely abandoned in modern American foreign policy.
And it wasn’t abandoned through democratic deliberation. It was set aside quietly through executive arrangements and political pressure until departing from it required explanation, while maintaining it became invisible.
When we accept the modern framework as the natural baseline, certain questions become almost impossible to ask — the very questions Washington and Adams considered foundational.
Should the United States maintain treaty-equivalent commitments to foreign countries without ratified treaties?
Under the founders’ framework, the answer is obviously no. The Treaty Clause exists precisely to prevent permanent attachments from forming without Senate deliberation.
When such attachments form anyway through executive agreements, lobbying pressure and political momentum, they bypass the constitutional architecture designed to prevent them.
Should American military resources be expended defending another nation’s territory when that nation has chosen not to enter a treaty that would create reciprocal obligations?
Again, under the founders’ framework, no……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
American forces have expended more strategic missile defense ordnance defending Israel than Israel itself has expended defending itself.
This is in service of a war Israeli leadership reportedly pushed the United States to join.
Iran is not invading the United States.
Iran has no capability to invade the United States.Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and accepted the most intrusive nuclear inspections regime ever applied to any country under the JCPOA.
Israel has not signed the NPT, has no IAEA inspections, and maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal.
The state that accepted inspections is treated as the proliferation threat.
The state that refused inspections is treated as the legitimate party demanding constraints on the inspected one……………………………………………………………………………………..Permanent military rule over millions of people who have no voting rights in the government controlling their lives, no freedom of movement, no citizenship and no realistic political path to acquiring any of these — that is government without consent of the governed.
Exactly the kind of illegitimate rule the founders identified when they applied the analysis to themselves………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
So let me ask the question plainly:
Is it an American value to conquer, occupy and permanently subjugate another people?
Is it an American value to treat some human beings as less than fully human?
No…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Donald Trump Is Going Nuclear
He envisions hundreds of reactors rolling off Valar’s assembly line every year, populating huge groupings of reactors that Valar calls “gigasites,” and possibly, at some point in the future, being installed on Martian soil. The primary obstacle standing in the way of such a future, he explained to me, was the “regulatory matrix.”
Valar has company hats that read “Make Nuclear Great Again,”
“It’s one thing to challenge the status quo and try to innovate,” said Scott Morris, the former number two at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It’s another to try to go behind closed doors and blow the whole thing up.”
Valar has company hats that read “Make Nuclear Great Again,”
significant piece of Valar’s safety case is its choice of fuel. Called TRISO (for “tristructural isotopic”), the fuel is fabricated so that every uranium particle is encased in a ceramic coating that can withstand extremely high heat and will contain within it nearly all the radioactive fission products that are created as the uranium starts splitting. ………….. The big downsides are that TRISO is expensive to make, and there is very little available. Valar was planning to manufacture its own on-site, but that facility was nothing more than a patch of concrete when I saw it.
As the president explodes the nuclear energy regulatory landscape, hungry startups like Valar Atomics are racing to build new reactors as quickly as possible. But speed comes at what cost?
Colin Jones, The New Republic, May 26, 2026
At 27 years old, with a baby face and a receding hairline, Isaiah Taylor looks like nothing so much as a very large cherub. After dropping out of high school, he launched into entrepreneurship; he has described himself in his professional bio as a “self-taught engineer and 3x founder.” The first two companies were an auto repair shop in northern Idaho and a software system to allow auto repair shops to track the condition of their customers’ vehicles. The third was a nuclear energy startup, Valar Atomics, with hundreds of millions in capital, a factory in El Segundo, California, and a very active social media presence. (Taylor tweets regularly: pictures of him smiling next to the red Tesla that Trump bought from Elon Musk before their falling-out; paeans to God, “the empire,” and “Western civilization”; and more scattered thoughts, like gratitude for a national nuclear laboratory: “Fizz fizz. Fizz fizz. Uranium so good! Thank you Oak Ridge!”)
Taylor founded Valar in 2023. He has said he pitched his company to some 80 different venture capital firms before Stephen Marcus of Riot Ventures gave him his first investment. That was, frankly, a crazy bet: Taylor was only 24 years old and had no real connection to the nuclear industry, apart from a paper brief on his vision. Last year, the bet paid off. In February, Valar announced it had raised $19 million in seed funding and unveiled its first reactor prototype. Then, on May 23, Donald Trump issued four executive orders that have transformed the U.S. nuclear industry. These called for new public subsidies across the entire sector—from enrichment to plant construction to the disposal of radioactive waste. Crucially for startups like Valar, the executive orders also outlined regulatory transformations that would allow companies to build small reactors, load them with fuel, and turn them on without having to go through the painstaking licensing process of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
As news of Trump’s orders broke, Taylor published a manifesto heaping praise on them. (“There’s a new arm to national nuclear security: Dominance. Dominance in civilian nuclear technology development, dominance in nuclear energy infrastructure deployment, dominance in shaping global development.”) The same day, Taylor went live on Bloomberg TV. Alongside Utah Governor Spencer Cox, the young CEO announced that Valar had signed a deal with the state to build an advanced reactor there that would be operational by July 4, 2026. “That’s what the president has asked for,” said Cox. “It’s absolutely possible that we can do that.”
The timeline is immensely ambitious. In a 2021 study (from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, actually), researchers looked at how long it took to build over 500 advanced research reactors “from first concrete pour to criticality” with appropriate safeguards. They found that a majority had taken at least a year to build, with the average time being 32 months. Valar, as well as a handful of other companies selected for the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, are attempting to do the same thing in a fraction of the time. The DOE maintains that three companies are on track to turn something on by the president’s deadline, although it is cagey about which companies exactly. Valar is gunning to be one of them.
Some critics have questioned the wisdom and purpose of this breakneck sprint. Paul Dickman, a retired senior policy fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and an adviser to the Japanese government on the decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex, called it “bullshit” when I spoke with him. “I always tell people I don’t need to wait until July Fourth. I can do it tomorrow. I’m gonna go down to PetSmart and get myself a fish tank. I get myself a California source and a piece of fuel and I’ll have criticality tomorrow,” he said. “Of course I have a lot of dead fish floating around my fish tank, but that’s OK, you know.”
Others have pointed out that the United States has no long-term solution for waste disposal. Or that major questions hang over the economic viability of the small modular reactors most of these companies are building. Or that the reforms Trump has enacted at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission look like regulatory capture. Even further afield, there are those who view the current bipartisan enthusiasm for nuclear energy as a pernicious distraction, given that almost none of these reactors will come online soon enough to service the data-center boom or affect global carbon output in time to evade catastrophic climate change. “The first thing to understand is there isn’t much of a there there,” Allison Macfarlane, director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and former chair of the NRC, told me. “None of these things exist, OK. You can’t go and buy one and have it built tomorrow or even probably 10 years from now. So that’s the reality.”
Thus far these voices have been little more than a distant chorus to the forward march of industry. Asked recently what success looks like for the NRC, Ho Nieh, whom Trump appointed as NRC chair in January, replied, “Shovels in the ground.”
I first spoke with Taylor in summer 2025, a few weeks after Trump’s executive orders were announced. He popped up on my computer screen seated in a rattan chair and ready to give me his pitch. “Most of the time when we’re talking about building reactors, these are like five- to 10-year research projects, which maybe happen, maybe don’t,” he said. “And my whole philosophy in starting the company was like, we have to start moving faster as a country.” China, which had started building out a major domestic nuclear industry only this century, was on pace to overtake the United States in nuclear energy generation within a matter of years. It would require “a massive leap” to catch up. He thought Valar could do it.
Part of the reason I had been interested in Taylor and Valar was that they were such outliers in the field. Taylor has a great-grandfather who worked on the Manhattan Project, but his childhood was spent following his own dad from state to state as he chased white-collar sales work and the like. He says he grew up on food stamps. Their car was once stolen by a family friend, whom they confronted and forgave. I found these details immensely sympathetic when I heard Taylor relate them in an unusually personal interview he gave to the podcaster Shawn Ryan. I felt the same way hearing Taylor speak about his mother’s intelligence and how she used to discuss physics with him when he was a child.
All this cut against some other salient facts of Taylor’s life, which reporters in Salt Lake had been writing about of late, after his company announced it would build a nuclear reactor in their state. Like our secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, Taylor is a member of Christ Church, an institution that was founded and is still run by a pastor named Doug Wilson. Wilson wants an America in which non-Christians would be barred from public office. In a tweet about Wilson, Taylor said he appreciates the pastor’s teaching on “Christian wealth.” For Taylor, that not only means money, but also friends and family and other forms of wealth, although money is a big piece of it. (“Certain exceptions aside, participating in the system of wealth creation is simply blessing your neighbor at scale.”)
More directly related to what Valar was attempting, Taylor had erroneously claimed in a press release posted to X that you could hold spent fuel from his reactor after it had been removed. (“Nuclear engineer here. This statement cannot possibly be true,” Nick Touran, a prominent nuclear commentator and indeed a nuclear engineer, replied to the tweet. Fuel from the kind of reactor Taylor was talking about “would give a person a fatal dose within a few seconds if they were to hold a handful.”) And there was the unfortunate fact that in 2023, months after Taylor founded Valar, his friend and director of business operations, Elijah Froh, had sued Taylor’s other friend and head of operations, Kip Mock, for pouring diesel in a wood-burning stove and inadvertently setting Elijah on fire.
When Taylor and I talked, we focused on his criticisms of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Like most leading nuclear startups today, Valar is pursuing a small modular reactor, or SMR. Its chosen design is cooled with helium gas, and Taylor has called it “the Toyota Camry” of nuclear reactors. (That has to be understood as a proleptic description, as there is currently only one commercial version of such a reactor in operation in the world, and it is in Shandong, China). Also like most of its competitors, Valar has a business model that leans heavily on the notion that it will build its reactors in a factory. For years now, analysts have suggested that bringing construction inside a factory could help avoid the cost and schedule overruns for which the nuclear industry has become notorious. There is the tantalizing likelihood, too, that repeated construction will yield major efficiency gains, as mass production has tended to do for most products. Taylor is particularly captivated by these prospects. He envisions hundreds of reactors rolling off Valar’s assembly line every year, populating huge groupings of reactors that Valar calls “gigasites,” and possibly, at some point in the future, being installed on Martian soil. The primary obstacle standing in the way of such a future, he explained to me, was the “regulatory matrix.”
In April 2025, Valar had joined two other nuclear startups and the states of Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Arizona, and Florida as a plaintiff in a complaint against the NRC. Their case hinged on the claim that the small modular reactors that Valar and other companies planned to build posed “no meaningful risk to ‘the health and safety of the public.’” Because of that, the plaintiff’s lawyer argued, these reactors did not fall under NRC oversight. There was some exegesis of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 involved, but in the main, the suit was asking a judge to adjudicate the basic safety of a broad category of nuclear reactors. To me, the whole thing seemed insane on its face. A report from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity also points out the risk of a “fifty-state patchwork of separate licensing regimes” if regulatory authority were taken from the federal government. But working on the rough heuristic that the Supreme Court had systematically undercut the authority of federal regulators over the past half decade, and that the suit against the NRC was being heard by a member of the Federalist Society, I reckoned Valar and its co-plaintiffs had a reasonable chance of success.
Early in our call, Taylor wanted to show me a chart. “So this is the cumulative U.S. nuclear construction permits over time with Three Mile Island drawn in,” he said. What that looked like on the page was a yellow line ramping upward at a healthy rate from 1955 until 1979, where it was bisected by a vertical red line marking what for Taylor was a diluvian event. That year, in March, a broken valve in the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant precipitated a partial meltdown of the core and the release of a plume of radioactive fission products into the surrounding area. No deaths were directly linked to the disaster, but the U.S. nuclear industry never recovered. On Taylor’s chart, the yellow line effectively flatlined after this point.
There are a host of competing interpretations of exactly what went wrong with the nuclear industry over the 1970s. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
In the past decade or so, though, it has become more common to see arguments that lay the blame at the foot of the NRC. Take, for example, “It’s the Regulation, Stupid,” a 2024 essay from Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute……………………………………………………………………
Taylor shares the deregulatory impulse that lately goes under the slogan of abundance. His lawsuit against the NRC originated with the Abundance Institute and a former Chicago University law professor who, with financial support from the Koch brothers, had created an investment firm dedicated to “regulatory entrepreneurship.”…………………………………………………………………..
The bedrock of all this is his conviction that he should be able to build a reactor and test it without significant interference from the government……………………………………………………………………………………..
“I’ve said to people, an awful lot of what’s currently happening at the NRC feels like an Oklo revenge tour,” one former government official with knowledge of these events said to me. In 2020, Oklo Inc. was the first company to apply to the NRC for a construction permit to build an advanced reactor, or one that is not cooled with water. After two years of acrimonious back and forth, during which Oklo’s application never moved beyond the preliminary review, the NRC sent the company a letter informing it that its application had been rejected. The agency cited Oklo’s failure to provide “detailed technical information responsive to the staff’s requests for details about the safety of [Oklo’s] design.” Oklo’s CEO, Jacob DeWitte, has accused the NRC of screwing up. The executive orders that Trump signed on May 23 last year took Oklo’s side. “Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion,” reads the second of the four. The same order goes on to call for a “wholesale revision” of the NRC……………………………………………………………….
Beginning in June, DOGE staff and the president also began implementing more direct forms of control. On the 16th, Trump fired Christopher Hanson, a Democratic appointee and the former chair of the NRC’s five-person commission. A steering committee was then stood up and staffed with DOGE affiliates to implement Trump’s executive orders, including the rewriting of the agency’s rules.
So far, their recommendations have suggested changing environmental-impact reviews, cutting the number of inspections for operating plants, allowing nuclear workers to sustain higher doses of radiation, and sunsetting the NRC’s aircraft impact assessment, which requires nuclear power plants to demonstrate that a large plane crashing into the reactor would not produce to a major release of radioactivity. ………………………………………………… . In a recent ProPublica article, a young DOE lawyer who had entered government through DOGE, Seth Cohen, is reported to have commented during an internal meeting: “Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do.”…………………………………………………….
“It’s one thing to challenge the status quo and try to innovate,” said Scott Morris, the former number two at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It’s another to try to go behind closed doors and blow the whole thing up.”
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Securing a plot at San Rafael let Taylor announce plans to build a test reactor on the same day that the executive orders were announced. From there, things just kept falling into place for him and his company. In August, Valar was selected as one of 10 companies to take part in the DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program. That gave it preference for fuel allotment and a fast track to regulatory approval for its test reactor through the DOE.
All companies in the pilot program benefited from the same structure, but Valar appears to have enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the former DOGE staffers who were spearheading reforms at the NRC. Valar has company hats that read “Make Nuclear Great Again,”
…………………………………………………………………………………….. The real lift for Valar came in November, however, with a Series A funding round led by Snowpoint Ventures, Dream Ventures, and Day One Ventures. (Snowpoint is a major firm founded by a former head of global defense at Palantir. Dream Ventures is a bit of a cypher; it has a website with a logo in one corner and the words “Investing in Extraordinary Dreamers” displayed prominently, with no other information.
Day One Ventures was founded by Masha Drokova, an émigré who was a high-ranking member of Russia’s nationalist youth movement, Nashi, before becoming disenchanted with Vladimir Putin. In the States, she got her start in venture capital while working as Jeffrey Epstein’s publicist from 2017 to 2019. When I asked Valar’s director of communication about Drokova, I was told that she’s not on the board.) The funding round brought in $130 million, much of it from Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer and executive vice president, as well as from Palmer Luckey, the founder and head of the defense company Anduril Industries. (I wrote to both of them asking to speak about their choice to invest in Valar and received a polite no from each.) With that money, Valar had more than enough to build its experimental reactor in Utah. As a first step, it brought its reactor core critical at Los Alamos. Taylor claimed that Valar was the first startup to “split the atom,” rowing that back after it was pointed out that other venture-backed companies had done it years earlier.
Work at the San Rafael Energy Lab moved quickly. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
significant piece of Valar’s safety case is its choice of fuel. Called TRISO (for “tristructural isotopic”), the fuel is fabricated so that every uranium particle is encased in a ceramic coating that can withstand extremely high heat and will contain within it nearly all the radioactive fission products that are created as the uranium starts splitting. ………….. The big downsides are that TRISO is expensive to make, and there is very little available. Valar was planning to manufacture its own on-site, but that facility was nothing more than a patch of concrete when I saw it.
Finally, we entered the reactor building. A large U.S. flag had been stuck to the wall, and the ground was a vast pad of exposed concrete that ran several feet deep. Near the center of this pad, looking somewhat small within the hangar’s voluminous interior, the reactor vessel stood upright, a rounded steel cylinder maybe 15 feet high and painted black. In Valar’s design, helium will draw the heat off the reactor core through a U-shaped pipe that runs through a trench and up again into an Escheresque complex of what looked like off-the-shelf steel ducts. These contained a heat exchanger, a purification system for the helium, and a squat red vessel, studded with steel bolts, that will pump the helium through the system……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://newrepublic.com/article/210095/donald-trump-nuclear-energy-regulations-valar-atomics?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily
Energy Department takes steps toward allowing plutonium, historically used in weapons, in nuclear fuel
by Rachel Frazin – 05/26/26, https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5896154-energy-department-plutonium-nuclear-power/
The Energy Department may allow up to five companies to use its surplus plutonium — which it has historically been used in nuclear warheads — as fuel.
The department has selected the firms for “advanced negotiations regarding the potential allocation of surplus plutonium materials,” a spokesperson for its nuclear energy office said Tuesday.
The five companies entering advanced negotiations are: Oklo, Exodys Energy, Shine Technologies, Standard Nuclear and Flibe Energy, Inc.
The Energy Department has historically used plutonium in nuclear warheads. It produced a significant amount of it during the Cold War.
In March, the White House issued an executive order directing the department to halt a prior program that sought to dilute and dispose of the plutonium. The order also directed the department to instead set up a program making surplus plutonium available to the nuclear energy industry.
In October, the Energy Department said that the available surplus for the program includes weapons-grade, fuel-grade, reactor-grade or mixed plutonium.
According to the department, the plan to give plutonium to energy companies “is anticipated to help companies unlock the next level of private funding to broaden domestic nuclear fuel supplies, spur innovation on American recycling technologies, and unlock private sector funding to fuel the nation’s nuclear renaissance.”
However, critics argue that repurposing plutonium for civilian energy could have security and other risks.
“Plutonium-based fuels and reprocessing have a poor track record when introduced in civilian nuclear energy programs,” Ernest Moniz, who was energy secretary under former President Obama, wrote last year, adding that it could lead to “the creation of additional stocks of weapons-usable materials.”
Meanwhile, Oklo cofounder and CEO Jacob DeWitte said in a written statement on Tuesday that the Energy Department program could help speed up the development of nuclear energy.
“Fuel supply constraints are a key throttle to advanced reactor development,” DeWitte said. “This program creates a pathway to use existing surplus material as bridge fuel for advanced reactors to bring more reactors online sooner.”
Bully Trump pivots from strong Iran to weak Oman – Walt Zlotow
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL, 29 May 26
Donald Trump is the classic schoolyard bully. Alas, instead of hurting, indeed terrorizing weaker school mates, he’s terrorizing the weaker on a global scale, both at home and abroad.
On the domestic front he’s demonizing the ‘other’ by abusing, sometimes killing decent, hardworking undocumented. He uses the Bully Pulpit, not in the rhetorical sense to uplift society promoting wise polices, but to dismantle most sensible domestic policies and institutions, and demonize anyone who crosses him. Nearly every critic of Trump within the Republican Party has been bullied from public office. Every Democrat is slimed as a terrible, horrible person. Classic bullying.
But it’s on the world stage where his bullying is relentlessly murderous. Over 60 bombings of imagined bad guys in Somalia without a hint of justification, much less even a mention. Swooping down into pitifully powerless Venezuela to snatch its president on trumped up charges, slaughtering hundreds in the process. Blowing up small, unarmed boats in the Caribbean then bragging his sick, murderous rampage saved a million US lives.
But on February 28th bully Trump met match. He attacked large, powerful Iran believing the lies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and own war cabinet that Iran would collapse within days once Netanyahu assassinated Iran’s ruler. A few days turned into 39 days of bombing before Trump realized that Iran was not only surviving but winning. How? By unleashing a massive missile barrage on every US Gulf States base, Gulf States oil infrastructure, Israel, and closing the Strait of Hormuz to a fifth of the world’s oil supply.
What to do? After 91 days of humiliating defeat, bully Trump turned his bullying on tiny Oman which shares the Strait of Hormuz with Iran. Oman will be Iran’s partner in controlling traffic thru the Strait which consists of Iran and Oman territorial waters.
When asked if he’d accept a short-term deal that involved Iran and Oman jointly controlling the Strait of Hormuz, bully Trump unloaded on Oman. “No, the Strait’s got to be opened to everybody. It’s international waters. Nobody’s going to control it. We’ll watch over it, but nobody’s going to control it. Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that they’ll be fine,
Sorry bully Trump. Knowing Trump can no longer ‘blow up’ anybody in the region after squandering much US firepower on his lost Iran war, Oman will stand up to bully Trump just like Strait partner Iran.
Now that bully Trump has been exposed as the powerless bully he is, it’s all over for him to strut the world stage like he owns it. He’s alienated friend and foe alike with his murderous bullying, duplicitous negotiating and utter lack of credibility.
Trump’s bullying served him well in both his business career and his takeover of the r Republican Party for two presidential terms. But Karma eventually comes to bullies who believe they can bully their way thru life. It’s going to take months, years, possibly a decade to undo the damage of Trump’s bullying at home and abroad. But as Bob Dylan sang long ago…”Even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked.”
U.S. Turns Cold War Plutonium Into Nuclear Fuel
Oil Price, By Charles Kennedy – May 28, 2026,
- The U.S. is exploring the use of Cold War-era plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads as alternative fuel for advanced nuclear reactors due to uranium supply shortages and reliance on foreign enriched uranium.
- The Department of Energy has shortlisted five nuclear companies, including SMR developers.
- Critics warn the plan raises nuclear proliferation risks and could prove technically and economically difficult, as converting weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel remains highly expensive.
……………………………………………………………. The plutonium considered for distribution to nuclear companies is from dismantled warheads from the Cold War. The radioactive material—50 tons of surplus supply, according to the New York Times—was originally to be diluted and buried, but President Trump last year suspended that plan, per Reuters, which also recalled reports about Washington planning to make 20 tons of plutonium available to private companies.
……………………………There are, of course, opponents to the idea of using weapons-grade nuclear material for nuclear power generation by private companies. Indeed, some Democratic members of Congress have publicly protested the plan.
“The transfer of weapons-usable plutonium to private industry would increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, including to rogue states or terrorists,” Massachusetts senator Ed Markey and representatives Don Beyer and John Garamendi said in a letter from last September. “The United States cannot effectively discourage other countries from using plutonium for civil purposes if we use it ourselves.”
The idea behind the move is to encourage the development of small modular nuclear reactors that could be built much more quickly than conventional ones—at least theoretically. The practical application of SMR technology, however, has stumbled after pioneer NuScale had to scrap its plans to build the first small modular reactor in the U.S. amid much higher than hoped-for costs, leading to insufficient numbers of future buyers willing to sign up for the facility’s output.
Despite these challenges in the MR segment, nuclear is back in a big way, not least thanks to Big Tech’s AI rush, which requires these companies to secure massive amounts of electricity for their facilities—and make it reliable. This is boosting the popularity of nuclear electricity outside the Big Tech community as well—higher electricity bills are making the construction costs of new nuclear power plants more palatable than they would have been a couple of years ago.
Whether plutonium would make an equivalent substitute for uranium in this nuclear renaissance remains questionable, it seems. The fact that the element could be used for the production of nuclear weapons is one problem with the idea. Another problem appears to be of a more technical nature, per the New York Times, which also cited critics as saying the cost of turning plutonium into nuclear fuel was prohibitively high. https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/US-Turns-Cold-War-Plutonium-Into-Nuclear-Fuel.html
Trump’s government-wide NDA (non disclosure agreement) seeks to silence whistleblowers
May 26, 2026 / Freedom of the Press Foundation, https://freedom.press/the-classifieds/trumps-government-wide-nda-seeks-to-silence-whistleblowers/
Washington, D.C., May 26, 2026 — The Washington Post reported today that the Trump administration is planning a broad, government-wide nondisclosure agreement to combat leaks to the press.
The following can be attributed to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper:
“The proposal by the ‘most transparent administration in history’ that millions of federal employees sign a blanket NDA is not just absurd, it’s unnecessary and dangerously secretive.
“This policy, from a president who has previously attempted to impose oppressive, corporate-style confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements on federal employees, would kneecap whistleblower protections, undermine the First Amendment, and wrongly inhibit the public’s right to know. It comes at a time when agency watchdogs are sidelined, FOIA officials are being fired, and leaks to the press — which are the sole reason the public knows about so much of this administration’s misconduct — are being demonized and prosecuted.
“We know exactly what kind of information the administration wants to bury. Look no further than the FOIA release to Freedom of the Press Foundation that showed the administration had no solid legal rationale for conducting mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, substantiating a leak the administration called ‘fake news’ and cited as false justification for loosening restrictions on subpoenas to reporters.
“Trying to force the entire federal government to adopt the Trump organization’s aggressive use of NDAs won’t make anybody safer and won’t improve agency processes. Its sole intent would be to protect the administration from the leak of embarrassing, politically damaging, or unlawful information.”
With potential Iranian deal on the horizon, MAGA media’s drawing red lines
by Jason Campbell, 26 May 26, https://www.mediamatters.org/media-matters-weekly-newsletter/media-matters-weekly-newsletter-may-29#paragraph–narrative-item–3479479
Deep divisions have emerged in right-wing media since President Donald Trump started a war with Iran three months ago. Some conservative media figures have loudly supported Trump’s war while others have been extremely and vocally opposed to new entanglements in the Middle East. Many figures fell somewhere in the middle, tepidly supporting the president while urging for a quick end to the conflict. With a potential deal (again) reportedly on the horizon, some voices on the right are starting to draw their hard lines for an end to the conflict.
The infighting between right-wing media pundits over the war has at times been deeply personal. This week, for example, Fox’s Mark Levin and podcaster Benny Johnson traded blows over the war. Johnson, who has been supporting Trump but also urging for a swift end to the fighting, said, “I don’t understand people like Mark Levin,” and then asked “How many people do you think are being paid by Israel?” Levin, a staunch supporter of the conflict, fired back at “BJ Benny Johnson,” saying, “He’s been a grifter.” Levin also said “Benny Johnson, a nobody, and his ilk. And his ilk, they’re the ones who trash the president. They give aid and comfort to the Iranian Islamic regime.”
With a potential deal coming, some right-wing figures are already laying out what would be tolerable for the Trump administration to accept. Ben Shapiro, who has consistently taken a hardline stance supporting the war, laid out some red lines for a deal, including claiming that the United States cannot give Iran money to rebuild its infrastructure. A Charlie Kirk Show producer said the proposed deal is “not a perfect deal” and “would be getting us back to the situation before the war.” Fox’s Martha MacCallum commented on the potential deal, saying, “It doesn’t feel like we’re any closer than we were before.” On Fox News, staunch war supporter Jack Keane said the U.S. can’t give Iran immediate sanctions relief. A Newsmax host said the reported deal with Iran “sounds like a pretty bad deal.”
The war with Iran has caused serious turmoil inside Trump’s MAGA base. With the disastrous effects of rising fuel prices accumulating and the war’s catastrophic unpopularity with the American people growing, the political need for a swift end to the conflict may butt up against MAGA hardliners who want to see Iran capitulate further.
President Donald Trump, amid ongoing negotiations with Iran and a new spate of U.S. military strikes against it, spent part of Tuesday morning watching Fox News and then posting thanks on social media to on-air commentators who praised his efforts in the region.
U.S. and Iranian diplomats are once again negotiating toward an agreement to end the three-month war. Against this backdrop, Trump spent his Tuesday morning watching Fox News, a typical source for both information that shapes his worldview and praise to salve his various grievances. We know this because he posted on social media about segments that captured his fancy soon after they aired, a phenomenon Media Matters’ Matt Gertz termed the Fox-Trump feedback loop.
Major domestic and international affairs can turn on what Trump sees on Fox, though whatever he ends up deciding to do, the network’s hosts will surely fall in line behind their Dear Leader.
- Excuse me?
- Newsmax host Carl Higbie responded to a hunger strike at the Delaney Hall ICE detention center, saying “If they want to not eat, that’s on them. I don’t really care. Saves us some taxpayer money, I guess.” Fox’s Greg Gutfeld also commented on the food in Delaney Hall, saying, “Maggots or not, the food is dietitian approved.”
- Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts argued “there ought to be certain restrictions against not just religions, but particular political implementations of religions.”
- Speaking about Iran, Fox’s Laura Ingraham admitted “All of their military sites, I guess, have not been destroyed.”
- In the 19 hours following the breaking news, Fox News failed to cover the Justice Department’s new criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, who previously won a civil judgment against Trump that he had sexually abused and defamed her. In contrast, all 12 CNN shows that aired after the news broke covered the story, and 7 of 8 such MS NOW programs covered it.
After New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his plans to make affordable housing more available in the city, Fox News personalities and guests fixated on the plan’s efforts combating negligent landlords. They declared that enforcement against negligent landlords amounted to “public theft,” said it was a “throwback to Stalin,” and ranted that legal action to turn over properties from them to more responsible stewards will lead to “mass killing” and similar atrocities.
Fox hosts have also peddled the myth of tax flight, which you can read about here.
Nuclear Power and Other People’s Money
Arnie Gundersen, https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/28/nuclear-power-and-other-peoples-money/
Nuclear Power would never have existed without government handouts and ratepayer subsidies. The commercial nuclear power Gordian knot, from mineral extraction to component manufacturing to reactor operation to Price-Anderson Nuclear Insurance, and ending in waste disposal, exists only because of opium, whoops, OPM, Other People’s Money, in the form of taxpayer subsidies. Intense political pressure from the DC-based Nuclear Energy Institute prevents national and state politicians from cutting that twisted knot into pieces.
The financial problems associated with constructing and operating commercial nuclear power plants and the need for federal subsidies had been identified as early as 1958 by Time Magazine.
“The program needs a strong infusion of Government aid because
commercial nuclear power is so new, complex, and costly that private
companies cannot carry that burden alone,”[1]
And again at the turn of the 21st century according to Scully Capital Services Inc, a Washington-based investment and financial services firm, when the “Nuclear Renaissance” was being hyped by NEI:
“without government participation, some risks and costs of new nuclear reactors may remain at unmanageable levels.” [2]
Just before the Fukushima meltdowns in February 2011, the Union of Concerned Scientists again identified how heavily subsidized nuclear power had been and continued to be:
Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away… Piling new subsidies on top of existing ones will provide the industry with little incentive to rework its business model to internalize its considerable costs and risks.[3]
In 2018, sixty years after that Time Magazine subsidy analysis, the United States Congressional Research Service issued an analysis[4] of total government energy research and development funding spanning 71 years between 1948 and 2018. The report concluded:
Energy-related research and development (R&D)—on coal-based synthetic petroleum and on atomic bombs—played an important role in the successful outcome of World War II. In the postwar era, the federal government conducted R&D on fossil and nuclear energy sources to support peacetime economic growth. … For the 71-year period from 1948 through 2018, nearly 13% went to renewables, compared with nearly 5% for electric systems, 11% for energy efficiency, 24% for fossil, and 48% for nuclear.
The graph [on original]shows that for seventy years after the secrets of the atom were unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America plowed almost half (48%) of its research funds into more nuclear subsidies. What did those expenditures buy us? At the peak of the Atoms for Peace nuclear building spree in 1990, nuclear power provided about 20% of America’s electricity. But electricity is only a small part of the total energy America consumes; most of the US energy consumption comes from fossil fuels for transportation and heating. The nation’s overall energy consumption shows that nuclear power provides about 9 percent of the energy that our society runs on[5]. The bottom line is that half of America’s research expenditures over 70 years subsidized nuclear power’s 10% energy contribution. That is hardly a worthwhile investment unless you are the companies receiving all that cash!
I can understand that subsidizing a nascent industry in 1950 might be a reasonable policy decision, but nuclear subsidies have continued for eight decades. When your kids return from college, letting them have their bedroom back might be reasonable. But when the kids turn eighty years old, it’s long past time to end that subsidy. And ending those subsidies is exactly what the Nuclear Energy Institute was created to prevent.
It’s time to pick up the pieces from Atoms for Peace. Without subsidies, nuclear power is simply not competitive with renewable energy.
power is simply not competitive with renewable energy.
NOTES
1. February 10, 1958 Time Magazine ↑
2. July 2002 Business Case for New Nuclear Power Plants, Scully Capital Services, Inc. ↑
3. https://www.ucs.org/resources/nuclear-power-still-not-viable-without-subsidies?utm_source=SP&utm_medium=more&utm_campaign=NuclearSubsidies-02-23-11-more ↑
4. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS22858, Renewable Energy R&D Funding History: A Comparison with Funding for Nuclear Energy, Fossil Energy, Energy Efficiency, and Electric Systems R&D, CRS Product Number RS22858 ↑
5. https://usafacts.org/articles/what-kinds-of-energy-does-the-us-use/ ↑
Arnie Gundersen is the Chief Engineer, board member, and resident “science guy” at the Fairewinds Energy Education NGO. Since the catastrophe at Fukushima, Arnie focuses his energy worldwide on the migration of radioactive microparticles. During his multiple trips to Japan, Arnie has met and trained community-volunteer citizen-scientists to study the migration of radioactive microparticles from Fukushima in two co-authored peer-reviewed scientific articles.
The Trump administration’s reckless attack on radiation protection will have long-term consequences for public safety
In the absence of an objective ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) cost-benefit analysis, future decisions on limiting doses from ionizing radiation to workers and the public from nuclear power operations will be determined in significant part by the relative political strengths of industry and regulators. Under the Trump administration, the industry clearly has the upper hand.
Just as it did with air pollution rules, the Trump administration has now, in effect, set the value of American lives to zero in regulatory protections against nuclear-radiation-caused cancer.
the attacks of the Trump administration on public safety must be exposed.
By Frank von Hippel | Analysis | May 27, 2026, https://thebulletin.org/2026/05/the-trump-administrations-reckless-attack-on-radiation-protection-will-have-long-term-consequences-for-public-safety/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20Trump%20admin%20s%20attack%20on%20radiation%20protection&utm_campaign=20260528%20Thursday%20Newsletter
Worldwide, regulations limiting doses from the radiation emitted by nuclear fissions and decays are based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model. This hypothesis posits that, irrespective of whether ionizing radiation comes in a pulse or over years, the additional risk of developing cancer as a result is proportional to the cumulative amount of energy deposited per gram of tissue, with weighting risk factors for radiation type, sex, age, and specific organs.
Since 1975, the US nuclear industry has been required to limit exposures to workers and the public to “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) levels. What the ALARA level should be is determined by cost-benefit analysis in which the costs of dose reductions are compared with the benefits to workers and the public, measured in terms of reduced disease and longer life expectancy.
In May 2025, four months after taking office, the Trump administration challenged this five-decade-old regulatory approach as part of an Executive Order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission” (NRC). The order claimed the “NRC utilizes safety models that posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure,” which corresponds to the linear hypothesis. “Those models lack sound scientific basis,” the Executive Order added, before directing the NRC to “reconsider reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ [ALARA] standard, which is predicated on LNT.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had reviewed exactly this question in 2021 in response to a campaign by advocates of the radiation “hormesis” theory, which posits that low doses of ionizing radiation actually protect against cancer by stimulating the body’s DNA repair mechanism—the exact opposite of ALARA. The NRC rejected that contention, concluding that “the LNT model continues to provide a sound regulatory basis for minimizing the risk of unnecessary radiation exposure to both members of the public and radiation workers.” As a result, the commission maintained the current dose limit requirements contained in its regulations.
But President Donald Trump’s decision to bring independent regulatory agencies under White House control and to fire the NRC’s chairman ended the commission’s resistance. On July 2, 2025, an anonymous NRC spokesperson enthused in a social media post that the Executive Order reforming the NRC “gives us a chance to reconsider our radiation protection framework in support of the whole-of-government effort to safely enable the nation’s use of nuclear power.”
Two weeks later, the NRC hosted a webinar for input on the issue of the LNT hypothesis. The Nuclear Energy Institute—the US nuclear industry’s lobbying organization—recommended that the commission remove ALARA and dose minimization as regulatory requirements. Instead, the institute proposed to establish a “practical threshold”—for instance, 2 rem per year (or 20 milliGray per year for gamma rays) for workers—below which further dose reduction would not be required. (The rem is a unit of effective absorbed radiation in human tissue, equivalent to one roentgen of X-rays. One millirem is one-thousandth of a rem. The Gray measures the absorbed dose, which is the physical amount of radiation energy absorbed by any material or tissue. One Gray corresponds to one Joule per kilogram.)
Radiation hormesis.
Read more: The Trump administration’s reckless attack on radiation protection will have long-term consequences for public safetyAdvocates of the theory of radiation “hormesis” do not believe the LNT hypothesis. Radiation hormesis is a fringe theory with passionate adherents who are taking advantage of the Trump administration’s skepticism about regulations of all types.
One of the most vocal hormesis advocates is Edward Calabrese, an emeritus professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He argues that the evidence for the linear no-threshold hypothesis is based on scientific fraud and, therefore, should be replaced with a model that considers the possibility of no risk—and even possible benefits—from ionizing radiation below a certain dose.
Calabrese’s arguments persuaded some recent leaders of the Health Physics Society (HPS), an association of radiation-protection professionals, to host a 22-part, 10-hour video lecture series by Calabrese on the history of the LNT model in 2021-22. John Cardarelli, the HPS president when the videos were produced, summarizes Calabrese’s argument at the end of each video. In the final one, Cardarelli declares his conclusion that the LNT model is “based on flawed research, ideological motives, deliberate misrepresentation of the research record, and political agendas.”
Although the Health Physics Society declares that “the views expressed in these videos are not intended to represent official positions,” it also advertises that its associated credentialing organization, the American Academy of Health Physics, has “preapproved 10 continuing education credits for certified health physicists watching all 22 episodes of this video series.”
Physicist-epidemiologist Jan Beyea published a critique of Calabrese’s allegations in the HPS journal Health Physics, to which both Calabrese and Cardarelli have responded with lengthy rebuttals.
The research and reports Calabrese and his supporters are trying to discredit were done more than 50 years ago. For decades, the largest human population studied for radiation effects was the survivors of the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, who, depending on their proximity to the ground zeros, were exposed to whole-body doses ranging from near zero to several Gray delivered in a single burst. But the cancer statistics for the Japanese survivors were not good enough to determine with high confidence carcinogenic effects in the dose range relevant for worker radiation protection (in the tens of milliGray per year). Hormesis advocates also argue that cellular mechanisms should be more effective in repairing the damage from low-rate radiation than from a nuclear explosion’s short pulse.
The lack of data on the effect of small low-rate doses left a gap in the epidemiological confirmation of the applicability of LNT estimates of the cancer risks from low doses to radiation workers and to civilian populations exposed to radioactive releases from nuclear accidents. That gap has been partially filled, however, in more recent studies of large populations of individuals who have received low-rate doses of ionizing radiation.
A directly relevant example is the INWORKS study done by an international consortium of researchers on the excess cancer deaths among approximately 310,000 nuclear industry workers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, whose radiation doses were measured and recorded throughout their decades of employment. As of 2012-16, this population had an average age of about 65, and about one third had died, with 28 percent of the deaths being due to “solid” cancers (abnormal masses of tissue arising in organs, glands, or bones), therefore excluding leukemia. Of those deaths, 5,500 to 14,000 were excess cases relative to the rate observed in a control group of 51,000 nuclear workers with near-zero occupational doses.
Figure 1 [on original]shows the rate of excess deaths from solid cancers in this population as a function of cumulative on-the-job dose 10 years before death, assuming that any solid cancer caused within the last decade of life would not have had time to become lethal. The bars show the 90-percent probability range associated with the number of deaths in each dose bin; that is, there is statistically only a 10-percent probability that, with more data, the number of excess deaths would converge outside that range (5 percent chance above and 5 percent below). The solid line is the best linear fit of the data to the LNT model.
By this measure, there are significant excess cancer deaths among nuclear workers down to cumulative doses of 30 milliGray.
Energy Department’s takeover. In addition to bringing the NRC to heel, the Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy has been inviting startups promoting new-design nuclear power reactors to build prototypes on department land, including the 900-square-mile footprint of the Idaho National Laboratory, where they will not be subject to NRC safety requirements.
According to President Trump’s May 23 Executive Order, the NRC will be required “to approve reactor designs that the Defense Department or the Energy Department have tested and that have demonstrated the ability to function safely.”
At most, the startups will only be able to demonstrate that they will not have had a serious accident or a near miss within their first few years of operation before they hope to build their reactors in large numbers across the country and export them abroad. In their efforts to compete with natural gas, photovoltaic, and wind power plants, the nuclear startups are under great economic pressure to cut safety and security requirements currently required by the NRC and other regulators around the world. Costly requirements include containment buildings that prevent the release of radioactivity to the atmosphere in case of a core meltdown accident. Regulations also include requirements that it be possible for the timely evacuation of areas around the reactors where the population could be at risk of high radiation doses from an accident, and robust around-the-clock guard forces to protect nuclear plants against potential sabotage.
By putting the Energy Department, which is pouring billions of dollars into nuclear startups, first in line in safety regulation, the Trump administration has partially undone the 1974 decision of the post-Watergate Congress to separate safety regulation from nuclear power promotion by breaking up the Atomic Energy Commission to create the NRC and Energy Department.
Even before the Trump administration, under political pressure from the nuclear industry through congressional Republicans, the NRC commissioners backed off by majority vote from requiring filtered vents for a set of US reactors designed by General Electric that were clones of the Fukushima-Daiichi reactors 1–3, whose small-volume containments released large amounts of radioactivity due to overpressure after core meltdowns. The NRC also refused to end the practice of dense-packing spent fuel pools to five times their design density despite Fukushima unit 4’s near miss of a potentially much more catastrophic spent-fuel fire because of an undetected water level drop.
The end of ALARA. After it was effectively given much of the responsibility of regulating the US nuclear industry, the Energy Department commissioned a review of the LNT hypothesis by the Idaho National Laboratory, which supports the Office of Nuclear Energy’s mission to promote new types of nuclear power reactors.
INL quickly produced a report, which cited a 2013 comparison by Mohan Doss of the LNT model against the radiation hormesis, as “[p]erhaps most significant for regulatory considerations.” Dr. Doss is a radiologist, not an epidemiologist. His article was published in the journal Dose-Reponse, which was founded in 2003 with Professor Calabrese as its editor-in-chief and focuses on hormesis advocacy. Contrary to what the INL report claims, Dr. Doss’ article is not a meta-analysis but rather an argument for radiation hormesis.
Doss starts by arguing at length that the atomic bomb survivors study would have shown a hormesis effect had it been compared with a control group that had a higher incidence of cancer. Doss even replotted the atomic bomb survivor data to show the result if such a control group were used. In fact, there are appropriate zero-dose control groups for the atomic bomb survivors study, including those who were away from the cities at the time of the bombings. When those control groups have been used in studies, they showed some non-linearity with dose for male cancers, but no hormesis effect.
At the same time, INL referenced but ignored the findings of two actual meta-analyses of low-dose studies: one by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and one by an international team of 16 cancer epidemiologists led by Michael Hauptmann and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and partly funded by the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, and the Energy Department.
The National Council review concluded that “no alternative dose-response relationship appears more pragmatic or prudent for radiation protection purposes than the LNT model.” Hauptmann and colleagues found that “there is evidence of cancer risks from low-dose ionizing radiation.”
INL’s “reevaluation report” was quickly cited in a memorandum by the Department’s Undersecretaries of Science and Nuclear Security recommending that the Secretary of Energy “eliminate ALARA from all Department of Energy Directives and Regulations,” which he reportedly has done.
In the absence of an objective ALARA cost-benefit analysis, future decisions on limiting doses from ionizing radiation to workers and the public from nuclear power operations will be determined in significant part by the relative political strengths of industry and regulators. Under the Trump administration, the industry clearly has the upper hand.
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has recently made a similar decision that it will no longer take into account the health benefits from limiting air pollution. In 2024, the Biden administration announced new limits on fine particulate pollution from coal power plants and other facilities. Those regulations were justified by an estimate that, on average, 77 dollars in health benefits would result from each dollar spent by industry on emission reductions and that the regulations would save 4,500 lives per year.
A climate reporter commented in the New York Times about the Trump administration’s decision to roll back the air-pollution regulation that, for over four decades, “different administrations have used different estimates of the monetary value of a human life in cost-benefit analyses. But until now, no administration has counted it as zero.”
Just as it did with air pollution rules, the Trump administration has now, in effect, set the value of American lives to zero in regulatory protections against nuclear-radiation-caused cancer.
The damage that will result from the evisceration of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will not be immediate and may arguably turn out to be minor on the scale of the damage the Trump administration is doing in other policy areas. But public safety analysts and decision makers must keep track of the dismantlement of regulatory structures that have been built over generations. Hopefully, it will be possible to reconstruct some of them, with improvements where possible. In the meantime, however, the attacks of the Trump administration on public safety must be exposed.
Inside the broligarchy: Is big tech running US politics? Carole Cadwalladr talks to DW News.
From Donald Trump’s alliances with tech billionaires to the collapse of US media outlets, investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr says we are accelerating towards a “techno‑fascist future.” Chapters 00:00 Where does government end and Big Tech begin? 00:26 DW speaks with Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative Journalist 02:40 What is the broligarchy? 06:45 Missing accountability for big tech 08:00 Tech entrepreneurs are taking over legacy media companies 10:30 A techno-Fascist future? 12:30 What can People do? 14:00 How Aware is the public about data collection risks? 15:20 AI and intellectual property 18:00 A positive way forward?
Trump plan to give start-ups plutonium harvested from Cold War–era nuclear weapons is risky, experts say
Weapons-grade plutonium can fuel nuclear reactors known as mixed oxide reactors, but none of these exist in the U.S.
By Adam Kovac edited by Claire Cameron, May 28, 2026 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-warn-against-trump-plan-to-give-cold-war-plutonium-to-nuclear-power-companies/
The Trump administration’s plan to offer plutonium from dismantled Cold War–era nuclear weapons to private energy companies is drawing criticism from experts who say it makes little economic sense and presents a national security threat.
There are currently no operational nuclear reactors in the country that are built to use plutonium-derived fuel. Instead nuclear power plants in the U.S. are powered by a mixture of two uranium isotopes. A small portion, usually around 5 percent, of that fuel is uranium 235, which can also be used to make nuclear weapons. The majority is uranium 238, which cannot sustain a nuclear fission reaction on its own. Because of that balance, if some of this fuel were to fall into the wrong hands, it would be enormously difficult to weaponize, says Scott Roecker, vice president of nuclear materials security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing nuclear catastrophe.
“The most difficult step in getting a nuclear weapon is having enough of that material,” he explains. “The U.S. government has spent probably billions of dollars over the last several decades to remove highly-enriched uranium and separated plutonium from countries that don’t need it.”
Plutonium, meanwhile, is considered a human-made element and is a by-product of the reactions that take place inside nuclear reactors. As uranium 238 is bombarded with neutrons inside the reactor, the molecules absorb some of these particles and become the heavier uranium 239, which rapidly decays and eventually becomes extremely radioactive plutonium.
That plutonium can be mixed back with uranium to be used as fuel in specific nuclear reactors called mixed oxide reactors. The U.S. abandoned mixed oxide reactors in the 1970s because they were both difficult and expensive to run. These kinds of reactors do exist elsewhere, though—in Japan, Russia and France—but those countries have encountered their own problems with the reactors, Roecker says.
“In France, the government’s subsidizing that process,” he says. “Only I think 1 percent of the uranium that’s actually reprocessed is being reused. And in Japan, it’s cost the country billions of dollars and has still not started operation, and who knows if it actually ever will.”
The U.S. Department of Energy has defended the plan, saying the private sector could play a vital role in advancing U.S. nuclear power infrastructure. Ted Garrish, assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy, said in April that decommissioned nuclear fuel “represents an immense, untapped energy resource for the United States.”
“The Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program is anticipated to help companies unlock the next level of private funding to broaden domestic nuclear fuel supplies, spur innovation on American recycling technologies, and unlock private sector funding to fuel the nation’s nuclear renaissance,” said a DOE spokesperson in a statement, adding that five companies have been selected to take part in the program.
Aside from the concern over cost and feasibility, other experts point out that keeping plutonium secure is much more difficult than doing so with typical uranium-based nuclear fuel. Daniel Speyer, a professor of nuclear power plant systems at New York University, says he isn’t convinced that energy start-ups could properly store plutonium. Even if the material is mixed back with uranium, separating the two to isolate the highly fissile material isn’t so difficult as to be impossible—which introduces a clear security threat, he says.
“It’s not something that a small organization really probably could do, but if you give them plutonium in purer form, I think it’s almost a trivial act to make a bomb,” he says. “A simple atomic bomb is not difficult to make.”
The DOE says that any company selected to receive the Cold War–era plutonium will have to show a deep understanding of the technology involved, as well as robust security plans and regulatory compliance. The plan has also met some pushback on Capitol Hill, however. Last September Democratic senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts and two Democratic congressional representatives sent a letter to President Donald Trump raising concerns over the risk to national security.
“The transfer of weapons-usable plutonium to private industry would increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, including to rogue states or terrorists,” they wrote.
Time for US to deescalate confrontation with China over Taiwan.
On October 25, 1971, the UN ended the 2 China policy, voting to expel Taiwan, claiming to be the Republic of China, and replacing it with the mainland Peoples Republic of China. Just a year later Nixon’s thaw with mainland China cemented US recognition of the mainland One China policy and de-emphasized supporting the Chiang government on Taiwan.
China’s relationship with Taiwan is essentially none of our business. Yet we continue to risk war 8,000 miles from the Homeland on China’s doorstep by provoking confrontation with China with massive arming of Taiwan’s military.
Current US government and media narrative erases the last 6,000 years of China, Taiwan history to create a new cause célèbre for US military adventurism, America’s No 1 business industry. Without historical context, the US electorate remains clueless of reckless US policy deemed necessary to US national security interests: defending freedom over authoritarianism on the other side of the world.
A review of the long, tortured China, Taiwan history refutes that narrative. Chinese from Southwest China settled Taiwan over 6000 years ago. Beginning in 1624, the Dutch and Spanish moved in to exploit Taiwan’s resources, as Europeans were want to do worldwide. But the Chinese kicked them out by 1683, ruling Taiwan for 212 years till Japan gobbled up Taiwan after in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895.
For the next 50 years Japan used Taiwan (Formosa at the time) as a land based aircraft carrier for their pan Asian adventurism. But at the Cairo Conference in 1943, the Allies declared a major war aim was full return of Formosa to China. This occurred by a UN mandate upon Japan’s surrender in 1945.
With Japan defeated in China, Mao’s communists resumed their civil war to overturn the corrupt, unpopular nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1949, Mao prevailed. Chiang fled with about 2 million of his die hard supporters to Formosa, setting up their own version of the Republic of China renamed Taiwan.
The US looked at the 538 million Chinese living under communism on the mainland, the 2 million on Taiwan living under Chiang’s authoritarianism, and said ‘Nope, we’ll recognize Chiang on tiny Taiwan as the legitimate Chinese government till he can kick out the dreaded commies.’ They even gave Chiang the military assistance to prevent any unification with China which was inevitable without that support. Is it any wonder the people and government of China would embark on eventual reunification, whether taking years, decades, even a century?
On October 25, 1971, the UN ended the 2 China policy, voting to expel Taiwan, claiming to be the Republic of China, and replacing it with the mainland Peoples Republic of China. Just a year later Nixon’s thaw with mainland China cemented US recognition of the mainland One China policy and de-emphasized supporting the Chiang government on Taiwan.
Without abandoning Taiwan completely, the US embarked on 5 decades of ‘strategic ambiguity’ which kept tensions with China over Taiwan’s status on the back burner of US China diplomacy. That changed when President Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ in his second term moved pro Taiwan policy to the front burner. His successors Trump, Biden and Trump again have so turned up the heat, that war with China over its long term plan for eventual absorption of Taiwan into Chinese sovereignty, remains a possibility.
From Strategic Ambiguity we’ve degenerated into reckless trips to Taiwan by US officials and congresspersons and proposed legislation giving the President a blank check to intervene militarily with China should they embark on any, albeit unlikely, military move at reunification. The US keeps advancing multibillion dollar weapons tranches that do nothing for Taiwan’s defense; indeed, provoke Chinese military maneuvers near Taiwan, raising the possibility of US China confrontation.
At his recent summit with Chinese President Xi, Trump got schooled by Xi who told Trump that if Trump doesn’t pull back from arming Taiwan it could lead to “clashes and conflicts” between the two superpowers. Trump might be getting the message. He had his Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao tell Congress that the US was “doing a pause” on a $14 billion Taiwan weapons package to ensure the US has enough weapons to finish off the Iranian regime in so far failed Operation Epic Fury. Facing the biggest military failure in US history, Trump would be wise to put belligerence with China over Taiwan back on the back burner.
Ignoring the 6,000 year long interwoven China, Taiwan history prevents sensible, peace promoting US diplomacy. America made the wrong decision on the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and has chosen to govern in ignorance for the past 77 years. On this issue, ignorance is not bliss. It may mean war.
Trump’s Retaliatory Withdrawal: America Punishes Europe for Refusing to Join Its War with Iran
Adrian Korczyński, May 24, 2026, https://journal-neo.su/2026/05/24/trumps-retaliatory-withdrawal-america-punishes-europe-for-refusing-to-join-its-war-with-iran/
In the first days of May 2026, the Pentagon announced the withdrawal of approximately 5,000 American troops from Germany over the next six to twelve months — with explicit threats of further cuts directed at Italy and Spain.
President Donald Trump stated the reason with characteristic bluntness: these countries had failed to provide meaningful support during the joint U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
This is not a strategic recalibration. It is a punitive act by a declining hegemon that launched a dangerous conflict, triggered a global energy shock, and is now lashing out at Europe for refusing to bleed alongside it.
U.S.-Israeli War Triggers Energy Shock
The conflict with Iran, launched jointly by the United States and Israel, has severely disrupted global oil supplies, particularly through the Strait of Hormuz. Crude oil prices have surged, driving up the cost of gasoline, diesel, and all forms of transportation fuel. Logistics costs have skyrocketed, inflation is accelerating, and entire industries dependent on cheap transport and energy are slowing down. The ripple effects are hitting every sector of the European economy.
Europe — far more dependent on imported hydrocarbons than the United States — has been hit hardest by this self-inflicted crisis. Yet when Washington and Tel Aviv demanded active European participation in their war, most European capitals offered only minimal or symbolic help.
Trump’s response was simple and crude: you didn’t help us enough, so we’re pulling our troops out.
This is the classic behaviour of a fading empire: drag others into your reckless adventures, force them to bear the economic consequences, and then punish them when they refuse to pay the full price in blood and treasure.
Europe’s Angry Backlash
The announcement triggered sharp reactions across the continent. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who had publicly stated that the United States was being “humiliated” by Iranian leadership and lacked any coherent exit strategy, tried to downplay any direct link between his remarks and the troop withdrawal — but the timing was unmistakable. Washington had made its point.
In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez faced renewed pressure after refusing to allow U.S. military planes to use Spanish bases for Iran-related operations. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, long cultivated as one of Trump’s closest European allies, also found herself in the crosshairs. Trump singled both countries out by name, saying he would “probably” reduce troop presence there too.
What makes the decision particularly revealing is that even within the United States, Republican lawmakers expressed alarm. The withdrawal has not been universally welcomed in Washington — which tells you everything about how impulsive and transactional this decision actually is.
The message from the White House was unmistakable: loyalty is no longer a relationship. It is a service to be paid for on demand.
Poland’s Eager Servility
While much of Europe reacted with concern or restrained anger, Polish President Karol Nawrocki once again demonstrated the depth of his country’s strategic dependence. Instead of reading Trump’s withdrawal as a warning signal about the nature of American commitments, he immediately volunteered to absorb the displaced forces.
“If President Donald Trump decides to reduce the American military presence in Germany, then we in Poland are ready to receive American soldiers. We have the necessary infrastructure,” Nawrocki declared.
This is not strategic wisdom. This is the behaviour of a client state. While Germany, Italy, and Spain push back — imperfectly, inconsistently, but at least instinctively — Warsaw rushes to fill the gap left by countries that finally said no.
Poland is not strengthening its security. It is deepening its exposure — on behalf of a partner that has just demonstrated it will withdraw forces the moment European governments exercise independent judgment.
The Unravelling of American Hegemony in Europe
Even after this withdrawal, more than 30,000 American troops will remain stationed in Germany alone. The point is not that American power has collapsed overnight. It is that the terms of that power are changing — openly, transactionally, and with diminishing pretence of shared values or mutual obligation.
What we are witnessing is the visible erosion of the post-1945 European security model. An arrangement that was never genuinely about partnership — only about power, dependence, and the management of European compliance.
The withdrawals are only the beginning. The real question is how long it will take for European elites to acknowledge that the old order was never built on solidarity. It was built on hierarchy, and hierarchy that no longer finds Europe sufficiently useful is beginning to look elsewhere.
The age of automatic American commitment to European security is ending. Not with a dramatic rupture but with punitive withdrawals, transactional threats, and the slow realisation that decades of unconditional loyalty purchased nothing permanent.
Bucharest appears to have understood. Rome and Madrid are beginning to understand. Berlin understood reluctantly — and Warsaw still volunteers for more.
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