United States: Trump’s Domestic Nuclear Energy Policy Prioritizes Deregulation

Deregulation, meant to incentivize private capital to fund new nuclear deployments, is emerging as the central, defining characteristic of US President Donald Trump’s domestic nuclear energy agenda. The White House is currently drafting four executive orders, expected to be released within the coming weeks, attempting to expand the ability of the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DOD) to deploy prototype and demonstration reactors with potential commercial applications, possibly without oversight by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

The NRC is already the central impediment to a new US nuclear renaissance in the narrative of certain Silicon Valley nuclear start-ups, and this view appears to be adopted wholesale within the Trump administration. “We are trying to knock things over that we can that are regulatory,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the House Appropriations Committee in a May 7 hearing. “There will be catalyzing regulatory events to bring” in “tens of billions of dollars” in private capital, “mostly from hyperscalers.”

This effort coincides with the White House Office of Management and Budget’s directives to cut staff and spending across federal agencies. On May 2, the White House released a budget proposal that would cut the fiscal 2026 budget for the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy by 25% of current levels. Wright did, however, make clear his defense of grant programs, cost-share awards and loan financing for nuclear power, as well as government research and development efforts. In his testimony, Wright praised Idaho National Laboratory (INL) for taking the “lead in nuclear commercial nuclear technology” and “launching the nuclear renaissance from the test reactors that’ll be done there to the scientists” that are “collaborating with virtually all of the next generation commercial reactor developers.”

It’s that collaboration and the parallel efforts to jumpstart advanced nuclear deployments at the Pentagon that are the subject of the forthcoming executive order initiatives first reported this week by Axios. Industry and government sources told Energy Intelligence that the White House is, in fact, working on four executive orders — expected to be made public in the next couple of weeks or sooner — that would collectively expand collaboration between the Pentagon and the DOE in advancing new nuclear technologies. Some of the more extreme wording being debated for the executive orders could pare back any NRC oversight in this collaboration, although everything is in flux: “There’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen,” one government source told Energy Intelligence.

What the draft executive orders appear to be targeting is the precise nature of the carveout from NRC authority that the DOE and DOD have enjoyed since the NRC was created in the 1970s, in legislation amending the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The DOD has internal nuclear safety oversight over its own nuclear activities, including naval nuclear reactors. DOE has traditionally had internal oversight over a specific subset of activities, according to an April 2024 INL presentation: those performed on a government-owned or controlled site, under contract to DOE, and not providing “power for commercial application” or demonstrating the suitability of a reactor “for commercial application.” It’s likely these last restrictions that the draft executive orders would target.

Contested Licensing Authority

The four planned nuclear energy-focused executive orders would be the first of Trump’s 147 executive orders since taking office in January that directly speak to the nuclear energy sector. One previous executive order more broadly sought to strip away the independence of certain federal regulators including the NRC, while another more vaguely and confusingly sought to streamline federal licensing authority by sunsetting existing regulations.

The Trump Administration’s executive order approach to governing by fiat carries with it legal and political risks. Executive orders are historically easy to overturn and revoke, both by court injunction and by subsequent presidents — as Trump himself has revoked many of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders. In the case of the most extreme version of the draft nuclear executive orders, this means that even if they’re promulgated, the executive orders might have an uncertain impact. Without Congressional language substantiating the authority of the DOD or DOE to license commercial reactor designs connected to the US power grid, vendors hoping to deploy reactors under this scheme could run into future legal headwinds.

At issue in the draft executive orders is the expansion of DOE and DOD authority to license prototype and demonstration reactors to reactors that also provide commercial power to the grid, “as long as the reactor is predominantly for DOD and DOE purposes,” a senior DOD official told Energy Intelligence. “The Atomic Energy Act does not actually clearly delineate whether or not DOD or DOE-licensed reactors can be on the commercial grid.” To avoid legal challenges, this would likely require Congress to designate in statute such authority to the agencies.

Others argue that nuclear power reactors on the commercial grid must have an NRC license. There’s also the point that “if you start getting into multiples of projects,” there is “an open question on the oversight and inspection” regime, because the research and test facilities traditionally authorized by the DOD and DOE tend to have a short-term, targeted purpose, one Washington source told Energy Intelligence. “If you’re looking at an energy generation facility that likely you want to operate for decades,” then DOD has not been in the practice of reviewing and authorizing such facilities recently.

While the NRC is engaged with more than two dozen vendors and developers in pre-application design work and has been actively developing a regulatory pathway for new reactor designs, there is some precedence for what the executive orders could propose. The Experimental Breeder Reactor-II — a 20 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor on which some advanced reactor designs are based — did occasionally sell power to the grid during its 30 years of fuel and material testing operations at Argonne National Laboratory in Idaho before it was shut down in 1994.

The draft executive order initiative would certainly require larger allocations of resources to the DOD and DOE in future budgets (fiscal 2027 and 2028) to staff up and build out the infrastructure to support internal regulatory oversight, especially if it is to be paired with proposals to site and power data centers at federal installations and labs.