Red, white and glowing blue: Trump’s push for new reactors reaches the finish line
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Red, white and glowing blue: Trump’s push for new reactors reaches the finish line
A little over a year ago, President Trump set an ambitious goal: He wanted to see American companies build at least three new experimental nuclear reactors by July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Shortly after Trump signed an executive order enshrining his goal, the Department of Energy launched its Reactor Pilot Program. The program is designed to help companies build and run test reactors quickly, in part by radically cutting back on the regulations required for such reactors.
Details
That program has sparked a nuclear race, and with less than a week to go, two companies have already reached the goal of switching on their reactor (“going critical” in nuclear-speak).
On June 4, Antares Nuclear announced it had gone critical, and Valar Atomics said it went critical on June 18 and is now producing tens of kilowatts of heat from its new reactor core, which is operating out of a tentlike structure in the Utah desert.
Other companies are getting close to making the deadline, and all this happened in less than the span of a year.
Analysis
“We haven’t done anything this fast, basically ever,” said Nick Touran, chief nuclear officer at Ocean Atomics, which seeks to put nuclear power onto civilian ships. His company isn’t part of this program, but he has been tracking it closely.
He says this pilot program could jump-start America’s nuclear industry.
“I’m just excited that we’re now actually building these little reactors and trying it out and we’re going to look at what the economic story is and find out if there’s a market,” he said. “It’s going to be so much better than sitting there talking about it like we did for the last 40 years.”
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