US Role in a Nuclear Energy Resurgence

Guests

Experts

Ashley Finan

Global Fellow

Artificial Intelligence Energy Policy

Experts

Matt Bowen

Senior Research Scholar

Nuclear Energy

Transcript

Ashley Finan: We’re kind of stuck in a situation where if we want to have the outcomes that we’re looking for, we need to incentivize them. Or we end up with things like a grid that has not enough reliability. So a lot of things can get off course if we don’t manage those electricity markets sufficiently. And I think that milestone-based payment approaches could be a good efficient way to support some of these projects that are in the executive orders.

Jason Bordoff: Nuclear energy is having a resurgence and the United States is a key part of this renewed surge in interest. Climate imperatives, national security, and the need for reliable carbon-free dispatchable power to meet rising electricity demand are all contributing to the push towards nuclear energy. Tech companies are signing major deals for nuclear energy to meet their growing energy needs, and President Trump recently signed four executive orders aimed at dramatically increasing nuclear power generation — an issue that has rare bipartisan support, but significant challenges remain. Building nuclear plants in the US has been plagued by cost overruns and delays as seen with the troubled Vogtle project in Georgia. Meanwhile, China and Russia are dominating global nuclear construction and fuel, raising questions about American competitiveness and national security.

So can the US become a leader in nuclear energy deployment? What role will new technologies and policy play in changing that trajectory? And what role should the US government play in financing, regulating and promoting nuclear energy both domestically and internationally?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Jason Bordoff.

Today on the show, Ashley Finan and Matt Bowen. Ashley recently joined the Center on Global Energy Policy as a global fellow after serving in senior leadership roles at Idaho National Laboratory where she worked on nuclear energy and national security issues. Matt Bowen is a senior research scholar here at the Center on Global Energy Policy where he focuses on nuclear energy policy, economics, and regulation.

The three of us recently co-authored an article in Foreign Policy in which we argue that a nuclear energy resurgence is vital to meeting rising electricity demand. In this podcast episode, we explored what’s driving renewed interest in nuclear power. We discussed the economics of nuclear energy, the role of advanced reactor technologies, regulatory reform — challenges particularly around safety and oversight — and why nuclear energy matters for American leadership and competitiveness. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Ashley Finan, Matt Bowen, great to see you both. Welcome to Columbia Energy Exchange. I’m really excited to talk about this topic, the new piece we wrote and what’s happening with nuclear power, which seems to be the topic of the moment that so many people want to talk about. And you guys have both spent a very long time and part of your career focused on. So welcome. I’m excited to have this conversation.

Matt Bowen: Thanks. Good to be here.

Ashley Finan: Thank you.

Jason Bordoff: Ashley. Let me start with you. Just help people listening understand… the word nuclear renaissance gets thrown around often. We’ve been talking about, there’s been periods of time where we’ve said maybe nuclear power will come back. We saw a surge in production development in the US in the sixties, seventies. Then Three Mile Island and it seemed like things stalled. What’s causing this renewed interest? How real is it? Where is nuclear power today? And let’s start with the US and then we’ll move to the rest of the world in the role it plays in the US energy system and the potential for that to change in the near to medium future.

Ashley Finan: Sure. Thank you Jason. That’s a great big question. So I mean, what’s driving the interest in nuclear today? I think there are several key factors and they’ve changed over the years. So compared with the seventies and eighties, we now have climate change as an imperative to address. So that’s a major driver. Nuclear energy is carbon-free and can contribute to addressing climate change in a big way. We know that it can scale, it has low land use, it’s firm clean power. So a lot of positives on that particular requirement for what we’re moving forward with. Another thing that’s changed recently that is vitally important right now is that we have the prospect and reality of increasing electricity demand in the United States. We haven’t seen that in decades to any significant degree. We did see that in the seventies and eighties, but then it has trailed off, so it’s really difficult to innovate and expand without growth and demand.

So that’s an enormous contributor to the current support for nuclear and current interest in nuclear. And then nuclear has bipartisan support, which is important in our current political atmosphere. So I think those are the three things that I’d highlight as fundamental changes around/within our society that are important to nuclear. At the same time, we have new technologies in nuclear energy that work to address some of the key challenges of the past, including in principle getting to a technology that is competitive in the market when it’s able to be built at scale. And I think we see that all those factors in the United States to some degree, we have an energy security imperative, but that’s even greater elsewhere in the world. For example, in Eastern Europe, energy security is very top of mind for them and that’s driving a lot of their interest in nuclear energy because you can eliminate, for example, the dependence on natural gas from neighbors. So I’ll pause there, Jason, but those are some big factors.

Jason Bordoff: And tell me, I’ll flag, there’s also this issue of the geopolitics of leadership on nuclear, what China and Russia are doing around the world. Something I’ve been thinking about and the three of us wrote about, I’ll come back to that in a minute, but just wondering, Matt, do you agree with what’s driving this and then if it provides all these benefits meet rising electricity demand in the US with 24/7 power, climate, lower land use, the question is why hasn’t it been happening more? I think part of what, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’ve heard you talk often about, well the problem is it’s really expensive and just want to kind of hear your take on where it is today and if those drivers of this resurgence are the way you think about it.

Matt Bowen: Yeah, you took the words right out of my mouth. I was going to say there was this bid at a nuclear renaissance back when I first came to Washington DC in 2006. Back then we were talking about building a bunch of large light water reactors. It didn’t pan out in part for reasons, lower demand projections, falling price of natural gas, economics. And what few reactors did go forward went badly. The first AP1000s in Georgia and South Carolina went over budget, over schedule. The ones in South Carolina were canceled and the ones in Georgia were finished, but well over schedule and over budget. So I think that is why we’re saying nuclear resurgence not renaissance today. And economics I think is the biggest barrier to new nuclear and nuclear expanding in the United States. I think you’re right that the geopolitical lens, the national security lens, the United States having a role in the international nuclear energy marketplace is part of the rationale. Ashley mentioned this bipartisan support for nuclear in Congress and across the administrations. And I think that is one angle: this worry that we are not part of the conversation. There are various points of influence that the United States has if it is a supplier that it does not, if it is not. And Russia and increasingly China are kind of stepping into that void. Russia is the leading supplier of reactors and there is concern in US policymaking circles over that lack of presence for the United States.

Jason Bordoff: Ashley, I’ve heard you say before, I think, tell me if I’m right, that Vogtle for example, the last AP1000s we brought online, were over time, over budget, but the lesson from that experience need not be, should not be, it is just economically impossible to build new nuclear. I’m just wondering if you could comment how you think about the economics of nuclear right now.

Ashley Finan: Absolutely. Thanks for the question. That’s right. The Vogtle projects were far over budget. They were far behind schedule. They had a lot of the attributes of mega projects which the United States is famously not doing well at. Examples run from the big dig in Boston to the Vogtle projects in Georgia and lots of things in between.

Jason Bordoff: Subway system here in New York.

Ashley Finan: Yeah, the subway in New York. There’s no shortage of examples and there are two approaches to addressing that problem. And I think that we need to pursue both of them. One of them is to become more competent at doing mega projects and we need that not just for nuclear but for all parts of our infrastructure and economy. That is possible. South Korea, for example, builds nuclear plants on schedule, on budget. Other countries do this. So it is achievable. And without going into a lot of detail, there’s been work done in the wake of Vogtle to identify what went wrong and to provide guidance to EPCs, builders, and vendors and utilities on how to avoid those pitfalls in the future. So if we apply those lessons learned, I think we can address much of the issue around mega projects. Not all of it. We still have workforce and supply chain issues that simply have to be worked through by getting multiple projects going and continuing construction at a pace that maintains the supply chain and the workforce. That’s what’s been done in South Korea and elsewhere. That’s one approach, improving our success at mega projects. The other…

Jason Bordoff: So just to be clear, you think when you look around the world, there are examples of countries that are doing new nuclear in whatever way one thinks is responsible that demonstrate it can be done at lower cost.

Ashley Finan: There are countries doing it at lower cost. South Korea, yes, successfully building BWRs in four years on budget, on schedule. Would we take issue with some of their process? Yes, but it’s not what’s driving their success. Their success is driven by building multiple projects in series and in parallel over time, not by maybe missing some quality assurance. That’s a problem, but it’s not what’s making them successful at building mega projects. China similarly…

Jason Bordoff: And remind people listening, BWR…

Ashley Finan: Boiling water reactor, it’s a large light water reactor like a lot of the reactors that we have in the United States today. China also is successful. They are seeing learnings in their latest AP1000 derivative projects. So they’re having that improvement. The other approach that we are taking is to avoid some of the mega project attributes. And so that’s where you hear about small modular reactors and micro reactors and trying to move towards factory fabrication for more components or reactors as a whole, trying to reduce onsite work and do things in a controlled environment to control costs and make it look more like production scale manufacturing like you make airplanes for example, or cars or submarines, ship building, that kind of approach. And that’s another approach that has merit that we’re also pursuing. And I think both of those are valuable because the products that come out of each of those lines have different applications.

Jason Bordoff: Matt, let me ask you, we’ve used little buzzwords so far, like BWR and AP1000 and just remind people listening how we think about traditional technology, what falls in that bucket when the phrase advanced nuclear is thrown out, what that means and then what does that mean for how one thinks about moving forward in a way where nuclear can grow at scale, can be lower cost. And then what I want to hear both of you talk about is also the timeframe for that. Because one of the things Ashley said is a driver for this is this rising power demand, the surge in electricity we’re going to need for AI. And a lot of people are talking about timeframes for that, that we need that power right now really fast and if we want to widen the aperture for more of the advanced technologies, does that square with the driver of meeting power demand for AI. So maybe Matt, you could go first and then Ashley.

Matt Bowen: Sure. So all of the reactors in the United States are so-called light water reactors. So they use water to cool their fuel and some of the reactors that are under development today, AP1000 is a commercial product that’s ready to go. There are some smaller light water reactors that are under development. GE Hitachi just got a construction permit to build in Canada. What would be their first SMR. And then there are these other reactor concepts that are using coolants other than water. X-energy is a high temperature gas reactor company. They’re using helium as a coolant. Kairos Power is using a fluoride lithium beryllium salt as a coolant. And TerraPower is a sodium fast reactor company that’s using sodium as a coolant. And there are a variety of different reasons why these other coolants might have some advantages. It’s possible that some of these reactors might be able to lower costs compared to light water reactors.

It’s also possible that these non-light water reactors, which operate at higher temperatures than light water reactors do, can move into a different market, which is process heat. So get outside of the electricity sector and start to contribute to the industrial sector. So X-energy for example, has a deal with Dow Chemical. They are looking at potential deployment in Texas at a Dow facility, a manufacturing facility where in part those reactors if they were built would supply process heat replacing fossil fuel use. So this is an interesting potential divergence for US nuclear energy, which has historically been in the power sector. And it’s also interesting from a climate perspective because eventually you’re going to need to decarbonize the industrial sector. And there as folks like our colleague Julio Friedman pointed out, it is a little less obvious, maybe a little more challenging in terms of the options to do so. So it’s very exciting. I don’t know how this will all turn out, but there’s a lot of promise in some of these reactor designs.

Jason Bordoff: Ashley, I want to ask you about artificial intelligence, rising power demand, but first just how people listening to this should understand the sort of AP1000 light water reactor and the potential new technologies coming on board. Is there anything you’d add to what Matt said?

Ashley Finan: I think Matt gave a good summary of it. Thank you, Jason.

Jason Bordoff: Okay. Well I mean we’re super excited that you have joined the Center on Global Energy Policy. Welcome and excited because you bring a lot of expertise, not just in nuclear energy, which is what we’re talking about today, but playing a role, helping to build out the work we’re doing on artificial intelligence and energy, which of course is something a lot of people are talking about today: both how AI can be a tool for the energy sector — our colleague David Sandalow has done a lot of work on that, for example — and also how we’re going to meet rising power demand. Can you just talk about maybe two things. One is the timeframe of some of the advanced technologies we just talked about and do they square with the timeframe for bringing power online for AI? And also one of the reasons it seems like there’s a lot of support for nuclear from the Trump administration, but others for the purpose of meeting rising AI demand is it is 24/7. And maybe you could talk about that attribute and how important that is managing intermittency, long duration storage, gas backup. When we think about the needs of AI training, inference data centers, is there something about that driver of the resurgence in nuclear that’s like particularly needs 24/7 and that is why we’re focused on this as much, or solar and wind are going to be part of that, but it’s got to be 24/7 too. Maybe you could talk about both of those things.

Ashley Finan: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think AI is one of the contributors to increasing electricity demand that we see in the US and those contributors include other things like electric vehicles and electrification of different industries and onshoring of manufacturing. So there are a number of drivers, but AI and data centers are a really important one from an economic and national security perspective, as you described. There are a lot of projections out there on how much AI energy demand will grow in the coming years. But one cite from Columbia University is 88 terawatt hours annually by 2030 — 1.6 times the electricity consumption of New York City. And seeing power demand increase by 165% by 2030, a lot of projections out there, but growing by more than several percent a year, possibly 15% a year globally or more. So there’s a lot of energy or electricity demand growth wrapped up in this.

And if you look at what’s holding up the companies trying to build data centers, it’s largely power supply. Building a data center requires moving fast and having a lot of chips and other equipment. But the thing that requires permitting and transmission connections and big infrastructure that’s most difficult to procure is the power supply. So they are challenged by this, and our ability to lead in AI is going to be either largely successful or not based on our ability to provide power for data centers in a timely manner. And we’re really at a tipping point where the United States could pull ahead and be the global leader or continue to struggle and fall behind China in leading on AI and it’s a national security imperative as well as an economic imperative that we do lead. So the timeframe in which data centers require power is immediate, but also it’s not projected to drop off.

So they need power yesterday and they need it by 2030, but they’re also going to need it for decades to come. So I think we need to think both about how do we do things quickly and now, but how do we also set ourselves up for decades of clean firm power for data centers in the future? And nuclear, as you described, it’s really one of the few clean firm power options that can run 24/7. Certainly data centers need to run 24/7, they need to have high reliability. So you can put together renewables with storage and gas backup, but there’s only so much gas backup that we can put in place. And there are areas of the United States where gas supply is congested, so you’d require pipelines and all sorts of other infrastructure that takes a very long time to build. So we see AI companies even building temporary power that will have to be replaced by longer term power or transmission, but they need it now and that’s going to be whatever they can get.

And then we need to plan for the future so that we can do this in an organized and clean sustainable way. For nuclear, some of these designs that Matt was talking about as well as the project of building new plants takes several years. It’s not ready tomorrow. But we also see companies being really creative about existing capacity. So including restarting Palisades, which is scheduled to restart in October of this year and restarting Three Mile Island into the Crane Clean Energy Center to potentially restart in 2028. So really being creative and moving fast to use what we have as well as start building new capacity.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah. Matt, I want to ask you about that. A lot of people listening to this will have read headlines about Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Meta signing these deals for nuclear power. We just had an announcement from Meta about taking power from a reactor in Illinois. Some of that there’s not too many opportunities to restart shuttered nuclear plants, maybe, in this country. There may be a few other countries where it is more possible restarting a shuttered reactor or contracting for a new power from a new reactor or keeping existing reactors online that may be part of this too. That was, I think, what I read about the announcement in Illinois. How big a deal are these? Are they just announcements and memoranda of understanding that don’t really mean anything? Or do you think that all these announcements are going to be a really important driver of maybe changing the economics and putting real capital behind the resurgence in nuclear?

Matt Bowen: Yeah, I think it is a big deal. I still kind of marvel. This is sort of like a solution to the challenge of getting new nuclear builds going in the United States that just kind of fell from the sky last year. You have these very deep-pocketed companies that see rising demand for 24/7 power and also crucially have made climate commitments. They’re looking to meet their new demand with low emission dispatchable technology and are reportedly willing to pay above market rates, which most utilities are not willing to do for new nuclear. That is quite a lucky combination to show up at the doorstep. And I think it’s fair to say that that sort of nexus could be looked at as the tip of the spear for new nuclear. And those announcements last year were the most exciting thing, in my book, they have happened for years. The announcements for the new reactors, the restarting reactors is important and valuable, but getting new ones built, because then they can be built again and again and again, whereas you are limited on the restarts. And Google’s investing capital with this nuclear project developer Elemental Power to prepare three potential sites in the United States for advanced nuclear projects, each at least 600 megawatts of capacity. So the planning continues and yeah, I think it is a really important development.

Jason Bordoff: Ashley, I’m sometimes skeptical of targets as a driver of policy action. We see in the climate community lots of targets, pledges, commitments that frankly not enough governments or companies are taking seriously. But in the piece we did, we had a target of 20 gigawatts of nuclear power, new power by 2035. I was wondering if you could, just as a background, how much power in the US is provided by nuclear today? What share is that of overall power? How should people think about a number like 20? Is that impossible to imagine? Is that ambitious but possible? Not ambitious enough? And also we’ve had some conversations internally about how to think about targets in 2030 versus 35, what that does to different potential technologies. And I think that timeframe is actually important When you think about what’s on the table for some of the advanced technologies you talked about. Maybe you could comment on both of those.

Ashley Finan: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that timeframes or targets are important if they don’t drive perverse results, right? But we’ve seen them work in the past. We had the Moonshot, there was SunShot to try to get solar to a dollar a watt, and those efforts really did drive results and having a target that the country could rally around and focus our programs around — the government has supports in all different areas, and if you can focus them all in the same direction with a simple target, I think that that can be really useful. Why 20 gigawatts by 2035? Well, we need to again, get to production at scale. We need to build reactors and then keep building reactors. We can’t build one and then wait five years and build another because then you lose your workforce, you lose your supply chain. It’s really important to get to economic construction that we’re constructing them continuously over time.

So we want to make sure that there’s a target that allows us to build multiple units of one or more designs. And by 2035, building 20 gigawatts is about 20% of our current installed generation. We have about 94 gigawatts of nuclear energy installed in the United States providing roughly 20% of our electricity, and that’s been true for many years and it provides a much greater percentage of our clean electricity. So 20 gigawatts is an ambitious number, but it’s not unachievable. It’s consistent with scale-up that we’ve had in the past in the seventies and eighties. It’s consistent or lower than the build rate that exists in China. So it’s achievable, but will be a challenge. And why 2035, not 2030? Well, by 2030 we can build the designs that are ready now. We can do uprates, we can restart existing plants. It’s not obvious that we can achieve a lot of advanced designs — some of the things that Matt was talking about — to be under operation by 2030, they can certainly be under construction, but in operation by 2030, a lot of advanced designs would be a real challenge. So 2035 allows us to incorporate multiple designs into that target and not necessarily lock in one of the technologies that has existed for many years.

Jason Bordoff: I want to come in a minute to what we should do to make this happen. Policy actions, solutions, some of what was in President Trump’s recent executive orders, but just to close out on what the drivers of this are. Matt, maybe you could just say a little bit more about the geopolitical dimension. I mean, I think we noted in the piece nearly 85% of the world’s nuclear construction today is done by China or Russia. Those projects often move forward with low-cost debt provided by those countries with conditions that the workforce and the operation be the state owned companies in China or Russia. How should we think about the national security issues of US leadership in nuclear?

Matt Bowen: Yeah, as you mentioned, Asia’s really been where the growth in nuclear energy has been happening over the past decade, and China’s connected about 36,000 megawatts of new nuclear over the past decade. So steadily adding a few gigawatts a year on average, they have about 55,000 megawatts of capacity now. So on their current path there, they should overtake France in the next couple of years to become the second biggest fleet in the world. And if they keep going on that pace and we keep going on our pace, which is zero builds, they’ll overtake us somewhere over a decade perhaps. The IEA says they have about 29,000 megawatts of reactors under construction right now. Thus far, China’s only exported to Pakistan, but they have been talking with other countries. They were potentially going to build a Chinese reactor in the UK before the British decided perhaps that wasn’t such a good idea.

Now Russia has been the leading exporter of reactors. They have reactors under construction, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Turkey, and of course they’re also building at home. Now again, compared to the United States, we have zero commercial reactors under construction at home and zero of our reactors under construction abroad. We have been talking with Poland and as Ashley mentioned Eastern Europe very much sees this through an energy security lens and maybe we’ll get those AP1000s under construction. Finally, those have been under discussion for a long time. The Polish entities have also been part of this joint US Canada, Poland investment into the GE Hitachi BWRX-300 SMR, which looks like it will be first built in Canada, perhaps the second one will be in the United States and Tennessee, where we just saw a construction permit application submitted. And very well maybe in Poland too.

So I could see other Eastern European countries as destinations for US reactors, as you mentioned, it will be tough for the United States private companies to compete even with US government help on financing to match some of the low cost, low interest loans that these state owned entities from Russia and China are able to offer. I mean large $25 billion loans. This is, I think, what Russia offered to Egypt at 3% interest rates, large equity investments just plopping down billions of dollars to pay for reactors in Turkey and Russians were going to build a reactor in Finland before the Finns decided after the Russian invasion of Ukraine not to do that. So I think it will be hard on a one-to-one basis for the United States to compair on financing. We certainly also can’t make the argument that we’re really good at delivering large light water reactor projects on time and on budget. Maybe some of these SMRs advanced reactors will break through, and that could also be a boon to US competitiveness and to helping supply the world with low-emission power and heat.

Jason Bordoff: Ashley, you’re joining us after stepping away from a senior leadership role in the national and homeland security directorate of one of the biggest national labs in the country. So I just want to see what you would add to that national security imperative in how you think about that.

Ashley Finan: Great. Yeah, I will just without adding too much to what Matt has said, I’ll just say that I do believe it is an imperative as we move forward, we see the expiration of key non-proliferation treaties and not an obvious way that we’re going to renew non-proliferation treaties. And so the importance of US influence over commercial nuclear globally is even greater than it was in the past. So I think that it’s vitally important that the United States takes a leadership role here. We also clearly see China working to assert global dominance over all sorts of economic and energy spheres and Russia continuing to try to do that. So that’s the real challenge we face moving forward is conflict with China. We’re in gray zone conflict with these countries already and it’s going to continue. So having supremacy in this space is vitally important.

Jason Bordoff: So in terms of what we do about this and how we enhance that leadership and move the ball forward, there’s probably a very long list, but in what we wrote, we highlighted I think three broad categories, financing, regulation, and export. So maybe Ashley, I’ll start with you just on how we think about financing. As I talk with my students about the more government subsidized is something, the more you get, that doesn’t necessarily mean those are well-spent taxpayer dollars. And so how do you think about the role of where does that financing come from? Is this just a matter of larger subsidies from the federal government? That’s sort of the solution. What does it mean to focus on the financing element of nuclear — given what you guys said earlier, which is first of a kind, projects are more expensive, it is costly now, but there’s a runway you both see to bring those costs down over time.

Ashley Finan: Sure. Well, I think it’s a complex space and there are a number of reasons to think that the government should step in here. One is that it’s a national security and economic priority to lead in this space and the establishment of supply chains and workforce and getting from first of a kind to nth of a kind is not a burden that a single company can bear. And so fundamentally, there needs to be some collective action which is best orchestrated by the government. It may be orchestrated by hyperscalers in part, but I think a partnership there would be more powerful in spades. So that’s one reason that this is important. Another is that our electricity markets are not free markets. They are very structured. They’re very much impacted by subsidies and regulations that support certain attributes of energy that subsidize various energy technologies. And so we are kind of stuck in a situation where if we want to have the outcomes that we’re looking for, we need to incentivize them.

Or we end up with things like a grid that has not enough reliability because there isn’t enough spinning reserve or there isn’t inertia on the grid. So a lot of things can get off course if we don’t manage those electricity markets sufficiently because we already interfere with them quite a lot. Those are a couple of reasons that I think government involvement is important here, and I think that some of the mechanisms that we already have are working well. The Loan Programs Office has been really effective in supporting the Palisades restart. It was effective in getting the Vogtle project to completion and it seems like a tool that we have ready to go, so we should use it and use it aggressively because in principle, if things go well, it also doesn’t cost the taxpayers a lot of money. The tax credits that were in the IRA, those were driving movement before today.

A year ago, those were driving interest in building nuclear. And we know that they were moving projects forward that had been very much on the back burner and were moved to the front burner. So we haven’t seen them implemented yet, but we know that those were going to drive success and we should continue to use those. Those are a couple of examples, but I think also we’ve seen the success of the Advanced Reactor Demonstration program and Kairos has gone to use a milestone-based payment approach. Of course, Matt wrote on the value of that approach for US space travel, and I think that milestone-based payment approaches could be a good efficient way to support some of these projects that are in the executive orders that have a really quick turnaround that we want to see completed in a couple of years. Having some government backing to help move those first projects forward I think is really important. And we have a lot of tools in place, but also the opportunity to use other tools.

Jason Bordoff: So what I hear you saying is we just again, had these major executive orders from the Trump administration very supportive of trying to move the ball forward on nuclear. But I hear you saying if the big beautiful bill or other things being done in Washington, pull back support for the loan program office, pull back support for tax credits, that’s sort of inconsistent with that goal. Tell me if that’s right and I’m curious, Matt, if you agree, and then maybe you could also comment as Ashley noted, you had written a couple of times about milestone-based payments. Explain how that might work to people, but maybe comment also on the first question.

Ashley Finan: So yes, I think that that’s right that those supports need to continue. Now the government could choose to use other supports, but we do need support for those executive order projects to move forward. I would submit that pragmatically, the programs and mechanisms that we have in place now are best positioned to allow us to move quickly because even government and legislation, it takes a bit of time. So we should use what we have now if we want to move quickly.

Jason Bordoff: Got it. Matt, go ahead.

Matt Bowen: Well, just taking a couple of those topics, one of the letters earlier this year that to Congress that I thought was worth noting in this conversation, this is the governor of South Carolina Henry McMaster, not exactly a lefty, big government type saying, I urge you to protect the federal tax credit and loan programs for nuclear power in the upcoming reconciliation negotiation. And he’s talking about the sort of canceled VC Summer AP1000 project and wanting to get it going. And he’s saying, we just need to finish them, but that takes money. Fortunately, the money is available unfortunately and is about to disappear. And so that is, I think perhaps the most important thing going on right now is the fate of those tax credits. I’ve been critical of one of the Trump executive orders for laying the problems of the nuclear industry at the foot of the regulator and ignoring the economics of the situation, which if the wrong diagnosis, you’re not likely to get the right solution.

So I think as Ashley said, I mean these tax credits and loan programs, these are here, they are beneficial to nuclear. We’ve seen the nuclear industry having to play a little bit of defense to keep these instruments that are useful for new nuclear. And it’s not to say that we shouldn’t devote some time to improving regulation. I think there is space for improvement at the NRC. There are bipartisan efforts, the Efficient Nuclear Licensing Hearings Act by Senator Scott and Coons. It’s a bipartisan bill. It’s something the NRC can’t do on its own. Removing a hearing requirement, dating back to 1957 that today really only adds cost and delay. This is something Congress can do that would help with the efficiency of NRC licensing. And we should do it.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah. Can you just say another word? I’m going to talk about regulation and get both of your takes. And you noted this. Let’s not lay all the blame at the feet of the regulator, but you’ve also written a lot and spent a lot of time here at the center writing about the need to reform how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission works, its environmental permitting process for example. But you also wrote a separate piece sort of critical of some parts of the executive orders for maybe undermining the role of the regulator. And we’re in this just big debate in this country about abundance and permitting reform and you can’t build things because government permits and regulation gets in the way. What’s your view on how people should think about the role of the regulator here in this case and how big a barrier that is or isn’t — understanding, of course, economics is a big part of this too.

Matt Bowen: Yeah. And of course the regulation has some impact on licensing and economics. I don’t think it’s the major barrier year and I worry a great deal about undermining the independence of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. There was an executive order from earlier this year that was meant to rein in what it had called so-called independent agencies reviewing their work at the White House to make sure it’s consistent with the president’s priorities. And I would just underline that whether it’s international reports on nuclear safety from the International Atomic Energy Agency or domestic reports on the same subject by the National Academy of Sciences, the bottom line is always the same countries need strong independent nuclear safety regulators. And by that I mean specifically free from political and industry influence. I want to read one sentence from a National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine report. In 2014, Lessons Learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident for Improving Safety of US Nuclear Power Plants: “To be effectively independent.

The regulatory body shall have sufficient authority and sufficient staffing and shall have access to sufficient financial resources for the proper discharge of its assigned responsibilities.” So this is where myself and others get very nervous when we talk about we’re going to cut staff, we’re going to cut budget at the NRC, we’re going to have the White House directing it. This all kind of goes against what these international and domestic reports have recommended, and it goes without saying. The National Academy’s report went on to note that an examination of the Japanese regulatory agencies after the Fukushima accident concluded that they were not independent. So without nuclear safety and public confidence and nuclear power, all this other stuff goes away. So that’s a fundamental thing we need to protect and defend.

Jason Bordoff: I think that was a similar point to what I saw. Former secretary Ernie Moniz and John Deutch made that point in a piece they wrote after the executive orders came out. Ashley, I’m curious on this list of priorities low to high, where you would place NRC reform, how big, small a barrier that is to this nuclear resurgence. And I think your view, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so tell me if I’m wrong, is that you see potential risks in how the executive orders around NRC reform might get implemented but also see potential promise. Tell me if that’s right.

Ashley Finan: Yeah, absolutely. I think that we, first, I agree with Matt that an independent regulator is unequivocally needed. It’s absolutely necessary. And we can’t degrade the independence of the NRC for it to be effective and it needs to be independent and trustworthy. There’s also room for improvement, both in how the commission operates now, but also in how it needs to prepare for a bigger scale up of nuclear. And they’re doing some of that work, but they also need funding and support to continue doing that work and qualified experienced staff. So right now, if we’re licensing a reactor every five years or every several years or whatever it is, that is not going to get us to construction and deployment at scale. So there are movements towards high volume licensing or licensing manufacturing licenses for manufactured reactors, and there’s movement towards streamlining the environmental review process, which can take several years and really not produce the kind of value that you’d expect out of several years of work that can be cut down.

And we’ve seen examples of that where the NRC has used environmental assessments instead of environmental impact statements. They’ve worked to develop a generic environmental impact statement, though they haven’t had a commission vote on it. So there’s movement in the right direction, but that needs to continue and the commission needs to complete some of those initiatives to be able to support the United States becoming a leader in this space. So I think that there’s important work that can be done. I think there are other areas of reform, so for example, the mandatory hearing that Matt described, but also looking at the contested hearings and how can we make those more efficient? How could the office of general counsel and the commission really take a risk-informed approach to some of these processes and make sure that they’re spending the time and doing the work to consider things that are novel but not reinventing the wheel when something’s already been reviewed and decided. Those are a couple examples of ways that we could cut down on delay that is introduced by regulatory processes.

Jason Bordoff: And one of the concerns I’ve seen is sort of in the course of reform, I think the EO set deadlines like 18 months and put out the idea of reducing the staff size of the NRC. Is that inconsistent with how you think you build confidence and have adequate oversight or not necessarily?

Ashley Finan: That’s where the implementation I think is vital because it’s possible to reduce staff in one area and increase it in another and end up with a net benefit. And the executive order considers that yes, you might need to increase staff in some areas. And I thought that was unusual for these types of initiatives right now coming out of this administration and encouraging, relative to the timelines they also had in the executive order consistent with the NRC’s responsibility under legislation. So you can put in timelines and it’s good to have targets as we talked about for building reactors. It’s good to have targets for licensing reviews, especially things that are kind of pro forma that maybe aren’t new reactors but are relicensing of existing reactors where the NRC has a lot of practice and knows what they’re doing and could put more resources into a project to make it move faster.

I think there’s the potential to have timelines that are helpful, but those can’t override the NRC’s independence or their safety responsibility. And that’s where the implementation’s really important. There has to be a way for the NRC to say, we couldn’t get there in 18 months. We either need to say, no, it fails, or we need more time. And that is, I think, implied by the statement that the NRC needs to work within its legislative requirements, but again, implementation there is really, really important to make sure that we retain the efficiency, effectiveness and independence of the regulator.

Jason Bordoff: I want to get to one or two other topics in our remaining minutes, but very quickly, Matt, was there anything you wanted to add a respond to on that?

Matt Bowen: Yeah, the NRC executive order is the one that gave me the greatest consternation. There are elements of it I could agree with and other executive order provisions that I can agree with, and I support the Trump administration’s efforts to lift the ban at the World Bank in terms of supporting nuclear power plants. But some of the provisions in this NRC executive order I think are unfortunate: this direction for NRC to work with the DOGE team and OMB to undertake a review and wholesale revision of regulation and guidance issue proposed rulemaking in nine months and final rules and guidances within 18 months. Just to state the obvious, the review and replacement of NRC regulations should not be rushed, particularly if the staff is cut and these deadlines don’t recognize that many of the advanced reactors present novel safety issues, which will require careful analysis. There’s this 18-month timeline for what I read as a combined license combined construction operation license under part 52. Eighteen months with no allowance for first of a kind deployment.

And I do not think we should be rushing first of a kind reviews. I think it’s very reasonable to expect, and I think it will happen. We saw it with the Kairos Hermes, Hermes 2 sequence, that follow-on licenses after the NRC staff have reviewed a reactor design do go faster the second time along, but that’s worrisome to me. And I think reducing the personnel and functions of the advisory committee on reactor safeguards at a time when we’re licensing reactor types that have never been operated anywhere in the world. This is the body that provides independent reviews of the staff safety evaluations. And then just one more, I don’t like this back door to NRC licensing where if a reactor has been licensed by DOD or DOE, they get a kind of pass. I think the NRC is the only regulator that should decide if a design is suitable for commercial deployment and there shouldn’t be a kind of end around for companies to escape through scrutiny by the NRC.

Jason Bordoff: Alright, we’re going to need a part two where we just do a super deep dive on NRC reform. I think it’s interesting and really important. I wanted to just come to the third topic we talked about, which is exports. And if we’re trying to grow nuclear capacity investment production in the US, why is it important that the government support the export of nuclear technology to other countries? Ashley, maybe you could go first and then Matt.

Ashley Finan: Sure. Well, the other countries need it. Other countries are going to purchase nuclear energy and we want to be the supplier of choice. And we discussed the geopolitical reasons for that earlier. That’s one reason. Another reason is that it will help us achieve scale. We can only build so many projects at the same time in the US but with another workforce and another country’s commitment and resources, you can build more reactors. So it helps us build scale. We want to address climate and energy security across the world. The United States interests are global and the importance of global energy security and global environmental health are important to the United States. So there are a lot of reasons to be focused on exports as part of this. And I think that the executive orders had an appropriately big focus on exporting nuclear energy and described a number of different approaches to that. And I think that the World Bank financing opportunity that Matt mentioned is an important one. Also, some of our domestic efforts to finance exports can be more open and funded for nuclear. So a lot of opportunity space there and it’s very important.

Jason Bordoff: Matt, your thoughts is why is exporting technology important if we need to build it here?

Matt Bowen: Yeah, and I do want to add, that’s another part of the Trump executive orders that I do support and think is good. They have a section in the National Security Executive order talking about strategic planning to increase our international competitiveness. And as Ashley mentioned, I mean for these reactor companies in the United States, a substantial part, if not the majority of their business case is outside the United States. And there are other countries that nuclear energy looks more promising for a variety of reasons, whether this imperative to increase energy security, get off of fossil fuels for either that reason or for climate commitments, and they may not have the sort of renewable energy resources that certainly parts of the United States have. And I think that is part of what makes things go for these companies in both the US market and the international market. And I do agree with this question for new countries that are going to have civil nuclear energy programs, new civil nuclear energy programs, do we want to be there spreading our safety culture, our security practices, our non-proliferation norms? Or the Russians or the Chinese? I think on balance clearly the answer for the US is this is us. So that is another rationale I think that has figured into this bipartisan consensus on nuclear energy the last few years.

Jason Bordoff: We only have a minute left. And so this is sort of unfair to do because this is an important question, but I think a lot of people listening to this may think, alright, this all sounds great, but isn’t there a huge problem with nuclear waste? And I was wondering if you could just each briefly, sort of less than a minute, sort of give your take on how one should think about that challenge, maybe Ashley and then Matt.

Ashley Finan: Sure. I mean, nuclear waste is an important challenge for nuclear energy. All energy sources have these challenges with externalities and waste. I think that we know that it’s technically solvable and that other countries, including Finland and others are managing the nuclear waste issue, so that we can, and we must, do exactly that. We must figure out how the United States wants to handle its spent nuclear fuel and we must take steps to move forward. Matt, thanks.

Matt Bowen: Yeah, I try to be hopeful. Secretary Chris Wright has said he’s not going to push Yucca Mountain. So is Ted Garrish the nominee for the Office of Nuclear Energy. Garrish talked about collaborative siting working with the state on nuclear waste management facilities. So maybe we’re in a new moment. The first Trump administration had reinstated the Yucca Mountain budget request until the final year when they canceled it. There was an interesting op-ed earlier this year from Rick Perry, the first secretary of Energy in the Trump administration talking about during his tenure, it became clear to him that to move tons of spent nuclear fuel, it was going to require the practical consent of a state. That may have been slightly different words than the Obama era consent-based siting, call it whatever you want. It’s all the same thing. You need a local community that’s in support of the project. You need a state that’s either supportive or at least neutral on the topic, willing to let the local community move forward. I would love to see Congress engage on this issue. Would love to see Secretary Wright engage Congress and industry on this topic. We haven’t had appropriations to move Yucca Mountain forward in 15 years. We know what we need to do. If we can give up on “jam it down Nevada’s throat” then great, let’s get to work.

Jason Bordoff: Matt Bowen. Ashley Finan. Thanks so much for making time to be with us and explaining these really complicated issues. Thanks for being such fantastic colleagues here at the Center on Global Energy Policy and for teaching me so much every day and in the course of writing this Foreign Policy column together. I really learned a lot and appreciated working with you on it. So thanks for explaining all these issues to our listeners and making time to be with us today.

Matt Bowen: Thank you, Jason.

Jason Bordoff: Thank you again. Ashley Finan and Matt Bowen. And thanks to all of you for listening to this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. The show is hosted by me, Jason Bordoff and by Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Caroline Pitman and Kyu Lee, Sean Marquand engineered the show. For more information about the podcast or the Center on Global Energy policy, please visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media @ColumbiaUEnergy. And please, if you feel inclined, give us a rating on Apple Podcast. It really helps us out. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next week.

Climate imperatives, national security, and the need for reliable, carbon-free, dispatchable power to meet rising electricity demand are all contributing to a resurgence in nuclear energy. The United States is taking a leading role in this industry’s growth. Tech companies are signing major deals for nuclear energy to meet their growing energy needs. And President Trump recently signed four executive orders aimed at dramatically increasing nuclear power generation — an issue with rare bipartisan support.

But significant challenges remain. Cost overruns and delays, as seen with the troubled Vogtle project in Georgia, are hampering power plant construction in the US. Meanwhile, China and Russia are dominating global nuclear construction and fuel, raising questions about American competitiveness and national security.

So can the United States become a leader in nuclear energy deployment, without sacrificing safety? What role will new technologies and policy play in changing the trajectory? And what part should the US government play in financing, regulating, and promoting nuclear energy both domestically and internationally?

This week, Jason Bordoff speaks with Ashley Finan and Matt Bowen about the drivers behind this nuclear resurgence and why, as they argue in a recent Foreign Policy article, it is vital to meet rising electricity demand.

Ashley recently joined the Center on Global Energy Policy as a global fellow after serving in senior leadership roles at Idaho National Laboratory, where she worked on nuclear energy and national security issues. Matt is a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, where he focuses on nuclear energy policy, economics, and regulation.

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