Deep Dive: America's Nuclear Renaissance
How Trump and Big Tech broke Democrats’ 50-year war on nuclear power, and what that means for America's future.
by Rod D. Martin
January 15, 2026
For half a century, the American Left has done its best to cancel the future.
We were promised nuclear-powered everything. Clean electricity too cheap to meter. Cities in the desert. Ocean liners and maybe even airplanes running on atoms. Nuclear rockets cutting the trip to Mars to months instead of years.
Instead, Democrats gave us rolling blackouts, German-style “energy transitions,” and a never-ending string of hysterical predictions that never came true and for which no one apologized (even if they remembered them at all).
This wasn’t an accident. It was policy. It was bureaucracy. And above all it was power: the Left discovered that it could use fear to stampede the herd. And if you use that to control what and how much energy people may use, you can control everything they do.
But as Barack Obama told us, elections have consequences. For the first time since Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace, the United States is on the verge of a genuine nuclear renaissance. Donald Trump has torn a hole in the regulatory wall that strangled nuclear for fifty years. Big Tech and AI are suddenly demanding more electricity than the entire U.S. grid can presently provide. And the world is awakening to the fact that our enemies, particularly China, are sprinting ahead on the very technology our ruling class told us to fear.
It matters. Nuclear doesn’t just keep the lights on. It unlocks missile defense, space settlement, desalination, re-industrialization — the entire future my generation was told could never be.
How the Left’s 50-Year War on Nuclear Froze American Progress
From 1954 to 1974, the old Atomic Energy Commission licensed 133 civilian reactors. That was America doing what America does: scaling an epochal technology in record time.
Then the Democrats passed the Energy Reorganization Act, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was born.
In the half century since the NRC took over, it has approved exactly two new reactors that actually made it to operational status. Not 200. Not 133. Two.
It typical Deep State fashion, the NRC’s bureaucrats weaponized their political biases. They used fear to create demands for “safety”, and then turned “safety” into a weapon against the very thing they were supposedly regulating.
You can see it in the rules. Take the infamous Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model and its bastard child, ALARA — “As Low As Reasonably Achievable.” In English, LNT says any amount of radiation is harmful; ALARA says regulators must drive that risk as close to zero as possible, no matter what that costs.
Never mind that background radiation varies wildly around the planet with no corresponding cancer spike. Never mind that you get more radiation on a flight from New York to L.A. — or from eating a banana, or from shopping in New York’s Grand Central Station — than from living next to a nuclear plant for a year. Once LNT and ALARA hardened into doctrine, the NRC effectively gave itself a “zero bananas allowed” mandate.
The results were as predictable as they were intentional:
Licensing timelines stretched from a few years to a decade or more.
Applicants were billed by the hour to navigate a constantly shifting rulebook.
Multi-billion-dollar projects were killed by forced last-minute design changes, litigation, or both.
Costly workers and equipment were forced to stand idle while the NRC imposed reviews and changes, again and again, mid-construction.
Meanwhile, environmental NGOs learned there was big money in opposing energy. Groups that present themselves as “defenders of nature” in fact became the shock troops of an anti-energy, anti-industrial crusade, funded in no small part by America’s enemies but also by grants from the Democrat-run bureaucracy.
Just the top ten U.S. “green” NGOs alone take in roughly $1.8 billion a year. Their executives routinely make north of half a million dollars annually. That money doesn’t come from planting trees. It comes from stopping pipelines, refineries, gas stoves – and especially nuclear plants. And until the fracking boom — which the left also opposed — it came at the cost of intractable dependency on foreign energy.
Tie that to an Enemedia complex that sensationalizes Three Mile Island (where no one died), Chernobyl (a Soviet design no Western company would have ever built), and Fukushima (where the tsunami, not radiation, killed people), and you get fifty years of cultivated radiophobia.
So America, the country that invented practical nuclear power, froze. We kept the old plants — which allies like Germany did not — but we stopped building. We let our domestic uranium mining and enrichment industries wither and became deliberately dependent on Russia (as we did in the Obama years for rocket engines and manned space flight). We lectured the world about “climate change” while blocking the one technology that can actually deliver gigawatts of carbon-free baseload power.
But unlike the West, our enemies weren’t stupid.
China now gets nearly 90% of its energy from hydrocarbons and uses more coal than the rest of the world combined. But the biggest growth story has been natural gas and nuclear. Beijing has roughly thirty gigawatts of nuclear capacity just under construction and is on track to be the world’s largest nuclear operator in less than five years.
For fifty years, America chose to stagnate. Then Trump walked in.
Trump’s Nuclear Jailbreak
In May, President Trump signed four executive orders that, taken together, are the most pro-nuclear policy shift since Eisenhower told the world in 1953 that peaceful atomic power was “no dream of the future.”
They do three big things.
