Limerick nuclear generating station in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, June 2025. The Trump administration’s executive orders have created the policy framework for an advanced nuclear revival, but now the real test is whether industry can deliver reactors at scale and on schedule. (Shutterstock/Amy Lutz)

From Policy to Power: One Year After Trump’s Nuclear Executive Orders

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A year into America’s nuclear energy pivot, the real work begins.

Before Independence Day, a venture-backed startup will turn on a nuclear reactor. In the policy environment of five years ago, this would not have been possible. Today, the executive orders of the Trump administration from May 2025 and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Reactor Pilot Program, which were stood up less than a year ago, have created the conditions for several advanced nuclear reactor designs to reach the doorstep of criticality. Ours is one of them.

That shift did not happen by accident. Gradually, our country began to realize that energy had become the precondition for national security and economic growth. Between radar systems and missile defense architecture that form the backbone of homeland security, the increasing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and compute, and the reindustrialization of the American manufacturing base, the answer runs through the same bottleneck: we need an order of magnitude more electricity than the current grid can reliably deliver, and we need it to be clean, firm, and resilient against the disruptions our adversaries have demonstrated they can inflict. Nuclear energy is the only........

© The National Interest