Draft Executive Orders Aim to Speed Construction of Nuclear Plants

The Trump administration is considering several executive orders aimed at accelerating the construction of nuclear centrals to help meet the growing demand for electricity, according to drafts reviewed by the New York Times.

Drafts say that the United States has been left behind from China to expand nuclear energy and request a “wholesale review” or federal security regulations to facilitate the construction of new plants. They imagine that the Department of Defense assumes an outstanding role in ordering reactors and installing them in military bases.

They would also establish the objective of quadruplying the size of the fleet or nuclear centrals of the nation, from almost 100 Gigawatts of electrical capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050. A gigavatio is sufficient to feed almost.

“As the US development of new nuclear reactor designs has decreased, 87 percent of nuclear reactors installed worldwide since 2017 are based on Russian and Chinese designs,” says a eraser of order, entitled “Continuing in a nuclear rebirth.”

“These trends cannot continue,” reads the order. “A rapid and decisive action is required to boost the nuclear rebirth of the United States.”

The four draft orders are marked as “predictional” and “deliberative.” They are among several potential executive orders on the nuclear energy that have been circulating, but it is not clear what it is, if there is any, agree, according to a person familiar with the discussions, who spoke under an anonymous advertising condition.

Nor was it clearly clear who had written the draft orders or what stage of internal administration discussions the documents reflected. The White House declined to comment on whether any order would be issued ultimately.

In one of his first acts in office, President Trump declared a “national energy emergency”, saying that the United States had inappropriate supplies of electricity to meet the country’s growing needs, particularly for data centers that execute artificial intelligence systems. Although most of Mr. Trump’s actions have focused on increasing fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, administration officials have also supported nuclear energy.

“Our goal is to generate tens of billions of dollars in this administration in private capital so that the reactors are built, and I am very sure that we will achieve that goal,” said Chris Wright, the secretary of Energy, hearing Bepphore a Houseday.

In recent years, nuclear energy has been attracting the growing bipartisan support. Some Democrats support it because plants do not emit greenhouse gases heater of planets, although environmental have raised conerns on radioactive waste and reactor safety. It also supports Republicans who are less concerned about global warming, but say that nuclear power plants could strengthen the energy security of the United States.

Technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon that have ambitious climatic objectives have expressed interest in nuclear energy to feed their data centers, since plants can work 24 hours a day, something that wind and solar energy cannot do.

However, building new reactors in the United States has proven difficult.

While the nation still has the largest fleet in the world of nuclear power plants, only three new reactors have been put online since 1996. Many public services have been scared by the high cost. The two most recent reactors built at the Vogtle Energy Plant in Georgia cost $ 35 billion, duplicate the initial estimates and Artimed Beind Schedule.

In response, more than boxing companies have begun to develop a new generation of narrower reactors, a fraction of the size of Vogtle. The hope is that the thesis reactors have a lower initial price label, which makes them a less risky investment for public services. That, in turn, could help the industry reduce costs when repeatedly building the same type of reactor.

So far, however, none of the next generation plants have bone.

One of the executive orders of the draft blames the slow rhythm of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent federal agency that supervises the safety of the reactor and must approve new designs before they are built. The draft would order the agency to carry out a “wholesale review” of its regulations and impose a deadline of 18 months to decide White to approach a new reactor.

The draft of the order also urges the agency to reconsider its security limits for exposure to radiation, saying that the current limits are too strict and go beyond what is needed human health.

It is not clear if the president could see the changes in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which the Congress established as independent of the White House. In recent months, Trump has tried to exercise greater authority in independent agencies, establishing a possible confrontation in court.

Some pronuclear groups have said that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is already beginning to rationalize its regulations in response to a bipartisan bill approved by Congress last year. But nuclear energy skeptics say that the White House pressure could make the agency cut the corners in safety.

“That is my number one concern,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear energy security in the union of scientists in question and a frequent critic of the industry. “We are talking about new reactor technologies where there is a lot of uncertainty, and the NRC staff to raise many good technical questions. To short circuit that process would mean that sweeping possible security problems under the back.”

Ordinary drafts suggest other possible steps, even that the US Army. Use their deep pockets to finance the general reactors of the next. An option under consideration would be to designate certain AI data centers as “critical defense infrastructure” and allow them to be fed by reactors built in the facilities of the Department of Energy, which can allow the projects to avoid the review by the Nuclar regulation.

Another order would call the call about the Secretary of Energy who develops a plan to rebuild the supply chains of the United States for enriched uranium and other nuclear fuels, which in recent years have been largely imported from Russia.

It remains to be seen if such steps would be enough to mark a wave of new reactors, experts said. According to the Biden administration, the Department of Energy also made a great boost to expand nuclear energy in the United States, with some signs of progress. However, some of the federal offices that led that effort are now being reduced by budgeting, purchases and budget cuts.

For example, the Loan Programs Office of Energy Departments, which provided almost $ 12 billion in loan guarantees to help finance Vogtle reactors, is ready to lose more than half of its staff, according to several current and previous employees. These losses have said pronuclear groups, could hinder a key program to finance new reactors.

“The big question is how it builds a great book of orders for new reactors so that the costs begin to go down and the supply chains are raised,” said Joshua Freed, who leads the climate and energy program in Third Way, a group of experts in the center of the left. “There are many moving parts that have to join.”

Christopher Flavorle Contributed reports.