Reprinted from the Katusa’s Investment Insights newsletter
Another day, another government agency gets blown to smithereens. This time it’s the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that’s on the chopping block.
Because within weeks, the White House is expected to announce a new set of executive orders that will effectively render the NRC defunct. The orders are expected to enable the Department of Energy and Department of Defense to skip NRC rules and fast-track new nuclear plants.
This is the most important news for the U.S. nuclear industry in the past 50 years. Because for at least that long, the NRC has been strangling the industry alive. In fact, it’s made it all but impossible for new nuclear to be developed in the U.S.
For example, the original NRC licensing scheme was 50 pages long. The new version that the NRC has been simplifying for five years is 1,100 pages. The last reactor design to be approved by the NRC cost $500 million and required a 12,000-page application. The full application had about two million pages of supporting documentation. That’s a 650-foot stack of paper, taller than the Washington Monument.
Because the NRC still uses 1970s-era standards and reviews, it has approved only one new reactor project, in 2012 at the Vogtle plant in Georgia, since 1978. (The Three Mile Island accident happened in March 1079.)
According to former NRC Commissioner Jeffrey Merrifield, the NRC doesn’t know “when to stop” adding new regulations. And that it is “one of the primary obstacles impeding” advanced nuclear reactor development. So much so, that Last Energy is suing the NRC for “unlawfully impeding progress in the industry.”
Washington is fed up. And has finally decided to do something about it.
Nuclear becomes a bipartisan issue
Congress has been strongly pursuing nuclear growth for a decade. In fact, for the first time since Richard Nixon was president, both Democrats and Republicans have nuclear energy development in their platform
- Democrats see it as necessary for achieving net zero and fighting climate change.
- Republicans see it to establish total energy security and create new jobs.
Even the past five presidents have been advocates, with the amount requested for nuclear development steadily rising since 2000.
There are three crucial reasons both parties want to eliminate any roadblock to nuclear development:
- Nuclear exports: The U.S. could regain its primacy in nuclear exports, reducing the trade deficit. By 2050, the market is expected to be $1.9 trillion and China and Russia have dibs on 2/3 of that market.
- National security: Nuclear power is more important for national security than AI or semiconductors. Without nuclear power, there is no supply chain for nuclear weapons.
- Energy security: Independent, self-sustainable energy is the only answer, and nuclear enables that.
That’s why there has been a steady drumbeat of large pro-nuclear legislation, regardless of administration or control of Congress. Several of the laws above were specifically designed to force the NRC to fix its process. In seven years, the NRC made little to no progress. Meanwhile, Canada’s CNSC and the UK’s ONR have already updated their licensing strategies.
Finally, in 2024, Congress passed the Advance Act to drag the NRC into the 21st century and turn it from a barrier into an enabler of new nuclear plants. The Act directed the NRC to consider ways to simplify and shorten the review process for advanced reactors, speeding up the development of new nuclear power plants.
It still isn’t working.
Project 2025, the current administration’s public playbook, outlines exactly what to do in this circumstance: p. 365: “Ensure that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission facilitates rather than hampers private-sector nuclear energy innovation and deployment.”
Each bill took a step, but the coming executive orders will be the biggest shift yet.
2 agencies embracing nuclear
Instead of regulation, it’s time for R&D. And for support to be redirected to two agencies that are immensely well-funded and inarguably pro-nuclear. Like I said, this is big.
Because the Department of Energy is quite pro-nuclear. In April 2022, it implemented a $6 billion Civil Nuclear Credit Program to prevent reactors from shutting down prematurely. It’s giving Palisades $1.5 billion to be the first recommissioned nuclear facility in U.S. history. And it’s contributing billions of dollars to the development of new reactor types.
It has even called for a tripling of the U.S. nuclear fleet:
“We need two hundred [more nuclear reactors] by 2050.” Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm
And proclaimed a return to exporting technology:
“The U.S. Government will… recover our position as the world leader in exporting best-in-class nuclear energy technology.” United States Department of Energy
The current Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, left the board of a nuclear startup in order to assume his current position.
The coming executive orders will marry the will of the Department of Energy with the money and technology from the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense has extraordinary energy needs and happens to already own dozens of mobile nuclear reactors. It can also absorb risks in ways that the private sector cannot.
And it has lots of funding. A single year of the DoD budget, if redirected, could fund reactors covering roughly 85 % of U.S. electricity demand. Oh, and the cost of nuclear per MWh would drop by about 60 percent.
The White House wants an advanced reactor on-grid within three years. Doubters say ‘never.’ History says ‘likely.’ The U.S. government already has contracts with three companies to get advanced reactors running by 2029. Expect DoD and DoE to deploy serious capital to accelerate nuclear, a federal push on the scale of the original Manhattan Project.
As a new trillion-dollar market opens up…
There are plenty of ways to profit from it, including fuel, infrastructure, and investing in nuclear itself.
The new Executive Orders are expected to drop within weeks, which means there’s limited time to play this. My subscribers and I have invested in and profited from several energy opportunities in nuclear and uranium. And there’s a lot more to come.
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