Trump’s Nuclear Power Obsession

He failed to mention the “nuclear clause” in all homeowners insurance policies in the U.S. which states: “This policy does not cover loss or damage caused by nuclear reaction or nuclear radiation or radioactive contamination.”

Karl Grossman – Harvey Wasserman, June 6, 2025, https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/06/trumps-nuclear-power-obsession/?fbclid=IwY2xjawKxt5pleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFvTWNBeXVHWThCTEtyczlZAR4Wy4zp3k26LXBFk9nJmvu3gAlxlzaxf_bLpDX3vn4MeB8PdK4OTy_hrIw0-Q_aem_GM2n7mrZ43KodEXQfa0ZsA

Donald Trump on May 23^rd declared nuclear power to be “a hot industry.” Nuclear power plants are “very safe and environmental,” he said. He made the claims as he issued executive orders to quadruple nuclear energy capacity in the United States.

He failed to mention that nuclear power plants are subject to catastrophic accidents—such as the Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters. And in routine operation, they release deadly radioactive emissions. Also, the nuclear fuel cycle—including mining, milling, enrichment of nuclear fuel—is highly carbon-intensive.

He missed the fact that in pure economic terms they portend the largest economic debacle in human history. He omitted mention of who would pay for 300+ new nuclear plants in the U.S. to be built under his executive orders. (There are currently 94 nuclear plants operating in the U.S.)

Trump didn’t say why the nation would quadruple nuclear power capacity when renewables—primarily wind turbines and solar panels—account for more than 80% of the world’s new electric generating capacity and are coming in at up to 90% cheaper than nukes and years faster to deploy.

He failed to mention the “nuclear clause” in all homeowners insurance policies in the U.S. which states: “This policy does not cover loss or damage caused by nuclear reaction or nuclear radiation or radioactive contamination.”

That’s been the situation since 1957 when, with the insurance industry refusing to cover nuclear plant disasters, the Price-Anderson Act was enacted limiting liability in the event of a nuclear plant catastrophe. Congress passed it to jump-start the “Peaceful Atom” program of seven decades ago. The Price-Anderson Act has been extended and extended and Congress recently renewed it for another four decades to cover the untested “Small Modular Reactors” now all the rage in the latest ultra-hyped so-called “nuclear renaissance.”

Trump was surrounded at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office of The White House by executives of the nuclear power industry, including Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear power plant operator in the U.S., Jake Dewitte, CEO of Oklo Inc., and promoters, including Maria Korsnick, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the main nuclear power lobbying organization in the U.S.

Also present was U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum who said: “This is a huge day for the nuclear industry.”

It was a flip from Trump’s comments on the Joe Rogan podcast last year in which he said: “I think there’s a little danger in nuclear.” An article about this on the E&E energy website of Politico said his reservations “seem to qualify his campaign promise to ‘unleash energy production from all sources, including nuclear.’”

But it was a total nuclear advocacy declared by Trump in his executive orders.

One of the four, titled “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” notes that since 1978 “only two reactors have entered into commercial operation….Instead of efficiently promoting allegedly “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. 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. Those models lack sound scientific basis and produce irrational results.”

“Beginning today,” said this order, “my Administration will reform the NRC, including its structure, personnel, regulations, and basic operations. In so doing, we will produce lasting American dominance in the global nuclear energy market…”

The order then says: “It is the policy of the United States to: Reestablish the United States as the global leader in nuclear energy” and “Facilitate the expansion of American nuclear energy capacity from approximately 100 GW [gigawatts] in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050.”

To avoid a politically suicidal brush with economic reality, Trump ducked this simple calculation: the most recent new U.S. reactors, at Vogtle, Georgia, have come online seven years late, at a price of $18 billion each. (They were originally estimated to cost $7 billion each.) Meanwhile, the other two reactors, the construction of which began also this century, an expected $9.8 billion project at the V.C. Summer nuclear plant site in South Carolina, was abandoned when its estimated cost increased to $25 billion, having generated no electricity at all,

Today there are no large reactors under construction in the U.S. Based on the Vogtle/Summer experiences, to build another 300 nuclear power plants from scratch would cost a “base price” minimum of $5.4 trillion, though the historic likelihood is that they would cost at least double or triple that. Each would likely require 15 years or more to build.

A parallel and thus far theoretical fleet of the much-hyped Small Modular Reactors (“silly mythological rip-offs”) is certain to cost more. Their development has been plagued with soaring price projections, lagging production schedules and a series of cancellations. SMRs produce more radioactive waste per kilowatt-hour than the older, bigger nukes, nuclear proliferation concerns, and there are other problems.

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in an article last year titled “Five Things the ‘Nuclear Bros’ Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors” on its publication “The Equation” starts off with: “1. SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.” He said, “According to the economies of scale principle, smaller reactors will in general produce more expensive electricity than larger ones,” and he elaborates. He further exposes other SMR issues.

Of the Trump order to “reform” the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in an article published last week in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Lyman wrote it “mandates that the NRC fundamentally change its mission to support the absurd and reckless goal of quadrupling of U.S. nuclear energy capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050—which would, if achieved, add the equivalent of 300 large nuclear plants to the U.S. fleet—by prioritizing speedy licensing over protecting public health and safety from radiation exposure. This would effectively make the NRC a promotional agency not unlike its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, thereby undoing the NRC’s 51-year history as the independent safety regulator established by the 1974 Energy Reorganization Act.” The piece was titled: “NRC’s new Mission Impossible: Making Atoms Great Again.”

Another Trump executive order, specifically on “advanced reactors,” was titled “Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security” and say they “have have the potential to deliver resilient, secure, and reliable power…”

The nuclear industry in recent years has been touting what it calls “advanced” nuclear power plants—which include the SMR—claiming they are safer than current designs.

However, the Union of Concerned Scientists conducted extensive research on the “advanced” plants and its 140-report, authored by Lyman, a physicist, “found that they are no better—and in some respects significantly worse—than the light-water reactors in operation today.”

Another Trump order, “Reforming Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy,” directs “the Department of Energy, the National Laboratories, and any other entity under the [Energy] Department’s jurisdiction to significantly expedite the review, approval, and deployment of advanced reactors.”

And a fourth executive order, “Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base,” states: “Swift and decisive action is required to jumpstart America’s nuclear energy industrial base and ensure or national and economic security by increasing fuel availability and production, securing civil nuclear supply chains, improving the efficiency with which advanced nuclear reactors are licensed, and preparing our workforce to establish America’s energy dominance and accelerate our path towards a more secure and independent energy future.”

A former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Dr. Gregory Jaczko, a physicist, commented that the Trump orders show that “he is committed to further lawlessness, more nuclear accidents, and less nuclear safety. This guillotine to the nation’s nuclear safety system will only make the country less safe, the industry less reliable, and the climate crisis more severe….The executive orders look like someone asked an AI, ‘how do we make the nuclear industry worse in this country?’”

Lyman in a statement distributed by the Union of Concerned Scientists said: “Simply put, the U.S. nuclear industry will fail if safety is not made a priority. By fatally compromising the independence and integrity of the NRC, and by encouraging pathways for nuclear deployment that bypass the regulator entirely, the Trump administration is virtually guaranteeing that this country will see a serious accident or other radiological release that will affect the health, safety and livelihoods of millions. Such a disaster will destroy public trust in nuclear power and cause other nations to reject U.S. nuclear technology for decades to come.”

Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project of the organization Beyond Nuclear, said of the order on “reform” of the NRC, that it “most explicitly exposes the Trump Administration’s deliberate attack upon the public’s democratic due process regarding undisputably still hazardous nuclear power and strips away the appearance of maintaining an ‘independent’ federal regulatory agency exercising its due diligence in the interest of public health, safety, security and environmental protection.”

Gunter cited the 1974 Energy Reorganization Act, as did Lyman in his article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was abolished by Congress” by the act “precisely because it could no longer maintain the façade of being both the chief promoter and regulator” of nuclear power, said Gunter. This Trump order, said Gunter, “illuminates the obvious 50-year throwback to AEC and its abolition by Congress in 1975 for its blatant ‘conflict of interest’ as simultaneously a promotional agency for atomic power and supposedly an unbiased regulator.”

Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said: “After 70 years of promoting nuclear power, it is still too expensive and produces radioactive waste that will be dangerous for over a million years. President Trump’s executive orders will not fix those problems….There is no ‘fixing’ or ‘reviving’ nuclear energy. The orders are a shortsighted, wasteful effort that will only make nuclear power less safe and more polluting. They will further weaken the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and forever sabotage its already dubious ability to protect public safety and national security.”

Judson said, “One order ignores decades of scientific findings and thousands of families’ tragic experiences with radioactivity, directing the NRC to reduce radiation protections. The National Academy of Sciences has repeatedly found that radiation increases the risk of cancer and other diseases. Only kooks and crackpots under the spell of a Dr. Strangelove-like infatuation with nuclear power say otherwise.”

“Another order,” Judson continued, “will slash the NRC’s staff and subjugate the agency to White House approval of its regulations and licensing decisions, ending even the pretense that an independent regulator will be there to protect the public health and safety. The root of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear meltdowns in 2011 was found to be the subjugation of a nuclear safety regulator to politicians and corporations. The disaster displaced over 100,000 people, shut down the whole nuclear industry, and will cost Japan up to $700 billion. President Trump’s executive orders will increase the changes that could happen here.”

And Judson, like many others, concludes: “The truth is, we can meet all of our energy needs, safely, securely, and affordably, with renewable energy sources that are ready to deploy today. In the last two years alone, the world brought online as much new wind and solar as the entire nuclear industry worldwide can generate after 60 years.”

The Trump pro-nuke executive orders have sparked immediate stock market jumps for Trump’s insider atomic cronies while promising almost incomprehensible losses for the rest of us which includes the spread of atomic machines prone to catastrophe, regularly spewing lethal radioactivity, producing unmanageable waste and this funded by trillions of public dollars.

It further will sink us all into what Forbes Magazine in 1985 described as “the largest managerial failure in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale,” in a lead article titled “Nuclear Follies.”

Meanwhile, renewables are more than ready now, safe power which we can live with. Yet while prices and production times for renewable sources plummet, Trump and his anti-green minions have been vigorously assaulting the wind, solar and other green energy technologies. Trump has attacked not only tax breaks and clean energy grants for the clean energy movement, he has also assaulted the permitting process for renewables, at the same time pushing to expedite it for nuclear power.

He has been joined by California’s “Green Democrat” Governor Gavin Newsom, who has showered subsidies on two decrepit reactors at Diablo Canyon while slashing permits and rate and tax supports for renewables and forcing California ratepayers to fork over $11 billion for the Diablo reactors which are near multiple earthquake fault lines and slated to now be closed, Diablo Canyon is the last nuclear plant running in California. Newsom has devastated the state’s once-booming rooftop solar industry, destroying at least 17,000 green jobs, while sticking California with the continental U.S.’s highest electric rates.

Democratic governors in Michigan, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois and elsewhere have also boosted nuclear power while assaulting renewables.

Led by Trump and Newsom, the corrupt corporate leadership of both political parties thus seems bound and determined to bankrupt and irradiate us all with deadly, “nuclear-clause”-covered atomic reactors that can’t compete with the otherwise vibrant, fast-evolving renewable revolution which they are so cynically aiming to kill.

Harvey Wasserman wrote the books Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth and The Peoples Spiral of US History. He helped coin the phrase “No Nukes.” He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition at www.electionprotection2024.org  Karl Grossman is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power and Power Crazy. He the host of the nationally-aired TV program Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman (www.envirovideo.com)

June 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment