Trump Goes Nuclear
The Energy Department announced a plan to issue low-interest loans for up to 10 new nuclear plants in an effort to provide more electricity and lower prices.
You may have heard that the price of electricity is rising. If you didn’t already know it from looking at your monthly bill, the Leftmedia keeps churning the story to hurt President Donald Trump and Republicans, even though Joe Biden and Democrats created the problem.
Fun times.
To be sure, Trump did make campaign promises about reducing electric bills. That hasn’t happened yet, and Democrats blame him for the fact that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced subsidies for renewable energy. A far more likely culprit is the explosion of artificial intelligence and the data-center-driven rise in demand for electricity.
Meanwhile, Trump kicked off his affordability tour yesterday by (unwisely) dismissing the issue as a Democrat “hoax” before walking that back a bit but still making a false claim.
“I can’t say affordability is a hoax because I agree the prices were too high. So I can’t go to call it a hoax because they’ll misconstrue that,” he said. “But they use the word affordability. … And everyone says, ‘Oh, that must mean Trump has high prices.’ No. Our prices are coming down tremendously from the highest prices in the history of our country.”
That’s the same fall-flat deceptive messaging of the Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris campaigns. What they meant and what Trump means now is that the rate of inflation is falling. Actually, it’s gone up again in recent months, so even that’s no longer true. Regardless of the “don’t believe your lyin’ eyes” talk, Americans know that we’re all paying more for everything from groceries to electricity.
Fortunately, Trump may go off on boastful tangents in his stump speeches, but his administration is doing things to reduce prices.
In this case, Trump’s Energy Department just announced a new initiative to finance 10 new nuclear power plants.
A government operating within constitutional bounds wouldn’t be interfering with any industry, but the government has already been interfering with energy for a long time. And strategically, expanding nuclear power is in the national security interest of the United States, so there’s another arguable case.
“We want things built by and risk capital coming from the private marketplace, and most everything we’re doing is dominantly going to be funded by private capital,” noted Energy Secretary Chris Wright. “But the government smothered the nuclear industry for 40-plus years. We’ve got to get it back up on its feet again.”
What does that look like? “We are going to use our loan program office at the Department of Energy for credit-worthy hyperscalers that are putting equity capital in front of us,” he explained. “We’re going to back that up with low-interest loans. We’ll supply it to maybe the first 10 reactors that get built. That’ll incentivize people to move fast.”
Last month, the Energy Department finalized a $1 billion loan for restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. (Our Jack DeVine was there for the 1979 meltdown — you can read his story here.) Rebooting it is a good start, but there must be more.
The nation’s electrical grid may depend on nuclear power to stabilize it. Windmills and Chinese-made solar panels aren’t going to save us, despite laughable headlines like Bloomberg’s paywalled doozy: “Nuclear and Fossil Fuels Join Forces to Undermine Renewables.”
Please.
“We don’t need a little more energy, we need a lot more energy,” Wright said. “We want to get the huge benefits from AI. We want to reshore manufacturing in this country. We want to do things we never dreamed of before. All of those take massively more energy. If you’re serious about better energizing the world, you also should be all in on natural gas and nuclear.”
Yet building nuclear power plants is expensive and time-consuming. As The Washington Free Beacon reports, “Just two reactors, both located at the same plant in Georgia, have been licensed and constructed in the 21st century. Those reactors were also completed only after years of delays and billion-dollar cost overruns.”
If we’re going to, as Trump asserted several months ago, quadruple America’s nuclear capacity, that must change.
That’s where Wright’s intention to reform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission comes in. Our readers won’t be the least bit surprised to know that bureaucracy and red tape don’t help things move fast.
Again, Trump may be muddling the messaging on affordability, but he and his administration are actually making a lot of good moves to reawaken the nuclear giant.
As Wright put it in a statement, “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, the Energy Department is aligning its operations to restore commonsense to energy policy, lower costs for American families and businesses, and ensure the responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars. These changes will help us better execute the DOE mission of delivering affordable, reliable and secure American energy for the American people.”
Here’s hoping Wright is right.
