Do more with less?
AMember de Trump administration wants to accelerate nuclear energy through executive orders, in practice it has not yet assigned new financing, said Matt Bowen, an expert in the field of nuclear energy, waste and non -proliferation at the center of Columbia University for worldwide energy policy. In fact, the original budget of the White House proposed to reduce $ 4.7 billion of the Ministry of Energy, including $ 408 million of the office of nuclear energy assigned for nuclear research in the tax year of 2026.
“The administration suggested the cutbacks in the office of nuclear energy and do wider, and doge pushes the staff out,” Bowen said. “How do you do more with fewer staff, less money.”
The Trump administration blames the stagnation of the nuclear sector in the NRC, which supervises license and recertification processes that cost the industry every year millions of dollars in compliance. In his executive orders, Trump called for a major reorganization of the NRC. Some of the proposed changes, such as streamlining the approval process (which can take years for new factories), can be welcomed because “long they were very, very, very slow,” said Charles Forsberg, a nuclear chemical engineer at MIT. But there are concerns that the executive orders can do more than cutting the bureaucracy.
“Every word in those orders is worrying, because the thrust of those orders is to essentially remove the nuclear regulatory committee of its independence of the executive power, essentially the original goal,” Lyman said.
Some experts fear that NRC employees with these new limitations will have less time and less resources to do their work, which can influence the safety of power plants in the future. Bowen said: “This idea that the problem for nuclear energy is regulation, and so we only have to deregulate, is both wrong and really problematic.”
The following decades will learn whether nuclear, in particular SMRs, can overcome economic and technical challenges to safely contribute to the efforts of low -carbon. Some, like Hin, are optimistic. “I think we're going to accelerate,” he said. “We can certainly achieve a dramatic implementation if we bring our mentality to it.”
But making nuclear financially competitive will assume serious dedication from the government and the dozens of companies, still skeptical with many, said Shirvan. “I am completely, I would say, on a pessimistic scale when it comes to the future of nuclear energy in the US.”
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.
