America built the first civilian nuclear power reactor in the world in three years. We started on it in 1954 and were done by the end of 1957. Half a century later, just doing the paperwork to get a reactor design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the government body responsible for overseeing this process, took the company trying to build Georgia’s Vogtle reactors nearly four years. That means it took longer to finish the approval paperwork for nuclear power than it did to pioneer it. What happened? Regulatory bureaucracy throttled nuclear. But it’s a new day for the atom. If the Trump administration and a surprisingly bipartisan coalition in Congress have their way, a nuclear renaissance will begin.
Last week, the Trump administration announced the first part in what will be a broad new regulatory scheme that will unleash American nuclear power (again), with new rules on how the NRC approves new projects for so-called “microreactors,” small-scale atomic power plants that, rather than powering a whole region, are small enough to power things like a military base or remote area. These smaller nuclear reactors are a sensible place for the administration to start. They are easier to find sites for and have more applications, and so with the administration poised to roll out a game-changing suite of new regulations over the coming months—undoing the old regime that kept America from building nuclear power for half a century—it’s starting with simple, safe microreactors.
