The Trump administration says it wants a ‘nuclear renaissance.’ These actions suggest otherwise. todayheadline

In March, in a thunderous op-ed in Power Magazine, a trade publication covering the electricity industry, Republican senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee called for President Donald Trump to make some major institutional changes in the Tennessee Valley Authority, America’s biggest public utility.  

A couple months earlier, TVA’s CEO Jeff Lyash had announced his retirement. When the board of directors, whose seats are appointed by the president, chose Lyash’s successor, they selected someone from among the utilities current staff — Don Moul, who had been the executive vice president and chief operating officer since 2021. Blackburn and Hagerty expressed concern over the utility’s direction and leadership, saying a new direction was needed if it was to move quickly on building nuclear technology and lead “America’s Nuclear Renaissance.”

“With the right courageous leadership, TVA could lead the way in our nation’s nuclear energy revival, empower us to dominate the 21st century’s global technology competition, and cement President Trump’s legacy as ‘America’s Nuclear President,’” the senators wrote. 

“As it stands now,” the senators continued, “TVA and its leadership can’t carry the weight of this moment.”

Blackburn and Hagerty called for Moul’s replacement, intimated a need for reframing the focus of the board, and demanded a stronger focus on development of small modular nuclear reactors, which are purported to be safer, easier to build, and cheaper to run than larger nuclear plants, though only China and Russia have successfully built SMRs to date.

“If we, as a nation, fail to meet this moment,” they wrote, “American leadership in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, and the ability to win conventional wars will be put at risk. If we choose to lead, a Golden Age lies ahead.”

About a week after the op-ed was published, President Trump fired two members of the board — including the chair. It appeared as though the senators were getting what they wanted. But the move may end up backfiring.

Under its prior leadership, the TVA was already moving toward an expansion of nuclear power. During the Biden administration, which touted nuclear as a key ingredient of its decarbonization plans, the TVA marketed itself as a clean energy leader, pointing to its massive fleet of hydroelectric dams and nuclear plants. Lyash was a proponent of nuclear power. He sat on the board of the Nuclear Energy Institute and oversaw plans to build a new small modular reactor in TVA territory. 

Now, though, according to Simon Mahan, the executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, the recent changes could slow down any movement toward new nuclear plants rather than, as Blackburn and Hagerty hope, speed it up. The TVA’s board is operating without the quorum it needs to make major decisions, including electing a new board chairperson and approving new energy projects — like, for instance, a nuclear plant. 

“There are some real concerns that TVA’s plan is not matching up with their implementation, and it will be even harder for that to be synced up without a full functioning board,” Mahan said.

Some observers say that such concerns have to do with an inability to learn from TVA’s own history. 

“Tennessee has a long and troubled history when it comes to nuclear energy,” said Stephen Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which opposes nuclear energy, preferring renewables as a cheaper and more quickly deployable option. 

In the 1960s, about 30 years after the TVA was founded, it planned to build 17 nuclear power plants. Compared to the private utilities, the TVA seemed like a natural fit for the development of nuclear energy: It was easier for a public utility to take on the risk of the long, expensive construction periods without the need for immediate profit. But during the oil crisis of the 1970s and after the Three Mile Island disaster, the political support for nuclear power dissipated. Only seven of the plants that TVA planned for were completed — three of which are active today. The utility is still paying off billions in debt from the partially completed construction of reactors that simply never came online.

Nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build, they are risky investments for the private sector, and they require huge trained workforces and the coordination of many players with different interests, including reactor designers, construction firms, utility companies, regulators, and customers. For nuclear advocates, it’s an open question whether the Trump administration’s energy officials recognize the scale of the state-led effort that would be required to achieve their purported ambition for a nuclear revival — so far, there are few indications that they do. Aside from the personnel troubles at the TVA, firings at the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office and President Trump’s newly announced tariffs could also hobble an expansion of nuclear plants in Tennessee and throughout the country.

Despite the growing bipartisan political consensus in favor of nuclear energy, only two new U.S. plants have been built in the last three decades — two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, which were completed last year, after long delays and at a cost so enormous they contributed to the bankruptcy of their designer. A $9 billion project in South Carolina to build a pair of the same reactors was abandoned in 2017 before its completion. Multiple project executives were convicted of fraud and sent to prison.

The completion of the Vogtle expansion project cemented a belief among some nuclear advocates that the primary obstacle to a nuclear build-out was perhaps no longer the environmental regulations many had long seen as the main roadblock, but rather a problem of the decline of American industrial capacity. Now that Vogtle is completed, though, some in the nuclear industry hope that the ingredients are in place for that project’s knowledge and workforce to kick-start similar projects in other states. 

The costs, however, may still just be too high. “I see a lot of people who want to somehow find a way to get around the cost problem,” said John Parsons, an economist at MIT who studies investment in energy markets. But he suggested that pinning hopes for a nuclear revival on individual states’ willingness to shoulder the burden and risks of paying for another reactor ignores the necessity of state-driven funding and coordination of the kind that TVA could be particularly well positioned to administer — if it’s returned to its roots as a national incubator for energy innovation.

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks told Grist that the agency’s plans for a new small modular reactor are moving forward. The utility plans to apply for additional Department of Energy funding for the project, supplemented with private funding. 

Among the main vehicles that the Biden administration used to defray costs for nuclear investment — notably including billions in loan guarantees for the new reactors at Plant Vogtle — was the Loan Programs Office, or LPO; under Trump, staffing at that office is being decimated. The news outlet Heatmap reported that about half of the LPO’s staff have requested to take a buyout in anticipation of future layoffs orchestrated by Elon Musk’s initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency.

Added to the high costs of nuclear development are the economic uncertainties caused by President Trump’s tariffs, which are likely not only to drive up costs for imported materials like steel, but also to dissuade private-sector investment. 

“We might be moving into an environment where people are shy about investing in major infrastructure projects because there’s so much uncertainty now about what the inputs are going to be for such a project,” said Emmet Penney, an energy researcher at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning think tank. 

“In that case, the fact that the LPO can get long-term, low-interest loans for these projects is going to be vital to getting people comfortable getting to the table and agreeing to build these projects,” Penney continued. “If there isn’t that guarantee, we could see even private capital dry up for both traditional nuclear and for small modular reactors.”

According to Brooks, the TVA spokesperson, President Trump’s tariffs will not have much of an effect on the utility’s current operations. The majority of TVA’s economic activity, Brooks said, “is domestic — most based within the Tennessee Valley.” He preferred not to speculate on the tariff situation a decade from now, when the first of TVA’s new SMRs is set to be complete. 

But developing nuclear power plants does tend to require an international supply chain. Even if the TVA is all set for now, much of the nuclear supply chain is deeply tied in with international markets. A 2022 DOE report shows connections between the U.S. nuclear industry and manufacturers in countries like Japan, China, France, and Germany. There is also a continual need for critical minerals, most of which are mined outside the United States — China once again being among the dominant suppliers. Uranium and a large number of critical minerals may be exempted from Trump’s tariffs currently, but other materials, such as basic construction components like steel, are not. 

State Representative Aftyn Behn, a Democrat, supports diversifying the utility’s energy portfolio, but, looking toward the future, is more concerned about transparency and accountability.

“There’s some bipartisan interest in ‘advanced nuclear,’” Behn told Grist. But, she continued, “the Republican supermajority isn’t interested in a good-faith energy debate. They’re interested in handing TVA over to big utilities and fossil fuel donors, locking us into expensive, inflexible systems with no public oversight.”