Wong reported in early December 2024 that the U.S. [population and industry] are softening towards the idea of building a new fleet of nuclear reactors, large and small. Spring 2024 kicked off the best stretch for America’s nuclear industry in decades. It started in April, when, for the first time since 1990, the United States added nuclear capacity for the second year in a row. In June, Congress passed a major law to accelerate nuclear-energy development.
Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty
The Republican Party’s national platform trumpeted nuclear power, as did Kamala Harris in describing her economic agenda; this fall, three of the world’s largest companies—Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—announced substantial investments in nuclear-energy facilities. In November, the U.S. issued official goals to massively expand its nuclear capacity. “We have ambitious targets for the next 10 years,” Michael Goff, the acting assistant secretary of the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told me, as well as for the decade after. The DOE aims to add roughly 60 times more nuclear power in a quarter century than the country built in the previous one.
As recently as 15 years ago, or perhaps even five, imagining all of this would have been a stretch. For decades, the industry was stagnant and vehemently opposed by so-called environmentalists. But nuclear energy—a potential source of abundant, reliable, emissions-free electricity—[with a history safety better than all other heavy industries], is a powerful tool to fight climate change, and now the federal government, major companies, and a growing number of climate advocates are supporting a series of nuclear-energy projects that could transform America’s grid.
This is at least the country’s third attempt to do so—the original push to install a nationwide fleet of reactors ground to a spectacular halt in the 1980s, and a so-called nuclear “renaissance” in the late 2000s, which included dozens of proposed reactors, also failed to materialize. This round, “the industry itself has really got to deliver,” Goff said. The next few years [at least by the end of the decade] might be the country’s last chance to get nuclear right.
[Now, with new technology, AI, and both large and small (SMRs) as nuclear power plants will continue the "the energy transition," beyond coal, beyond wind and solar, to true nuclear power. After maybe 25 years, even fussion nuclear power may complete the transition. Follow the development of SMRs and nuclear power in general via the I2M Web Portal].
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