by Amanda Head
Increasing energy output, in all its forms, has been a central theme of Donald Trump’s presidency. His second term might bring about the biggest leaps in production and efficiency yet.
President Trump's bet the United States could squeeze far more power out of the nuclear plants the country already has got a $5 billion boost this week – enough to light more than 930,000 homes without breaking ground on a single new reactor.
"The Energy Department is accelerating President Trump's American nuclear renaissance and unlocking the full potential of our nation's nuclear fleet," Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in announcing the deal.
He called uprates "yet another example of the commonsense energy addition policies the Trump Administration is embracing."
The conditional loan from the Energy Department's Office of Energy Dominance Financing will fund uprates and modernization at eight Constellation Energy plants in Illinois, Maryland and Pennsylvania, adding nearly 1.1 gigawatts to the grid and supporting more than 10,000 project jobs.
Wright made the announcement Tuesday at Constellation's Byron Generating Station in Illinois.
The deal advances Trump's May 2025 executive order, Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base, which set a goal of 5 gigawatts of new output from existing reactors. The department says 94% of that target has now been identified through its UPRISE program. It follows a $4.2 billion commitment to Vistra and a $1 billion loan to restart Pennsylvania's Crane Clean Energy Center, formerly Three Mile Island Unit 1. In total, the administration has conditionally approved nearly $30 billion for the nuclear sector.
The loan is not final. Constellation must still meet technical, legal, environmental and financial conditions before money flows.
From four light bulbs to a fifth of the grid
America's nuclear age began modestly. On Dec. 20, 1951, an Idaho test reactor called EBR-I lit four light bulbs, the first usable electricity made from the atom.
Two years later, President Dwight Eisenhower took his "Atoms for Peace" plan to the United Nations. That vision produced the Shippingport Atomic Power Station on the Ohio River outside of Pittsburgh, which Eisenhower opened in 1958 as the nation's first commercial nuclear plant.
The industry boomed from there. Most of today's U.S. nuclear capacity was built between 1967 and 1990, and the number of operating reactors peaked at 112 before closures took their toll. Today, 94 reactors supply about 19% of the country's electricity, more nuclear power than any other nation produces.
Illinois, home to six of the eight plants in the Constellation deal, leads the country with 11 reactors. The average American reactor is now about 44 years old, which is why the administration sees modernizing the existing fleet as its fastest path to more power.
How nuclear safety grew up
For two decades, the Atomic Energy Commission both promoted and policed nuclear power. Congress split those jobs in the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, abolishing the AEC and creating an independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The defining test came on March 28, 1979, when Three Mile Island Unit 2 partially melted down. The NRC calls it the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear history, though its small releases had no detectable health effects. Still, the aftermath reshaped oversight: Every plant now has at least two NRC resident inspectors on site, and the industry formed its own watchdog, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations.
Today the pendulum is swinging toward speed. Trump's May 2025 order reforming the NRC sets an 18-month deadline to decide on new reactors and 12 months for existing ones. It directs the agency to weigh nuclear power's economic and security benefits alongside safety, the biggest shift in regulatory philosophy since 1979.
Big Tech comes calling
The new money arrives as artificial intelligence drives the steepest increase in power demand in a generation, and tech giants want electricity that runs around the clock.
Constellation's 20-year agreements with Google and Amazon already back more than $7 billion in plant upgrades. The Google deal alone supports $4.3 billion to add 890 megawatts across 11 reactors. Federal financing could lower Constellation's borrowing costs and let it build at greater scale, the company said.
Wright, speaking from the Byron plant, said Trump's push to add power to the grid has revived the case for nuclear. For an industry that spent decades closing plants, that is a remarkable turn: The reactors once written off as relics are now the most sought-after power on the grid.
Amanda Head is White House Correspondent for Just the News. You can follow her here.
Source: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/trump-effectuates-nuclear-renaissance-move-open-plants-iowa-michigan-and
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