100 Gigawatts to 400: Why I’m All In on Trump’s Nuclear Bet

I’ll admit it up front: I’m a true believer in nuclear power. So take this with whatever grain of salt you want. But the case is strong enough that you don’t have to take my word for it.

Here’s my whole case in one sentence. You can’t reindustrialize a country on wishful thinking and rolling blackouts. Manufacturing needs power. Data centers need power. Shipyards and steel mills need a ton of power. And if you want that power to be reliable, affordable and made right here at home, nuclear is the best answer we’ve got.

We stopped building, and we paid for it

This is the part that still blows my mind. According to the Department of Energy (opens in a new tab), the United States is the number one producer of nuclear energy in the world, and yet just three of our commercial reactors were completed in the 21st century. Three. We invented this stuff. The Navy had the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus (opens in a new tab), commissioned back in 1954. And then we just kind of… stopped.

It gets worse on fuel. The White House (opens in a new tab) says domestic sources supply only about 5% of the fuel used in U.S. reactors. That’s a national security problem hiding in plain sight.

What President Trump actually did

On May 23, 2025, President Trump signed four executive orders on nuclear energy. I’ve read the summaries, and I want you to see the scale of what he’s asking for. Per the DOE, the goal is to take American nuclear capacity from around 100 gigawatts today to 400 gigawatts by 2050. The orders push for 5 gigawatts of power uprates at existing plants, and for 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.

They also tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to set a deadline of 18 months to decide on new construction and operating licenses. If you’ve ever watched a good project die in paperwork, you know how big that is. Time is money, and in nuclear, time was the thing killing every project.

There’s more. The orders direct the Pentagon to put a reactor at a domestic military base, push to expand uranium conversion and enrichment here at home, and grow the nuclear workforce through apprenticeships and the national labs. That last part matters to me. These are great jobs. The kind you can raise a family on.

Why this is a free-market win

People sometimes assume “government nuclear program” means some big socialist scheme. It doesn’t. What the President is mostly doing is getting the government out of the way: faster licensing, fewer pointless delays, and a clear signal that Washington wants this built. The private builders and investors take it from there. That’s how it should work.

And from everything I read, the builders are ready. New reactor designs are drawing talent and private capital in a way this industry hasn’t seen in a generation.

The bottom line

Will every target be hit on time? I don’t know, and I won’t pretend to. Big projects slip. But I know which way the wind is blowing, and for the first time in decades it’s blowing toward building. A country that can split the atom and put that power to work for its own families is a country that’s going to win the century.

So yeah. I’m a nuclear guy. And I think by 2030 a lot more of you will be too.

Sources

• Department of Energy, 9 key takeaways from the President’s nuclear executive orders (opens in a new tab)
• White House fact sheet: reinvigorating the nuclear industrial base (May 23, 2025) (opens in a new tab)
• Naval History and Heritage Command, USS Nautilus (opens in a new tab)