Image by Lee Lawson.

Donald Trump has torched atomic power’s last illusion of credible regulation. He’s destroyed the last shreds of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, exponentially raising the likelihood of an apocalyptic radioactive disaster while escalating America’s transition to energy fascism. His nuclear boosterism has been joined by the core of the Democratic Party, including California’s Governor Gavin Newsom among many others.

But the low-cost zero-carbon tsunami of green Solartopian technology may yet prove unstoppable in the marketplace.

For the first time in US history, a president has fired a sitting NRC commissioner. Another has resigned. A DOGE flunky with zero nuclear expertise has decimated the NRC’s technical support staff.

The NRC has always acted, as the Boston Globe has put it, “more like an industry booster than a watchdog.” But a recent Washington Examiner headline may comprise the Commission’s ultimate epitaph: “Regulators fear dismissal if they slow Trump nuclear power plans.”

The commissioners themselves have nearly all been absurdly industry-friendly. But the rank-and-file NRC staff offered significant expertise. Now even that is gone.

Trump now loudly demands the commissioners “rubber stamp” Small Modular Reactors that are untested, unproven, uninsured and hyper-expensive. Industry supporters worry that soaring delays and prices followed by underperformance, accidents and radiation releases due to unreliable, unregulated construction could doom the technology.

Safety concerns have been confirmed by the refusal of the insurance industry to cover damages from an accident. The refusal stretches back to 1957, when Congress approved the Price-Anderson Act, shielding the industry from a requirement to get private insurance. Thus the “nuclear clause” in every U.S. homeowners policy says: “This policy does not cover loss or damage caused by nuclear reaction or nuclear radiation or radioactive contamination.”

“The NRC has always been a nuclear lapdog, not a watchdog. But under the Trump Administration’s new executive orders” expediting a drive for nuclear power in the U.S. “the lapdog has had its teeth removed. Its vocal cords cut. It can’t bite. It can’t bark, even if it wanted to!” said Arnie Gundersen, a form top executive in the nuclear power industry and now as chief engineer of Fairewinds Associates a leading challenger nuclear power.

As the orders, notes the U.S. Department of Energy, state: “The executive orders instruct the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to create an expedited pathway to approve reactors” and “expand American nuclear energy capacity from around 100 GW [gigawatts] today to 400 GW by 2050.”

Under Trump, “Nuclear safety is in complete free fall at NRC, and there is no parachute,” said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist at the organization Beyond Nuclear. “For example, the agency’s staff and licensing board have already shockingly approved an unprecedented, extremely risky restart of the closed Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan. To restore the operating license, the NRC cobbled together an ad hoc and convoluted regulatory pathway in close collusion with Palisades’ owner, reckless Holtec International. Holtec has zero experience or competence with operating a reactor, repairing one, building or restarting one, let alone at a problem-plagued nuclear lemon like Palisades.”

Palisades is “a badly designed, poorly built, and now dangerously age-degraded 60-year-old reactor that cannot begin to meet modern-day safety standards, which are themselves under serious attack by Trump, DOGE, and the industry,” said Kamps. “If the NRC commissioners reject our appeals and rubberstamp Palisades’ unneeded restart, it will risk a Chornobyl- or Fukushima-scale radioactive catastrophe, an existential threat to 21........

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