Evening Edition: President Trump Pushes For Increase In Nuclear Power
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Thursday, May 29th, 2025. I'm Eben Brown. Are we ready to go nuclear? The president's executive orders on energy policy could be pushing the U.S. to re-embrace atomic energy as our demand for power grows. Things like these A.I. applications, data centers, but also the onshoring of manufacturing, nuclear power,

increased electrification of buildings and transportation. All of those things are conspiring to cause demand growth forecasts to skyrocket. This is the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. ♪

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Cloud computing, data centers, artificial intelligence. You've no doubt heard that these futuristic utilities will all require incredible amounts of energy. That is power, electric, from the wall outlet.

And there's plenty of discussion that we just may not produce enough. Couple that in with President Trump's desire to bring back widespread manufacturing and other big plant type economic sectors, and the demand for electricity will grow even more. But when's the last time we've built a great number of power plants?

China is. Canada is getting ready to. We're behind on this. And that's why President Trump, through a number of executive orders, is pushing the nation to re-embrace nuclear energy. Once considered the quick way to vast stores of energy, nuclear or atomic went by the wayside. The incident at Three Mile Island didn't help with the PR either.

But there's a lot more interest now than there's ever been. Certainly is providing additional impetus for new nuclear construction here in the United States. John Kotek is with the Nuclear Energy Institute, where he's senior vice president for policy development and public affairs. He discusses the president's executive orders that could bring about a renaissance in the U.S. for nuclear power. The executive orders...

There were four of them, and they touched on somewhat different areas. One was to try to create more demand, more opportunity for next generation nuclear to serve national security and other federal energy needs through the defense and energy departments.

One was focused on regulatory modernization and efficiency, focused on our Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We had a third one focused on our Energy Department and their ability to demonstrate and bring new technologies to market. And then there was a broad-based fourth order that was looking at things like fuel supply, workforce, and other things that are going to be important as we build out new nuclear in the United States. And

The orders also provided a really strong signal to the rest of the government that it's not going to be just enough to build here in the U.S. There's really a global marketplace for this technology. And right now, Russia and China are winning in that marketplace. And we need to help our companies in the U.S. compete against those countries there.

in competing for and winning global opportunities. We have a need for more energy. I mean, I think that's sort of like the understatement, but we have newer technologies that are coming down the pike that are going to require, they're just going to have a bigger draw on the grid, so to speak. And we've had a grid that's had problems before.

over these past 20 years. We've seen what happens when a state tries to have its own grid in Texas. They've had catastrophes. We've seen a problem. I mean, I remember the 2003 blackout. You know, that's not necessarily a nuclear issue, but it's a problem with our grid. And now we have, you know, AI and data centers and cloud computing. It just puts all

all that much more stress on a limited resource that we have, and that is the power going through the grid. So nuclear can solve this, can't it? Nuclear can sure help. One of the things that is really striking about just these last few years is the anticipated increase in electricity demand. So some of the challenges that you pointed to occurred at a time when we didn't have much in the way of electricity demand growth, or we call it load growth.

Right. That's been pretty much flat in the U.S. over the last 20 years, at least. Now we're seeing things like these AI applications, data centers, but also the onshoring of manufacturing, increased electrification of buildings and transportation. All of those things are conspiring to cause demand growth forecasts to skyrocket.

So, for example, if you look back just a couple of years ago, we anticipated needing to add less than 30, we call gigawatts, right? Gigawatts, a large nuclear power plant. Less than 30 of those over a five-year period. That estimate's now close to 130, right? It's about five times the load growth we expected just a couple of years ago. As a result, we're going to need to build a lot more nuclear and a lot more other technologies to meet that surge in demand.

That's really important because if we're going to compete and win against China and others when it comes to AI, AI uses a ton of power.

And so if we're going to meet that demand and meet the demands of reshored manufacturing facilities, et cetera, we need a lot more power on the grid. And nuclear's got a huge role to play because nuclear is the one technology that runs 24-7 for 18 to 24 months at a time. And so you need that stable, firm, some call it baseload power there.

To be there when other technologies can't.

You're not going to power AI with solar energy. I think we've concluded that at this point, right? You know, we're not going to power it with windmills, are we? You know, we just need the big guns here, right? Well, I think what you're going to need to have is a combination of those things. And so, you know, certainly... Diversify. What we call intermittent technologies, you can couple those things with things like short duration energy storage. That has a role to play.

New gas, natural gas construction is going to have a role to play. Things like deep geothermal are coming to market. So there's a wave of technologies that are either currently available or coming soon that can help, but having something like nuclear that can really be the backbone of

of the electric grid going forward enables those other types of technologies to flourish as well. So it really is an and conversation now, not an or conversation when it comes to adding new generation to the grid.

Our guest is John Kotek with the Nuclear Energy Institute. We're discussing the impacts of President Trump's executive orders that could push the nation to re-embrace atomic power. On the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition, please like and subscribe. We'll have more straight ahead. She's made up her mind.

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There's a lot of support behind this idea, this diversifying it to have nuclear sort of do the heavy lifting, you know, and then but also to augment it with other types of power generation, whether it's old school fossil fuel stuff or it's new stuff, you know, solar, wind, whatever. It's coming from the industry side. It's coming from the commerce side. It's even coming from the general public. I mean, I think the public is OK with this now, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, if you if you look back over the last couple of decades, the one and only energy technology that has seen an increase in public support is nuclear power. And so, you know, more and more we're seeing people come to recognize the value proposition that nuclear delivers. Right. You know, the firm power, it is carbon free generation that, you know, that matters to a lot of folks.

creates a lot of jobs and a lot of economic activity. I already mentioned the fuel security, the fact that once you've refueled one of these things, you run it 18 to 24 months before you have to put more fuel on it, right? That provides a lot of energy security, very stable in terms of pricing, once you've got these things up and built, they operate at a very stable operating cost.

So for a lot of reasons, people are coming around to supporting nuclear. That's why we've seen over the last several presidential administrations, over the last several Congresses, some real progress in terms of supportive policy and programs for nuclear power. And frankly, as we go forward with things like the reconciliation bill working its way through Congress, as we look at implementation of the president's executive orders,

We're going to want to make sure that we don't go backwards on the policies and programs that we already have in place and then build on them through successful implementation of what the president has done. So how quickly can we ramp this up? If all the green lights were given, you know, from a legislation and regulatory perspective, how how quickly can we get the power plants that we need built? I mean, is that something that happens quickly or this is like a decades and decades type of thing? It's it's.

It doesn't have to be and shouldn't be. And so if you look, for example, to our neighbors to the north, Canada is actually deploying the first of an American-made small modular reactor technology. It's developed by GE and Hitachi Partnership. They're in the progress of building that now. Their regulator has already approved the design for construction. They intend to have that online before 2030.

Right. And with subsequent deployments of these reactors, we're going to get better at it. And that you look at the example of China, for example, China's put two dozen reactors on the grid over the last decade. They've gotten so good at it, they're building 30 more and they've got another 10 more in the queue. Right. And so if you look at this, the experience, for example, Japan, when they were really building at scale, they were going from the first concrete poured to loading the fuel in a reactor in three years.

Now, it's going to take us a while to get there. It takes a while to get good at these. They're big, you know, civil infrastructure. But the more we do, the faster they're going to go up. And that's what we got to get started now. So what is the next step in getting started? The president has his executive orders, but we need more.

legislation. We need money allocated. So as I mentioned earlier, we can't go backwards on the incentives that exist right now to help get the first few plants built because the challenge with new nuclear and with any capital intensive new technology is the first few are going to cost more. Right. So we're going to need some sort of probably combination of federal, state and private partnership to address those higher costs to come with the first few.

Once we get that in place, I think that's going to unlock a lot of utility interests, but also industrial interests, the computer AI companies, as well as this Department of Energy, Department of Defense, federal demand that the president has just unlocked.

last week. John Kotek, your Senior Vice President for Policy Development and Public Affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute. Thank you for being with us on the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. Thanks so much for having me. Music

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