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The president says he want to bring back nuclear — but he’s preparing to eviscerate an office crucial to making that happen.
In the past few days, I’ve started to wonder whether much of the Trump administration’s energy agenda is dead, and Trump officials just don’t realize it yet.
Trump dreamed of a new U.S. mining bonanza. But his tariffs are slowing economic activity and raising equipment costs, silencing that boom.
Trump called for the American oil industry to “drill, baby, drill.” But his trade agenda — plus his demand that OPEC increase its oil production — is smothering the Texas oil patch. The president’s trade war on China is also backfiring on America’s oil and gas producers, who export huge amounts of plastic feedstocks to that country.
Now Trump’s plan to revive nuclear energy is in peril, too — and the culprit, again, is the president’s own policies.
The Trump administration is planning to hollow out a Department of Energy office that has been central to financing almost every new U.S. nuclear project this century. That could kill the federal government’s ability to act as a financial backstop for new nuclear projects, which has been critical to the success of every recent American nuclear project.
It’s not clear that Trump officials realize what they’re doing yet — or that they care. (Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has been out of the country for much of the relevant period.) And while a coalition of centrist, conservative, and pro-nuclear groups is sounding the alarm, I’m not sure Trump officials are going to realize what they’re doing with enough time to stop it.
For decades now, reviving nuclear energy has been a big aim of Republican energy policy. Republican lawmakers passed nuclear-friendly bills in Congress, and Republican presidents tried to advance pro-nuclear policies.
Nuclear was central to the Trump 2024 campaign, too. Many Trump-aligned figures — including Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance — suggested that the United States should significantly expand its nuclear fleet. (Vance mentioned nuclear during his appearance on Joe Rogan’s influential podcast and in the vice presidential debate.)
Then, on his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order seeking to loosen rules holding back nuclear energy. The Department of Energy, in turn, has lifted up the revival of nuclear energy as one of its goals for Trump’s second term.
“America’s nuclear energy renaissance starts now,” Wright declared in late March, when he announced new funding for small modular reactors.
Bringing back nuclear power is the explicit goal. But when it comes to energy policy, announcing an aim is not the same as getting it done. Just ask the Biden administration, which struggled to build EV chargers despite $7.5 billion in funding.
It will take a lot of work to execute a project as big and complex as building new nuclear reactors across the United States, and simply wanting to do it will not make it happen.
That’s what the Trump administration may not understand.
The United States has started only four new nuclear projects this century. All but one of those efforts have received — or are now in the process of applying for — a federal loan guarantee by the Loan Programs Office, the Energy Department’s in-house bank.
The Loan Programs Office, or LPO, provides long-term financing to major American clean energy and industrial projects. The LPO is a small office — just a few hundred people — but it was a vital tool of the Biden administration’s clean-energy industrial strategy. The first Trump administration also used it to boost nuclear energy. (It’s helped Trump allies, too: Back in 2010, it made an early loan to build Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California.)
The LPO has been the key guarantor for every new U.S. nuclear project this century, save one:
The only new nuclear project this century the LPO did not support is the new reactor at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Tennessee, which opened in 2016. But that project had the federal government’s backing through a different avenue: The facility is owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned power utility.
Despite that track record, commissars at the Department of Government Efficiency are now trying to gut LPO. The Musk-led efficiency team is seeking to slash more than half of the office’s staff, Heatmap News reported last week.
Seemingly seeking to ease those cuts, Energy Department officials have sought to winnow down the office’s headcount on their own. Energy Department officials have encouraged as many LPO employees as possible to accept an early resignation program under which federal employees can resign this month and get paid through September.
About half of Loan Programs Office employees have asked to resign from their positions, according to one person who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly. The Department of Energy told Heatmap News last week that it could reject some employees’ early resignation requests.
On Monday, a coalition of centrist, conservative, and pro-nuclear groups wrote a letter to Energy Secretary Wright urging him to “ensure LPO remains fully equipped to carry out its mission.”
The letter says that the LPO could lose so much of its staff — many of whom have special technical or scientific training — that it can no longer support development of new nuclear reactors, fossil power plants, or mineral projects.
“The office’s ability to underwrite and monitor large-scale energy projects depends on specialized technical staff and institutional capacity. Without them, the federal government risks slowing or stalling the diverse mix of energy projects that serve national priorities,” the letter says.
The letter’s signatories include the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry’s main trade group. Other signatories include American Compass, a Trump-aligned industrial policy group; Oklo, a nuclear energy company; and the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative environmental group.
The letter is the strongest warning yet that the Trump administration could be blowing its nuclear agenda. In doing so, the administration will lose a rare window of opportunity to make progress on nuclear energy.
Americans are looking more favorably on nuclear energy. Earlier this month, a new Gallup poll found that the U.S. public’s support for nuclear energy has hit 61% — just one percentage point short of its all-time high.That has come as Democratic politicians — especially in swing states — have become more supportive of nuclear energy. As I wrote last year, Democratic candidates at the Senate and presidential level proposed pro-nuclear policies in the last election that until recently would have been unthinkable. At the same time, Republicans have maintained their support of nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy occupies a curious position in American politics. Think about it for a second. The country’s 54 commercially operating nuclear power plants are its largest source of zero-carbon electricity, generating more power than all of America’s wind and solar farms, combined. Second, nuclear power requires a large workforce of college-educated professionals, and those workers are unionized at much higher rates than the private workforce. Finally, nuclear power has never succeeded anywhere — not in the United States, not in France or Japan, and not in Russia or China — without huge amounts of public subsidy.
We are talking about a type of energy that is climate-friendly, that helps build a college-educated and unionized workforce, and that basically always requires government support. Yet nuclear energy has historically been beloved by Republicans and hated by Democrats.
I’m not convinced that will be the case for long — one of the two major parties might turn on nuclear energy in the next few years, driven either by political polarization or by the exigencies of events. (The American public’s support of nuclear power reached its all-time high in 2010, on the eve of the Fukushima disaster.)
Now might be the best window to build nuclear energy in this generation. Democrats in Congress — and the Trump administration — both say they want to do it. But the Trump administration is blowing it.
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Rob and Jesse go deep on the electricity machine.
Last week, more than 50 million people across mainland Spain and Portugal suffered a blackout that lasted more than 10 hours and shuttered stores, halted trains, and dealt more than $1 billion in economic damage. At least eight deaths have been attributed to the power outage.
Almost immediately, some commentators blamed the blackout on the large share of renewables on the Iberian peninsula’s power grid. Are they right? How does the number of big, heavy, spinning objects on the grid affect grid operators’ ability to keep the lights on?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob dive into what may have caused the Iberian blackout — as well as how grid operators manage supply and demand, voltage and frequency, and renewables and thermal resources, and operate the continent-spanning machine that is the power grid. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: So a number of people started saying, oh, this was actually caused because there wasn’t enough inertia on the grid — that Spain kind of flew too close to the sun, let’s say, and had too many instantaneous resources that are metered by inverters and not by these large mechanical generators attached to its grid. Some issue happened and it wasn’t able to maintain the frequency of its grid as needed. How likely do you think that is?
Jesse Jenkins: So I don’t think it’s plausible as the precipitating event, the initial thing that started to drive the grid towards collapse. I would say it did contribute once the Iberian grid disconnected from France.
So let me break that down: When Spain and Portugal are connected to the rest of the continental European grid, there’s an enormous amount of inertia in that system because it doesn’t actually matter what’s going on just in Spain. They’re connected to this continen- scale grid, and so as the frequency drops there, it drops a little bit in France, and it drops a little bit in Latvia and all the generators across Europe are contributing to that balance. So there was a surplus of inertia across Europe at the time.
Once the system in Iberia disconnected from France, though, now it’s operating on its own as an actual island, and there it has very little inertia because the system operator only scheduled a couple thousand megawatts of conventional thermal units of gas power plants and nuclear. And so it had a very high penetration on the peninsula of non-inertia-based resources like solar and wind. And so whatever is happening up to that point, once the grid disconnected, it certainly lacked enough inertia to recover at that point from the kind of cascading events. But it doesn’t seem like a lack of inertia contributed to the initial precipitating event.
Something — we don’t know what yet — caused two generators to simultaneously disconnect. And we know that we’ve observed oscillation in the frequency, meaning something happened to disturb the frequency in Spain before all this happened. And we don’t know exactly what that disturbance was.
There could have been a lot of different things. It could have been a sudden surge of wind or solar generation. That’s possible. It could have been something going wrong with the control system that manages the automatic response to changes in frequency — they were measuring the wrong thing, and they started to speed up or slow down, or something went wrong. That happened in the past, in the case of a generator in Florida that turned on and tried to synchronize with the grid and got its controls wrong, and that causes caused oscillations of the frequency that propagated all through the Eastern Interconnection — as far away as North Dakota, which is like 2,000 miles away, you know? So these things happen. Sometimes thermal generators screw up.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Then again, there are reasons why he’d want to focus on existing generation.
Just how big is the data center boom, really? How much is electricity demand going to expand over the coming decades? Business plans, government policy, and alarming environmental forecasts are all based on the idea that we’re on an unrelenting ride upwards in terms of electricity use, especially from data centers used to power artificial intelligence.
It’s one reason why the new Trump administration declared in the first days of its return to power that the country was in an “energy emergency,” and hasbeen used as a justification for its attempted revival of the coal industry.
But one mildly dissenting voice came from a perhaps-unexpected corner: the power industry.
Constellation Energy’s Chief Executive Officer Joseph Dominguez spent a portion of the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday throwing lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections, even as the company looks to profit from increased demand for the power that its over 30,000-megawatt, largely nuclear fleet serves.
Dominguez told his audience of investors and analysts that utilities and their power customers have been telling Constellation that “the same data center need is being considered in multiple jurisdictions across the United States at the same time, just like fishing. If you’re a fisherman, you put a bunch of lines in the water to try to catch fish, and the data center developers are doing exactly the same thing.”
This means that different electricity markets or utility territories could report the same future data center demand, when ultimately the developer will pick just one site.
Tallying the demand growth projections from a few large power markets — namely MISO, which largely serves the Midwest; PJM, which largely serves the East Coast; and ERCOT, the Texas energy market — which together “account for less than half” of U.S. power demand, Dominguez said, Constellation finds that they project “notably higher” demand growth than many third-party consultants and analysts foresee for the country as a whole.
“It’s hard not to conclude that the headlines are inflated,” Dominguez said. He further claimed that Constellation had “done the math,” and that “if Nvidia were able to double its output and every single chip went to ERCOT, it still wouldn’t be enough chips to support some of the load forecasts.”
He argued that utilities tend to overstate load growth — an observation backed up by research from the Rocky Mountain Institute. “We get it,” he said. “Utilities have to plan to ensure that the system is reliable.” That frequently means erring on the side of having more generation and transmission to serve future demand as opposed to being caught short.
Dominguez is hardly the first voice to call into question load growth forecasts. Energy industry consultant Jonathan Koomey told Heatmap more than a year ago that “everyone needs to calm the heck down” about AI-driven load growth. Data center developers, chipmakers, and AI companies would likely find efficiencies to get more computing power out of less electric power, he predicted, similar to how the original data center buildout avoided catastrophic predictions of imminent power shortages and spiking electricity prices in the early 2000s.
Since then, demand growth projections have done nothing but rise. But even just a few weeks ago, Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, told Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast, “It is simultaneously true that I think this is going to be a really large demand driver and that we have bubble-like characteristics in terms of the amount of stuff that people are trying to get done.”
Now, to be clear, Dominguez has a reason to talk down expectations of future demand growth — and with it the expectation that there needs to be massive investment in new power plants. Constellation owns and operates a fleet of nuclear power plants, and is bringing on a gas-heavy fleet with its planned acquisition of Calpine.
Dominguez also said that new natural gas and renewables were likely to prove expensive to build.
“The cost of new entry, whether that be for combined cycle machines or solar with storage, has gone up substantially, as has the time to build and site these assets,” Dominguez said. “Now, at the end of the day, in a tightening market, we compete with the cost of new entry.”
This is halfway consistent with what other big players in the energy industry have been saying. John Ketchum, the chief executive of NextEra, which has a large renewables development business,has been telling anyone who will listen that the way to meet urgent load growth is with renewables and batteries, as they can be built cheaper and faster than natural gas, let alone nuclear.
Dominguez’s take, however, is that it’s all quite expensive and lengthy considering the likely level of need.
“When I listen to some of the comments on these calls, I just have to tell you, folks, I think the load is being overstated. We need to pump the brakes here.”
On defending wind, Russian gas, and NREL layoffs
Current conditions: A state of emergency is in effect in Manitoba, Canada, due to multiple wildfires • 17 million people in the south-central U.S. are at risk of severe storms on Tuesday • The Interior Department has reportedly suspended air quality monitoring for National Parks, including California’s Joshua Tree, where the AQI today is moderate.
Attorneys general from 17 Democratic states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging President Trump’s executive order pausing approvals, permits, and loans for onshore and offshore wind projects. The lawsuit argues that Trump exceeds his authority with the indefinite pause, which threatens “thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments, and … is delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet,” in the words of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the coalition.
In a response to the lawsuit, a White House spokesperson told The Associated Press that “the American people voted for the president to restore America’s energy dominance, and Americans in blue states should not have to pay the price of the Democrats’ radical climate agenda.” As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written, however, state climate goals “become nearly impossible if no additional [wind] projects are able to get through the permitting process until at least 2029,” with New York state’s especially in jeopardy after the administration ordered the halt of construction on the fully permitted Empire Wind project south of Long Island.
The European Union plans to announce on Tuesday a 2027 deadline for companies to end any remaining energy contracts with Russia, the Financial Times reported Monday. Though the EU’s use of Russian oil and coal virtually ended with sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe still bought 49.5 billion cubic meters of Russian gas through pipelines in 2024, and another 24.2 billion transported on ships as liquified natural gas, per Rystad Energy (though some of that LNG was resold). Another way of looking at it: “The EU purchased a total of [$26 billion] in Russian energy in 2024, exceeding its military assistance to Ukraine last year,” Bloomberg writes, with imports accounting for about 19% of the bloc’s total gas purchases.
The proposed measures will need to be approved by a majority of EU member states and the European Parliament before they can be adopted, according to FT. Without Russian LNG, Europe is expected to turn to the U.S. to meet its energy needs.
Share of European Union gas demand met by Russian supply, 2001-2024
IEA
More than 100 employees at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory lost their jobs in a round of layoffs on Monday, Mother Jones reports. The cuts included non-probationary employees, or those who’ve worked at the Department of Energy division for over two years.
Though NREL has more than 3,000 employees on staff, sources who spoke with Mother Jones described the cuts as “rather haphazard and unorganized,” while others stressed that “if I am suddenly the only person on my team, I can’t handle that work.” The layoffs also notably come after President Trump’s “skinny” budget proposed $15 billion in cuts to Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding. The White House Office of Management and Budget has said that the budget aims to reorient the Department of Energy’s funding away from “unreliable renewable energy” and “toward research and development of technologies that could produce an abundance of domestic fossil energy and critical minerals, innovative concepts for nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels, and technologies that promote firm baseload power.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to end door-to-door survivor outreach in disaster areas for the upcoming hurricane and wildfire seasons, Wired reported Monday, based on a FEMA memo dated May 2. Previously, the agency would canvass disaster survivors to inform them about how to register for federal aid, a policy that one emergency management coordinator told Wired was critical given how many survivors don’t get adequate information about recovery resources otherwise. Instead, FEMA’s memo said the agency will “focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues.”
Last year, Republicans on the Oversight Committee singled out FEMA’s outreach program over alleged “widespread discrimination against individuals displaying Trump campaign signs on their property” in the wake of Hurricane Milton. The White House’s budget has also cited FEMA for supposedly “skipping over homes when providing aid.” But the Trump administration has also sought to pare back the agency aggressively: Earlier this year, it denied a request for federal aid from Arkansas’ Republican Governor and former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders after severe tornadoes that left more than 40 people in the region dead, arguing the disaster was not “beyond the capabilities of the state, affected local governments, and voluntary agencies” to address.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
The Los Angeles Dodgers have faced calls from activists and fans to end their sponsorship deal with Phillips 66’s 76 gas station brand — but the partnership might face a natural end due to the Olympics coming to L.A. in 2028, Legal Planet reports. Dodger Stadium will be an official Olympic venue during the summer games, and its 76 gas ads will violate the Olympic Charter prohibiting “commercial installations and advertising signs … in the stadia, venues or other sports grounds.”
The Dodgers are under mounting pressure to drop the Phillips 66 partnership even earlier. There are 76 gasoline ads “plastered throughout the ballpark, from the visiting team’s bullpen to the ribbon board screens lining the stands … Even the on-deck circles on the field, where batters prepare to hit, are orange-and-blue 76 logos,” the Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth wrote last year in a column calling for the team to break up with the oil company. As of November, the Houston-based energy company was facing six counts of violating the U.S. Clean Water Act by illegally discharging 790,000 gallons of wastewater from its Carson refinery into the L.A. County sewer system. “The lead up to the 2028 Olympic games period would seem to be a natural time for the Dodgers to reset a marquee sponsor for years to come — and to do so on their own terms — or else be forced to by Olympic rules,” Legal Planet writes.
“C’mon Ford, c’mon GM, c’mon Chrysler, let’s roll again/Build something useful that people need, build us a safe way for us to be/Build us something that won’t kill our kids, that runs real clean, that runs real clean.” —Lyrics to Neil Young’s new single “Let’s Roll Again.”