President Trump is reviving U.S. nuclear energy development. At the recent AI-energy summit in Pittsburgh, President Trump announced that Westinghouse would build 10 new reactors across the country. But not if anti-nuclear activists can help it.
Take Edwin Lyman, for example, a career anti-nuclear activist and longtime Director of Nuclear Safety at the far-left Union of Concerned Scientists. Lyman has spent decades opposing nuclear development from within every government-adjacent perch available.
It was therefore not unexpected that a Trump directive to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve reactors tested by the Departments of Energy and Defense would prompt Lyman to declare his “worst fears are being realized.”
And what are those fears, exactly? That the NRC might stop functioning as an institutional blockade for every new nuclear project in America and start doing its actual job.
President Trump’s recent executive orders are finally dismantling the bureaucratic machinery that throttled U.S. nuclear development for a generation. The only people alarmed by these advancements are those who built careers defending the ingrained dysfunction.
The directives lay out an aggressive plan to speed up nuclear reactor licensing and testing, increase domestic uranium enrichment, reopen shuttered plants, and prioritize deployment of next-generation reactors at military bases, national labs, and AI data centers. The target is 300 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity by 2050. Achieving this would allow the U.S. to finally reindustrialize, strengthen the electric grid, and outcompete China.
That vision terrifies Lyman because it cuts directly against the agenda he’s worked to preserve. For years, he’s treated the NRC as a kind of stronghold for his brand of nuclear pessimism – one that could be counted on to slow-walk innovation with endless risk analyses and procedural delays.
Lyman and the Union of Concerned Scientists aren’t acting alone. They’re part of a broader activist ecosystem intent on suppressing nuclear energy in favor of unpopular green mandates. Groups like Friends of the Earth, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative oppose every reactor proposal or domestic fuel project that challenges the Left’s green orthodoxy.
Their opposition is not scientific. It’s driven by leftwing dark money behemoths like Arabella Advisors, the Energy Foundation, and the Tides network, which bankroll everything from anti-capitalist environmentalism to gender radicalism and abortion activism.
The Energy Foundation in particular has well-documented ties to the Chinese Communist Party and has openly supported shutting down U.S. fossil and nuclear plants in favor of Chinese-controlled “green” tech.
Lyman himself has called Trump’s nuclear orders “crude and possibly illegal,” mocked officials at the Department of Energy as “idiots” for expanding uranium enrichment, and dismissed advanced reactors as “wishful thinking.”
He routinely accuses the nuclear industry of “bend[ing] the truth,” while ignoring that the Union of Concerned Scientists, where he’s worked since 2003, receives major funding from NEO Philanthropy, a group described as “one of the left’s best kept ‘dark money’ secrets.” The group has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to partisan firms like M&R Strategic Services, whose co-founder helped launch NEO.
This is the activist class the NRC has long catered to at the expense of American energy security. Fortunately, their influence is finally collapsing.
Nuclear is the only zero-emission energy source capable of delivering the baseload power needed to fuel an AI economy, electrify transportation, stabilize the grid, and meet modern industrial demand. The more renewables are deployed, the more their intermittency problem becomes clear. The countries that understand this – China, Russia, France, Japan, Canada, and South Korea – are building accordingly.
France, in particular, gets about 70% of its electricity from nuclear power. French nuclear plants had the availability and capacity to step in and save the Iberian peninsula’s power grid last April when Spain’s overreliance on variable solar and wind proved near-catastrophic.
About 20 percent of US electricity comes from safe nuclear power. Also little appreciated: the US Navy operates a fleet that includes 83 nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines with 250 reactors that have a combined record of 6,200 reactor-years of operation without any record of nuclear reactor accidents.
While several nuclear power accidents have occurred over the past 70 years, they are usually mischaracterized and hyped by anti-nuclear types. No one was harmed from the small amount of radiation released during the Three Mile Island incident in 1979. The 1986 disaster at Chernobyl was a uniquely Soviet-designed and operated disaster. And at the poorly-located Fukushima plant, there were relatively few radiation injuries from the 2011 disaster caused by a tsunami of unforeseen magnitude. The vast majority of the Fukushima disaster-related injuries were not caused by radiation leaks but by the panicked evacuation of locals.
Despite what Lyman and the climate establishment claim, Trump’s approach isn’t radical. In fact, it mirrors what most of the developed world is already doing. While other nations ramp up reactor deployment and advance innovation, Trump is finally applying the same logic by streamlining regulation, jumpstarting advanced nuclear, and restoring U.S. energy independence.
The only reason that these developments are controversial here is because a well-funded class of professional litigators and political activists have spent years convincing federal agencies to treat this kind of energy innovation as a threat. But now the political tides have turned.
President Trump isn’t interested in the activist Left’s “precautionary principle.” He’s interested in whether the country can generate enough power to sustain modern industry and outpace foreign adversaries. And the American people are better off because of it.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.