Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/11/going-nuclear/
Please see the link above for the source text.
Going Nuclear
President Donald Trump speaks during the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., November 19, 2025.(Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
By The Editors
November 21, 2025
The Trump administration’s approval of a $1 billion federal loan to Constellation Energy to help fund restarting the undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island is a sign of a renewed focus on expanding nuclear power, it is a very good thing.
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Energy abundance is the key to prosperity, and nuclear power should be part of the administration’s broader drive to increase energy supplies, notably from fossil fuels. Renewables, too, can have a role to play, if they, like other energy sources, can do so without relying on an economically unjustifiable subsidy regime or disrupting the grid. And we should not neglect research into nuclear fusion, an old dream that seems (finally!) to be coming closer to usable reality.
While we wouldn’t go as far as purists would in objecting to the federal government’s lending an occasional helping hand to this new expansion of America’s energy supply, such support should not become institutionalized. One of the reasons being given by Energy Secretary Chris Wright for prioritizing restarting a number of nuclear facilities is to stop the rise in electricity prices. That is commendable, so long as it is clear that the restarted facilities must, before very long, make economic sense in their own right.
Overall, the best approach to nuclear expansion is, as is the case in so many other areas, for the government not to lend a hand, but to withdraw one. The federal approval process should be cut back to a maximum compatible with a safety regime that replaces quasisuperstitious dread with scientific stringency. The administration should also do what it can to encourage states to follow suit.
The expansion of nuclear power inevitably conjures up thoughts, at least for the older among us, of The China Syndrome, a movie notable for its acting, paranoia, and timing: It was released less than two weeks before America’s Worst Nuclear Accident™, a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island’s other reactor, which, it is sometimes forgotten, injured no one, physically anyway (the new project is, not so subtly, renamed, the Crane Clean Energy Center). But it fed a growing national neurosis about nuclear energy’s safety, which has never entirely faded.
The China syndrome that should worry Americans is whether the loan to Constellation is another example of state capitalism that has been taking root in the U.S. under Presidents Biden and Trump. Constellation Energy’s CEO stated that the company could have secured the financing it needed from elsewhere but wanted “to show support for affordable, reliable, stable, secure energy in the U.S., as directed by President (Donald) Trump.”
The plant still needs some federal permitting. Giving the government a financial interest in the project’s success is, we suspect, one way of speeding that process along. That’s no bad thing in a sector hobbled by regulatory delay, but it will still be important to avoid the kind of regulatory capture that ultimately proved so disastrous at Fukushima.
The U.S. remains the world’s largest producer of nuclear power, and it should continue to be so, for obvious economic and strategic reasons. These include meeting the energy demands of the tech sector (Microsoft has signed a 20-year contract to purchase the power produced by Crane) and helping clean up the mess that the green “transition” is making of electricity supply in this country, with, as a bonus, an energy source that it is associated with negligible greenhouse gas emissions.
Constellation is not alone. Holtec International is poised to restart the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan if it can fight its way through the environmentalist lawfare that is inevitably underway. It also aims to supplement the power generated there with small modular reactors (SMRs). These, based on newish technology, are seen as a route to cheaper, speedier nuclear power. Among those planning to turn to SMRs are Amazon (its planned Cascade Advanced Energy Center would have four) and Google.
There are those who argue that SMRs will not live up to their
promises, something that the private sector will have, one way or another, to work out for itself. What matters more is the recognition that nuclear energy will have an increased role to play in meeting the sharply increased demand for reliable (suppliers of renewable energy, please note) power likely to go along with AI.
In 2023, the U.S. imported 99 percent of the uranium concentrate it uses to make uranium fuel, mainly from Canada, Australia, Russia (!), Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. As with other areas of U.S. resource vulnerability, the answer, already reflected in policies and spending plans by the Biden and Trump administrations, is to boost production here.
That’s common sense, and it will mean mining, baby, mining.