Trump touts U.S. nulear energy advancements

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced Friday that four American nuclear energy startups have successfully proven their technologies as part of an Energy Department pilot project that began last year.

At an Oval Office event, the president said the country had exceeded its goal of three cutting-edge reactors starting up safely by the Fourth of July.

“Most believed the goal was impossible, but I’m delighted to say that four companies succeeded in meeting that deadline — four of the greatest in the world at this subject,” the president said at an event where he was joined by the leaders of the companies and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

They are the first new privately funded advanced reactors to be activated in the United States in more than 50 years, according to White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios.

The milestone comes 14 months after Trump signed four executive orders to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050. The orders sped up the approval process for new reactors and set the country’s 250th anniversary as the deadline for advanced reactor projects to achieve so-called criticality.

“In the last 30 or 40 years, the American nuclear industry has been quiescent,” Wright said Friday. “Most of the reactors built around the world have been built by Russia and China, both in their countries and abroad. President Trump said enough of that. America’s going to be back as the leader in the nuclear space.”

Some Democratic lawmakers have criticized Trump’s nuclear energy executive orders for ramping up nuclear power while reducing public input and oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Calif., said in a statement last year that the executive orders were “reckless” and could weaken the NRC’s ability to ensure safety in the communities near nuclear plants.

“At Antares, we look forward to being a resilient energy source for Golden Dome, its high-powered assets in space and eventually undersea autonomy,” said Jordan Bramble, co-founder and chief executive of Antares Nuclear, based in Torrance, California. “This is a strategic technology for our nation, and what we look forward to doing is putting reactors on our military installations before 2028.”

The Golden Dome is Trump's proposed missile defense system to shield the U.S.

Among the four nuclear energy executive orders Trump signed last year was a Defense Department directive to deploy advanced microreactors for military bases.

“This is going to be historic, and people will look back and say this is how the tide turned on nuclear energy and how we unlock cheap and abundant energy,” Deployable Energy CEO Bobby Gallagher said at the event.

According to the World Nuclear Association, 94 nuclear reactors in 28 states supplied about 18% of U.S. electricity in 2024. The Energy Department describes nuclear power’s potential as “substantial,” as electricity demand surges because of artificial intelligence data centers.

While nuclear power proponents hail the technology as providing around-the-clock reliability and zero-emission energy generation with a very small land footprint, detractors say it is expensive and comes with the risk of catastrophic accidents.

The most recent nuclear disaster was at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in 2011, when a massive earthquake and tsunami caused the power plant to suffer a blackout that stopped the reactor from properly cooling and released radioactive materials into the ocean, soil and atmosphere.

“This year we’re going to be raising a billion dollars, moving into a million-square-foot facility, and our target market is data centers,” said Matt Loszak, the co-founder and CEO of Aalo Atomics in Austin, Texas, which was the last of the four data centers to meet the July 4 deadline when it achieved a sustained nuclear fission chain reaction at 12:20 a.m. at Idaho National Laboratory.

“In all my years, I’ve never seen government, private industry and the laboratories working together this effectively,” Idaho National Laboratories Director John Wagner said Friday.