How America Quietly Made Nuclear Power Great Again

By Andrew Follett

Saturday, February 21, 2026

 

Last spring, the Trump administration took action to cut red tape, to create a faster nuclear regulatory approval process. Now, we’re beginning to see the benefits.

 

The Department of Energy (DOE) granted approval last week for Radiant Industries’ Kaleidos nuclear microreactor, which would be the world’s first mass-produced microreactor, making it possible to build and bring nuclear facilities online much more quickly. Microreactors could be constructed in a factory and easily deployed to remote locations to provide reliable power, much like diesel generators today. This approval — the first of its kind under the DOE’s new streamlined Authorization Pathway for Nuclear Facilities, represents a significant milestone in the new era of faster and more accessible nuclear power deployment begun by the White House last year. Next up, the reactor design will be subjected to a full-power test, granted to the Idaho National Laboratory’s Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) facility.

 

This is the first significant payoff of last year’s massive deregulatory efforts by the Trump administration to exclude advanced nuclear power reactors from excessive National Environmental Policy Act requirements. The administration’s reform expedites what had been a traditionally slow U.S. nuclear reactor licensing process, which fell under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). In addition to its extremely long timeline, that process was very expensive to navigate, stifling innovation and new construction for decades.

 

Effectively, the White House’s nuclear regulatory reform leveraged federal oversight at national labs for testing and demonstration of advanced reactors instead of going through the full NRC process, reducing a decade-long bureaucratic review period to just 45 days. This proves advanced nuclear systems can move rapidly from design to testing without the costly traditional NRC licensing burden.

 

“The DOE’s approval of our DARK [DOE Authorization Request for Kaleidos] submission is a major validation of Radiant’s safety-first approach and the strength of our reactor design,” Radiant Chief Nuclear Officer Rita Baranwal said on LinkedIn. “Completing the second phase of the Authorization Pathway positions us to move confidently into startup activities and demonstrates that advanced nuclear systems can progress rapidly while meeting rigorous safety requirements.”

 

Radiant’s microreactors are significant, because they’re much smaller than traditional nuclear power plants and should be transportable in a single shipping container and capable of being installed in roughly a day. The Pentagon recently proved it could airlift a microreactor capable of powering 5,000 homes. The company claims testing will occur this year, such as the now approved full power test, with commercial deployment occurring in 2028. The company has already signed commercial agreements with the U.S. Air Force and corporate partners.

 

This is a key proof-of-concept for regulatory innovation that could help nuclear power escape from heaps of red tape. Limiting environmental impact statements or assessments before a project can be approved will save immense amounts of time and money; compiling an environmental impact statement takes nearly three years on average to complete. If successful, this venture validates the new faster bureaucratic pathway as a model for future projects.

 

As I previously wrote for National Review, decades’ worth of red tape at the NRC made it impossible to meet surging demand for nuclear power plants. The NRC is a bureaucratic disaster even when its own money is on the line, having taken six months and three different attempts to produce a simple budget to give to former Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, then-chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The agency only managed to deliver an incomplete budget the night before the NRC was set to testify before its paymasters.

 

The average nuclear power plant employs an estimated 86 full-time employees just to do NRC-mandated paperwork, meaning about 17 percent of the employees are handling just labyrinthine bureaucratic navigation.

 

In 1975, the year the NRC was founded, the country began construction of nine new reactors. Since then, it has built only eleven new commercial reactors, virtually all of which were expansions at existing nuclear-power plants and six of which started construction in 1976, before the bureaucracy could become entrenched. It took an incredible 43 years to get approval for and start building one of America’s newest nuclear reactors at Watts Barr in Tennessee, which began operating in June 2016.

 

Solving the red tape crisis is a necessary precondition for a nuclear renaissance. It is necessary to meet soaring power demand for AI, where any interruption in energy flow can lead to disaster — exactly the kind of project microreactors would be effective at powering. Data centers, which house the computers making widespread AI usage possible, consume massive amounts of electricity, requiring energy for power servers, cooling systems, and networking equipment — a demand that only nuclear power can meet without risking devastating fluctuations.

 

Previous over-regulation of nuclear power by the NRC caused America to lose its global lead in the energy industry by drowning it in a tidal wave of paperwork. The new microreactor approval shows how quickly deregulation can unleash American energy innovation.