The Problem

Most energy experts agree that a carbon-free grid needs nuclear power. If the transition from fossil fuels were to rely only on renewable power sources like solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal, it would consume vast amounts of land and water, require dramatically increased mining for critical materials, and generate environmental damage that would threaten public health and provoke political resistance. Nuclear is a proven carbon-free power source that runs around the clock at the scale a modern economy demands. The problem is not whether America needs it. The problem is that America presently cannot build it.

China has more than 30 reactors under construction and is racing ahead on smaller designs — factory-built reactors small enough to fit on a few acres, known as small modular reactors, or SMRs. South Korea has completed seven large-scale reactors in the past decade — three at home and four constructed for the UAE — and is competing for contracts across the Middle East and Europe.

Meanwhile, the United States recently finished its first new reactor in nearly a decade — Vogtle, in Georgia — and it cost $35 billion, more than double its original budget, and took seven years longer than planned, despite being a mere add-on to an existing facility. The first American SMR, NuScale's Carbon Free Power Project, was canceled when costs spiraled and local utilities abandoned the initiative.

The number of certified American nuclear suppliers has collapsed 80 percent since the 1980s. Until Congress banned Russian uranium imports in 2024, roughly a quarter of American reactor fuel came from Russia. The ban is in place, but the United States still has almost no domestic enrichment capacity to replace it.

The reactors work. What has always failed is how they get built — fragmented contracts with no accountability, designs that change mid-construction, a lack of guaranteed buyers, no industrial supply chain, and a regulatory process that takes years to approve what other countries accomplish in months.

The Three Types of Reactor

Type	Output	Size	What It Powers	Status
Full-size	1,000-1,400 MW	Large industrial facility	A million+ homes, entire regions	Proven. Hundreds operating worldwide. The U.S. has 96.
Small modular reactor (SMR)	50-300 MW	Fits on a few acres, factory-built and shipped to site	A military base, a data center campus, a small city	Russia and China have operating units. The U.S. has none — NuScale's project was canceled.
Microreactor	1-20 MW	Fits on a truck or railcar	A remote base, a mine, a small community	Experimental. The DOD's first prototype (Project Pele) is expected to generate power by 2028.

The Mission

The Mission for America will safely and rapidly build a new nuclear fleet to provide clean, cheap, around-the-clock energy for both everyday life and our most daunting decarbonization challenges. In the process, we will create millions of high-wage jobs across the economy, along with an ecosystem of education and innovation that will continue to enrich the nation for decades to come.

The Department of Defense will build and operate the first wave of reactors. The military already possesses deep expertise in safely operating nuclear facilities and rapidly training skilled technicians, and it can begin construction on bases without years of siting disputes.

Several full-size reactors will go up on select military bases, each one powering millions of homes and businesses across its region. The president will personally guarantee that at least one will be switched on and delivering power to the grid within their first term. The world record for building a full-size reactor is thirty-nine months, shorter than a single forty-eight-month presidential term — but the major components take two to three years to manufacture, so the work cannot wait for Inauguration Day. Sites are scouted and construction partners lined up during the campaign and transition, the contracts and long-lead component orders go out in the administration's opening months, and steel goes in the ground right behind them. Many will say this is impossible. It will be one of the moonshot proofs that America can build again, and a key to the MFA president achieving the momentum for reelection.

A separate set of bases will be a proving ground for more compact, advanced reactor technologies that show immense potential. Small modular reactors will provide power and resilience for individual bases, or nearby industrial facilities. Microreactors will power remote installations the grid has never reached. Once the first builds prove the designs, a larger industry of small and microreactors will follow.

The workforce needs are immense, and will be met by massive investments in nuclear labor of all kinds. The Navy's reactor operator pipeline, the same one that has trained submarine crews for generations, will be expanded to feed the first wave of operators. Hundreds of thousands of new construction workers will be trained to lay the foundations of the plants, while a carbon-to-nuclear trades pipeline will move welders, pipefitters, and electricians out of dying industries and into higher-paying, longer-lasting careers in the sector. A new network of national nuclear education programs, modeled on South Korea's dedicated nuclear universities, will train the next generation of operators and engineers.

Upstream, we will rebuild and expand the necessary industrial base, allowing the USA to achieve full nuclear independence. A national heavy forging facility will produce reactor components currently available only from Japan, South Korea, and China. New American uranium enrichment plants will supply both the standard reactor fuel the traditional plants need and the higher-enriched fuel small reactors require, which almost no country outside Russia makes commercially today. Component factories will rebuild the supplier base for pumps, steam generators, and specialty materials that has atrophied since the 1980s.

In addition, every reactor currently running today will produce more. Equipment upgrades, better fuel, and improved monitoring will squeeze the equivalent of several new reactors' worth of clean power out of the existing fleet.

Finally, the country will have a working answer to the waste problem. A new National Nuclear Waste Corporation, sitting outside the Department of Energy and outside the annual budget process, will have direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund that Americans have already paid for and that Congress has frozen for decades. A consolidated short-term storage facility will hold spent fuel at a single site, hosted by a community that volunteers for the job and receives handsome compensation. A permanent underground repository will follow on a longer timeline.

Every country that has expanded nuclear power quickly and cheaply did the same thing. Pick a design, standardize it, build the reactors over and over in batches. France licensed an American Westinghouse design and built 34 nearly identical reactors — then, once that fleet was running, moved to an improved design for the next batch. South Korea and China each have two standards. The United States has done the opposite, funding many designs, building one of each, letting every utility customize, and watching costs never come down.

The RFC, working with DOD, will select one design for each size of reactor and standardize it across the government fleet. Private companies remain free to build different designs on their own dime — the plan does not ban alternative reactors. But the federal buildout will not scatter its resources across competing designs. Each fleet order goes to a single contractor at a fixed price, with the vendor putting up 15 to 20 percent equity so that cost overruns come out of the company's pocket, not taxpayers'. The design must be finished before construction starts and frozen for the duration of the fleet order, with the option to adopt an improved design for the next batch once the first is built and the lessons are in. An independent program manager reports to the RFC, not to the contractor.

Solution 1: The Military Nuclear Fleet

The Department of Defense will build and operate all three sizes of reactor on military bases — full-size plants for the power grid, small modular reactors and microreactors for the bases themselves and on-site industrial uses. One operator, one set of rules, one chain of command. The military absorbs the first-mover risk that no private utility will take, proves the designs work, and drives costs down through repetition.

The military is already moving in this direction. A May 2025 executive order put the Army in charge of military nuclear energy and set a deadline of a working reactor on a military base by September 2028. The first prototype — a small microreactor called Project Pele, built by BWXT — broke ground at Idaho National Lab in September 2024 and is expected to generate electricity by 2028.

Full-Size Reactors

On day one, the RFC selects a proven full-size reactor design. The Westinghouse AP1000 is the clear first choice. It is an American design, already certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and already operating, with two units at Vogtle in Georgia and four in China. The design works. Vogtle was a disaster of project management — years late, billions over budget — but the reactors themselves run fine. China built four of them — late, but far faster and cheaper than Vogtle. The problem was never the AP1000. It was how Vogtle was managed — fragmented contractors, design changes mid-build, no construction discipline. The military fleet model fixes all of that.

Westinghouse is a private company, and the AP1000 is its proprietary design. The RFC will negotiate a fleet licensing agreement as part of the first order — Westinghouse licenses the design to the military fleet, provides engineering support, and in return gets the largest reactor order in American history. The agreement will include terms for the second fleet order, when RFC-financed utilities begin building their own AP1000s. Westinghouse has every incentive to cooperate. A government commitment to build 3-4 reactors immediately, with a larger utility buildout to follow, is the commercial opportunity the company has been waiting for since Vogtle nearly destroyed it. If negotiations stall, the administration has options. The Defense Production Act allows the government to compel production and licensing of critical defense materials, and 28 U.S.C. § 1498 permits the government to use any patented invention for government purposes, with the patent holder entitled to reasonable compensation but unable to block the project. The goal is a willing partnership. But the timeline does not depend on one company's willingness to negotiate.

The president declares nuclear construction a national emergency and orders the first 3-4 full-size reactors built on military bases. Not every base qualifies. The site must have access to a major water source for cooling — a river, lake, or coastline. The AP1000's passive safety systems handle emergency cooling without pumps, but normal operations still require a large, reliable water supply. Proximity to existing high-voltage transmission lines is preferred, but not a dealbreaker, as the MFA Clean Power Mission will be constructing new lines across the entire country. A base that sits along the route of a planned transmission corridor could be an ideal anchor for new lines. Where new or upgraded transmission is needed, the Emergency Nuclear Deployment Act will streamline permitting under the same emergency authority. Utilities that volunteer to connect military reactors to their grid will receive RFC support for planning and executing the upgrades, as detailed in the Clean Power chapter.

The AP1000 was designed for modular construction — 342 pre-assembled modules that can be built in factories while foundation and civil works proceed on-site. This parallel approach is what makes an aggressive timeline possible.

Speed requires buying from abroad. The major components that set the construction timeline — the reactor pressure vessel, steam generators, and heavy forgings — take two to three years to manufacture. Chinese factories have direct AP1000 production experience from building the Sanmen and Haiyang units and currently produce about ten sets of major reactor components per year. Korean and Japanese factories add more capacity. By placing orders with all three countries on day one and running site preparation in parallel, the first components can arrive within 18-24 months — roughly a year faster than relying on any single country's supply chain. This is a bridge strategy — buy foreign while building domestic. The national heavy forging facility and component factories in Solution 2 will supply later fleet orders, but the first reactors cannot wait.

South Korea's nuclear construction firms — among the best in the world — will partner on the first builds, bringing experienced construction managers, engineers, and quality control teams to train American crews. This is exactly what France did in the 1970s. It brought in American expertise, and within a decade was building reactors faster and cheaper than anyone.

South Korea's experience shows that every time you double the number of reactors built, costs drop by about a third. A second, larger fleet order follows based on real performance and cost data from the first builds — this is when RFC-financed utilities will begin building their own reactors.

SMRs and Microreactors: Prove It, Then Open It Up

Full-size reactors power regions. SMRs and microreactors power individual sites — a military base, a data center, a mine, a remote community that will never get a grid connection. They are small enough to factory-build and ship, and they go where full-size plants cannot.

Russia and China have a handful of operating small reactors — Russia's floating reactor Akademik Lomonosov has been running since 2020, and China connected its HTR-PM to the grid in 2021 — but the United States has none. NuScale's project, the only American SMR with a customer, collapsed when costs spiraled. The technology works. America just has not built one yet.

The DOD will build and operate the RFC's selected SMR and microreactor designs on military bases, the same way it runs the full-size fleet. The RFC will select from existing private-sector designs — companies like BWXT, which is already building the Project Pele microreactor, are years ahead of anything the government could develop from scratch. The company keeps its design. But as a condition of the contract, the RFC will negotiate broad licensing rights — in exchange for being the anchor customer that funds the first builds and absorbs the risk, the government secures the right to license the proven design to other manufacturers.

Once a design is proven on military bases, those licensing rights kick in. Other qualified manufacturers will be able to build the design under license, paying a royalty to the original designer. This prevents any single company from becoming a bottleneck. Multiple manufacturers will compete on execution, driving costs down and production up. Data centers, remote communities, industrial facilities, and allied nations will all get access to proven American reactor designs.

Why Military Ownership

It solves three problems at once.

First, speed. The military trains specialized workforces fast — the same institution that produces nuclear submarine crews in 18 months can train reactor construction teams. Site preparation begins under DOD authority while licensing is finalized. No years-long siting disputes on federal land.

Second, security. Nuclear plants require armed perimeter security, restricted airspace, and extensive background checks for all personnel. Military bases already have all of this. Building on a base means the security infrastructure is in place on day one, rather than built from scratch at enormous cost.

Third, politics. The first reactors go on bases in energy-poor regions, including red states. The president who orders them gets to turn them on and lower electricity prices for entire regions.

How These Reactors Get Regulated

The NRC is the safety regulator for every reactor that sells power to the public grid. That does not change under this plan. These are not secret military installations — they will power millions of homes, and the public has a right to independent safety oversight.

But the NRC's current licensing process was designed for one-off utility projects, not a standardized fleet. A full review takes years, even for a design the NRC has already certified. The plan does not cut the NRC out. It eliminates the redundant parts.

Congress will pass an Emergency Nuclear Deployment Act that:

1. Brings military reactors that sell grid power under NRC authority, but through an expedited pathway — the NRC confirms the existing design certification (the AP1000 is already certified) and licenses the specific site, rather than re-reviewing the entire design from scratch
2. Requires the NRC to complete this process within 18 months for pre-certified designs on federal land
3. Streamlines environmental review under NEPA. A standard Environmental Impact Statement takes 2-5 years for nuclear projects. For pre-certified reactor designs on existing federal land, the Act will establish a categorical exclusion or expedited environmental assessment, completed within the 18-month licensing window. Environmental review still happens. It just cannot take longer than the construction it is reviewing.
4. Authorizes DOD to sell power to the civilian grid (currently not permitted under law)
5. Extends federal nuclear accident insurance (the Price-Anderson Act) to DOD-operated reactors of all sizes

For SMRs and microreactors that power only the base and do not sell to the grid, the military regulates its own reactors the way the Navy has regulated submarine reactors for nearly 80 years.

Once a grid-connected reactor is operating, the NRC has the same inspection and enforcement authority it has over any civilian plant. The military operates the plants. The NRC ensures they are safe.

Congress and the White House are already moving in this direction. The 2026 defense budget bill put the Army in charge of military nuclear energy and ordered a working group to identify pilot projects. A separate Navy program is studying what it would take to sell military nuclear power to civilian grids. The president has ordered the NRC to approve or deny new reactor applications within 18 months, and the NRC itself proposed a new rule in April 2026 that would fast-track reviews for reactor designs the military or DOE has already vetted.

Operations and Scale-Up

The military will own and operate the plants. Each reactor will sell power directly to the grid at wholesale rates, the same way any power plant does. A typical AP1000 produces about 1,100 megawatts. The base itself might use 50-200 megawatts. The rest — the vast majority — will go to the surrounding region, lowering electricity prices for millions of homes and businesses. Revenue will flow into a dedicated fund that sustains the nuclear program, not competing with aircraft carriers and fighter jets for annual defense appropriations. The permanent governance structure — whether DOD continues to operate, or the fleet transfers to an RFC subsidiary or a new federal power corporation — will be determined based on operational experience.

The delivery rules — the "American Delivery Model" — apply to every RFC-financed project:

1. One contractor, one price. A single fixed-price contract. No more fragmented multi-prime failures like Vogtle.
2. Vendor skin in the game. The reactor company puts up 15-20 percent equity. If costs overrun, the company loses money — not taxpayers.
3. Design finished before construction starts. Vogtle broke ground with the design barely past the preliminary stage — estimated at only 10-20 percent complete.
4. Absolute design freeze. No modifications until the full fleet order is complete.
5. Independent oversight. A program management firm reports to the RFC, not to the contractor.

From expensive first builds to cheap repeat builds: The first reactors off the line will be the most expensive — $89-150+ per megawatt-hour, compared to roughly $40-70 for natural gas today. The Department of Defense absorbs that premium, paying for grid resilience and energy security. As the fleet grows and the workforce learns, costs fall. By units 5-7, full-size costs reach $60-95/MWh. At that point, RFC-financed utilities will begin building their own full-size units using the same proven design, the same trained workforce, and the same supply chain. Licensed SMR and microreactor designs enter the commercial market. Federal tax credits bridge any remaining gap.

What this delivers: 3-4 military-built full-size units and 5-10 SMRs/microreactors in the first fleet order, with utility-led expansion to follow. The industrial capacity, proven designs, and trained workforce to scale clean, always-on power for decades to come.

Solution 2: Rebuilding the Industrial Base

The RFC will rebuild the domestic nuclear supply chain on four fronts:

• Uranium fuel production. Two separate problems. For the AP1000 fleet, standard reactor fuel (enriched to about 5%) is available from allied suppliers — Urenco operates an enrichment plant in New Mexico and has facilities across Europe, and France's Orano adds more capacity. The first fleet order will not depend on Russian fuel. But many SMR and microreactor designs require a more concentrated fuel called HALEU (enriched to 5-20%), which currently has almost no commercial production outside Russia. The investment will build domestic enrichment capacity for both standard fuel and HALEU, so that neither the fleet buildout nor the SMR program depends on foreign suppliers long-term. The RFC will not wait for a private market to form. It guarantees the demand directly — a multi-year HALEU purchase commitment, an advanced market commitment, that hands enrichers the bankable offtake no private buyer can — and where that is not enough, it builds the centrifuge capacity itself through a government-owned, contractor-operated plant run by an experienced enricher such as Centrus or Urenco. The target is a first domestic HALEU line operating within four years, with standard-fuel capacity scaled in parallel, so the SMR program never stalls for fuel and the fleet reaches full independence from foreign enrichment by the second fleet order.
• A national heavy forging facility. The massive steel components at the heart of a reactor — pressure vessels and steam-generator forgings weighing hundreds of tons — can currently be made only in Japan, South Korea, and China, because they require some of the largest forging presses on earth, of which only a handful exist worldwide. The first reactors will use imported components while the RFC builds the domestic capacity directly, on the Defense Plant Corporation model — a government-owned, contractor-operated heavy-forging plant, with the RFC financing the ultra-large press and an experienced operator running it. Standing up a press of this size is itself a multi-year build, so the RFC orders it in the opening months — the same day the first foreign component orders go out — so the facility is operational by the time the second fleet order begins and every reactor after the first wave is forged on American soil. A forthcoming MFA chapter on natural resources addresses the broader critical mineral supply chains.
• Component manufacturing. Pumps, steam generators, electronics, and specialty materials. The certified supplier base has collapsed from roughly 500 companies in the 1970s and 1980s to about 100 today.
• Workforce training. Hundreds of thousands of new workers across several pipelines:
  • Construction trades. Welders, pipefitters, electricians. Carbon plant workers are the natural pipeline — their skills transfer directly to nuclear construction. The move from carbon to nuclear is not retraining from scratch. It is redirecting an existing skilled workforce to higher-paying, longer-lasting careers.
  • Factory workers. For new fuel fabrication plants, component factories, and SMR assembly lines. Closer to aerospace manufacturing than traditional construction.
  • Licensed operators and nuclear engineers. A National Nuclear Academy — modeled on South Korea's dedicated nuclear universities — produces the licensed professionals the industry needs. The military accelerates this — the Navy already trains nuclear reactor operators in 18-24 months. The same pipeline, expanded, supplies the first wave of operators for the military fleet.
  • Nuclear construction managers. The hardest bottleneck. You can train a welder in three years. Experienced managers who can run a multi-billion-dollar nuclear construction project take a decade or more to develop. The Vogtle project, for all its failures, produced a generation of managers who understand exactly what went wrong. They are the seed corn for the fleet buildout.

Solution 3: Solving the Waste Problem

The United States has more than 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel sitting at nearly 80 sites across 39 states. The federal government was legally required to start accepting it in 1998. It has not accepted a single fuel assembly. Taxpayers have paid $11.1 billion in damages to utilities for the broken promise, with another $37-44 billion in liability still growing.

A $46 billion Nuclear Waste Fund — paid for by utility customers specifically to solve this problem — sits frozen because of a budget scoring trap. Spending from the fund counts as "new" discretionary spending, so it competes with defense and education in annual budgets. The money exists. The accounting rules block it.

The fix: Congress will create an independent National Nuclear Waste Corporation (NNWC), outside DOE and outside the annual budget process, with direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund. The NNWC will build a consolidated storage facility using dry casks — sealed steel-and-concrete containers that hold spent fuel safely above ground, a proven technology already in use at every reactor site in the country. Communities will volunteer to host the facility and receive binding benefit agreements in return. A permanent underground repository, buried deep in stable rock, follows on a longer timeline. Finland is preparing to open the world's first one — Onkalo — after completing trial runs in 2025. It took 43 years from the initial government directive to reach this point. The plan does not minimize that timeline, but it breaks the paralysis now.

On recycling: Spent fuel is 95 percent unspent uranium and contains enormous potential energy. The United States is now actively pursuing commercial recycling for the first time. Oklo announced a $1.68 billion advanced fuel center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that would chemically extract the usable uranium from spent fuel and turn it into fresh fuel for next-generation reactors, using a process developed at Argonne National Lab. TVA is the first utility exploring a partnership to recycle its spent fuel at the facility. A nuclear fuel recycling bill cleared the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in October 2025, and a May 2025 executive order directed DOE to recommend a national recycling strategy. ARPA-E's NEWTON program is funding 11 groups working on ways to convert the most dangerous long-lived waste into shorter-lived or stable materials, with the goal of making full-stockpile recycling viable by the 2050s. Other startups — Curio, SHINE Technologies — have completed lab-scale demonstrations at national labs.

Internationally, France has been recycling nuclear fuel at a commercial scale for decades. However, the expense is immense. The French process costs 6-9x as much as mining fresh uranium, and the process creates its own waste streams. The plan will support the study of waste recycling through RFC financing and the Manhattan Projects R&D funding, but will not design the national waste strategy around the capability until the economics significantly improve. The NNWC's storage facility is designed so that fuel can be retrieved later if recycling becomes viable — the waste is stored, not buried and forgotten. The solution requires no new federal appropriations, because the Nuclear Waste Fund already exists.

Solution 4: Building Public Trust

Nuclear power is safer than coal, gas, or rooftop solar by every statistical measure. Public fear is real and has to be addressed directly. The case for nuclear cannot begin on Inauguration Day. It has to begin during the campaign.

During the campaign, the candidate will make nuclear power a visible part of the platform, stated plainly and repeatedly in front of audiences in the states where reactors will be built. The argument is simple. These plants will produce thousands of jobs, cheap electricity for the region, and energy independence from foreign suppliers. The candidate will name the goal — American-built nuclear power on American military bases — and let voters in energy-poor regions see themselves in it. Behind the public case, a team of volunteer experts begins the groundwork that makes a first-term reactor physically possible — short-listing candidate bases against the hard constraints of cooling water and transmission, opening informal talks with Westinghouse and the Korean construction firms, and mapping the long-lead component orders — so that none of it waits on the election to begin.

During the transition, the incoming administration will identify the 3-4 military bases for full-size reactors and the bases for the first SMRs and microreactors. Site selection cannot wait until after the inauguration — major components take 2-3 years to manufacture, so every month of delay pushes first power further out. The transition team will work with DOD to narrow the list based on the hard constraints (proximity to high-voltage transmission and cooling water), begin environmental reviews, and engage base communities so that component orders execute and site work breaks ground in the first weeks of the administration.

The transition is also when operator training begins. An NRC-licensed reactor operator takes 3-5 years to certify, and with the lead reactor scheduled to reach first power within the first term, the first candidates must enter the Navy's nuclear training pipeline in the administration's earliest days — so the transition team coordinates with Naval Reactors to expand the existing pipeline and begin selecting candidates right away.

Once in office, the plan will fund a national education campaign built on data and local testimonials, not industry PR. Every project will sign a legally binding Community Benefit Agreement with its host community before construction begins — guaranteeing local jobs, infrastructure investment, and revenue sharing. The communities that host these reactors are not doing the country a favor. They are getting an economic deal — permanent high-paying jobs, cheap power, and a binding, long-term commitment from the federal government.

Solution 5: Fleet Uprates — The Fastest Clean Power Available

America's 96 existing reactors can produce more power than they currently do. "Uprates" — equipment upgrades, better fuel, and improved monitoring — can squeeze 8-10 additional gigawatts out of the existing fleet within three to five years. (One gigawatt powers roughly 700,000 homes.) The cost runs $200-1,000 per kilowatt of added capacity, compared to $7,500-16,000 per kilowatt for building a new reactor from scratch. This is proven technology that utilities already know how to deploy. No new designs, no new sites, no new permits. Uprates are nuclear's most important first-decade contribution to the grid.

What this delivers: 8-10 GW of additional clean power — the equivalent of several large new reactors — at a fraction of the cost and timeline.

Solution 6: Keeping the Grid Clean While Nuclear Scales Up

The MFA is simultaneously electrifying transportation, buildings, and industry — massively expanding demand for electricity. If the gap between new demand and clean supply gets filled by natural gas, the plan fails. Gas plants built as a "temporary bridge" become permanent. Each one is a $2 billion asset with 30-year financing, an investor class that lobbies for its survival, and a workforce that depends on it.

Three measures prevent this:

1. Deploy clean power in speed order. Nuclear uprates and massive renewable buildout will carry years 1-5. Enhanced geothermal and long-duration storage will arrive in years 3-7. New nuclear construction will dominate after year 7. Each source fills the gap until the next one arrives.

2. Match electrification to clean supply. EVs that charge at off-peak hours and heat pumps with built-in thermal storage can run on wind and solar now. But industrial furnaces and large-scale hydrogen production need power that runs 24/7 regardless of the weather — they will wait until nuclear and geothermal reach scale. This is a binding cross-chapter principle.

3. No new fossil generation. The Clean Power chapter will establish a Clean Energy Standard that prohibits new coal and gas plants. The RFC will reinforce this by refusing to finance any fossil thermal generation. The standard will set the law. The RFC will control the money.

Presidential Leadership

On the campaign trail, the candidate will run on cheap, around-the-clock American power and on proving the country can still build something hard. The signature pledge will be personal and exact — at least one full-size reactor switched on and delivering power to the grid within the president's first term. Because the major components take years to manufacture, the groundwork — short-listing bases, lining up the reactor and construction partners, and mapping the long-lead orders — has to begin during the campaign, not after the win. The candidate will travel through the military communities near the bases where the first reactors would rise, the towns built around aging plants that deserve a future, the coal and oil-patch regions whose welders, pipefitters, and electricians would move into longer-lasting nuclear careers, the Navy's reactor-training centers, and the university programs and forging towns a revived industry would feed. On the stump, the candidate will pledge a standardized national fleet built in batches, uranium enrichment and heavy forging brought back onto American soil, a working answer to spent fuel after decades of paralysis, and high-wage jobs for workers leaving industries in decline.

During the transition, the incoming team will work with the Department of Defense to settle on the first bases for the full-size builds and the separate installations that will serve as proving grounds for small modular and microreactors. With the RFC, the team will lock the single standardized design for each reactor size, along with the fixed-price terms and the vendor equity stake that keep cost overruns off the taxpayer. The Navy will be engaged on widening the reactor-operator pipeline that has trained submarine crews for generations, talks will open with communities willing to host consolidated interim storage in exchange for substantial compensation, and counsel will draft the charter for a National Nuclear Waste Corporation along with the statute freeing the long-frozen Nuclear Waste Fund. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy will coordinate with the Department of Defense on a licensing track quick enough to match the build schedule.

On Day One, the president and Congress will give the RFC and the Department of Defense a joint mandate to finance the reactor fleet, the enrichment plants, the national heavy-forging facility, and the component suppliers that together restore full American nuclear independence. The same day, Congress will charter the National Nuclear Waste Corporation as an entity sitting outside the Department of Energy and outside the annual budget fight, with direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund Americans have already paid into. The president will issue a set of executive orders directing the Department of Defense to break ground on the first reactors, ordering the Navy to expand operator training at once, and instructing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to open an expedited review path for the frozen standardized design. An independent program manager, answering to the RFC rather than to any contractor, will be named to hold the fleet to its cost and schedule.

In the same opening window, Congress will enact the rest of the package drafted before inauguration. The legislation will authorize the RFC's nuclear financing line, fund the enrichment and forging build-out, codify the Waste Corporation's standing access to the Nuclear Waste Fund, and point the consolidated interim-storage program toward the community that volunteers to host it.

What the Ten-Year Mission Delivers

The Mobilization by Year 1 (2030)

The first year is the launch. Reactors take years to build, so the work of year one is the work that makes every later year possible — pick the designs, lock the sites, break ground on the industrial base, and pour people into the training pipelines.

The history is the proof that America can move at this speed once it commits. During WWII, the Manhattan Project reactors produced plutonium for weapons, not electricity, yet they showed that the country could design, construct, and operate industrial-scale nuclear facilities at extraordinary speed when it chose to. The Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on the Hanford B Reactor in Washington State in October 1943 and had it running by September 1944, eleven months. Oak Ridge's X-10 reactor in Tennessee went from groundbreaking to operation in nine months in 1943. When the country turned to power generation, a small experimental reactor called BORAX-III, built and iterated through three versions in just over two years, lit the entire town of Arco, Idaho, for about an hour in July 1955, the first community in the world powered entirely by nuclear energy. The first American commercial reactor, Shippingport, in Pennsylvania, 60 megawatts and small by today's standards, went from groundbreaking in September 1954 to full power in December 1957, three years and three months. The country built nuclear reactors quickly when it treated them as a national priority with a hard deadline. The Mission for America restores those conditions in year one.

By Year 1:

• DOD selects the standardized full-size, SMR, and microreactor designs and places the first component orders abroad
• The first military bases for full-size reactors and the first SMR and microreactor sites are chosen and broken ground in the administration's opening months — the lead unit on a 39-month schedule to first power within the first term
• The national heavy forging facility and the new uranium enrichment plants break ground
• The Navy reactor-operator pipeline and the carbon-to-nuclear construction-trades pipelines expand, with the first classes enrolled
• The National Nuclear Waste Corporation is chartered with direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund
• 8-10 GW of fleet uprates begin rolling out across the existing reactors

The First Reactors Take Shape by Year 5 (2034)

The first full-size reactors are deep in construction, and the lead unit has reached first power within the president's first term, a real timeline behind it. The world record for building a modern full-size commercial reactor is 39 months, set by Japan's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Unit 6 in 1996, and no country has matched it since. The Mission for America builds at that pace, and the lead military reactor — ground broken in the administration's opening months — is the proof. Even if it slips, it still comes online faster than any reactor built in the Western world in a generation.

By Year 5:

• The lead full-size reactor online and delivering power to the grid — first power achieved within the president's first term — with the rest of the first fleet order in advanced construction
• 8-10 GW of fleet uprates delivered, real clean power from the existing fleet
• SMR and microreactor proving grounds underway on military bases, first units approaching operation
• The domestic supply chain coming online, with forging, enrichment, and component factories starting production
• Tens of thousands of workers moving through the training pipelines, Korean-partnered crews training American teams
• A consolidated waste storage site selected with a volunteer host community under a binding benefit agreement

The Model Is Proven by Year 10 (2039)

The model works. The first reactors are online and powering their regions, the fleet build-out is scaling, and the waste solution is operating.

By Year 10:

• 3-4 military-owned full-size reactors operational and selling power to the grid; second fleet order under way
• Construction transitioning from Korean-partnered to American-led crews
• Domestic supply chain producing components for later fleet orders, the heavy forging facility operational
• RFC-financed utilities beginning their own builds using the same proven design, workforce, and supply chain
• Licensed SMR and microreactor designs entering the commercial market for data centers, industry, and remote communities
• Hundreds of thousands of workers trained across all pipelines
• Fleet cost data proving whether the $60-95/MWh target is on track, setting up costs competitive with gas
• The consolidated waste storage facility operating, a functioning national waste management system
• New nuclear capacity online and scaling, on track toward a self-sustaining nuclear industry by 2050