At a Glance: The National Mission for Nuclear Power

The national mission for nuclear power introduces a groundbreaking approach to expand America's nuclear energy capacity. After the transition to a clean economy, America will be producing several times more electricity that it is today to power vehicles, homes, buildings, and industry — and to meet the enormous electricity needs of producing green hydrogen to power shipping and aviation, and perhaps for powering CO2 drawdown projects. Meeting all of these needs using only wind, solar, hydro and geothermal will take a terrible toll on the environment in terms of materials that will need to be mined and fabricated, and land and water use.

We can only safely and sustainably achieve our clean energy needs by greatly increasing nuclear power capacity. Unfortunately, the current civilian nuclear regulatory regime makes developing new nuclear power facilities practically impossible. Adequately changing that regulatory regime will probably be politically impossible within the scope of the Mission for America, due to the deeply entrenched misunderstandings and fears of nuclear power among the American public. We offer a novel approach to expanding nuclear power in America that we believe is the only current politically feasible path available.

This mission will:

Launch a campaign to educate the public about the safety of nuclear power and dispel long held myths and misunderstandings of its imagined dangers.

Utilize the military's existing nuclear power program, which operates outside civilian regulatory frameworks, to construct nuclear power plants on military bases across the United States.

Employ the civilian nuclear industry, including start ups working on Small Modular Reactors and other innovative technology, to build the nuclear plants — as a way of preparing for a large civil nuclear sector once the military program establishes nuclear power as safe and necessary.

Connect military-based nuclear plants to the national grid, significantly boosting the country's power supply.

Allocate a substantial portion of the energy generated by these plants for critical processes like CO2 drawdown, green hydrogen production, and other high-energy-demand applications.

Leverage the president's emergency powers and executive orders, along with Congressional legislation, to overcome traditional regulatory roadblocks and accelerate the deployment of these nuclear facilities.

No energy source or industry is more misunderstood than nuclear power. Nuclear power has been stigmatized by a worldwide fascination with the destructive power of atomic bombs and the seemingly magical power of atomic energy, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of and dangers of radiation. Social movements and popular impulses that rightly object to and hate the destruction of the environment by modern technology and industry have often seen nuclear power as the most striking representation of the problem.

Nuclear power plants, however, are the safest form of energy production if you count actual deaths, injuries, and harm to humans — and even safer if you include animals and the environment in the equation. That is true when including all of the old-fashioned nuclear power plants in the world. New technologies, however, can make destructive accidents as good as impossible.

Industrial accidents related to chemicals or fossil fuels are virtually uncountable and have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people over the years. Meanwhile, pollution from burning fossil fuels kill millions of people every year.

You can count on one hand the number of nuclear power plant accidents that injured humans. The famous accidents that released significant radioactive materials into the environment — Chernobyl and Fukushima — killed less than 100 plant workers through radiation exposure. While that is a great tragedy, far more workers than that are killed in oil drilling jobs alone every year. The trauma from those two, and other nuclear accidents such as Three Mile Island, came not from radiation but a fear of radiation. In Fukushima, more than 100,000 people were unnecessarily evacuated due to an irrational fear of exposure to low level radiation. Dozens of people were killed during transportation of the evacuees alone, and thousands more died as a result of the evacuation. If they had stayed home, they would either not have been exposed to additional radiation at all, or to elevated levels equivalent to taking a long distance flight.

This innovative strategy for nuclear power development is both necessary and feasible, given the urgency to increase America's electricity production capacity, especially for clean and carbon-neutral sources. Building nuclear power plants on military bases presents a unique solution to bypass the extensive national, state, and local regulations that typically hinder nuclear power expansion. It capitalizes on the military's proven expertise in nuclear energy, cultivated through its long history of safely operating nuclear reactors.

Our proposal will rely on developing Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technology, contracting with existing startups and established players in the industry. As alluring as ideal of SMRs is, many experts argue that building new large plants from existing designs is the fastest and safest way to add capacity if regulatory blockers can be cleared away. Our plan remains open to the possibility of building large traditional facilities from existing standard designs if that's what it takes to get new capacity up and running in time to make a difference.

The mission acknowledges the critical role of nuclear power in achieving a carbon-neutral future. It seeks to marry the untapped potential of military resources with the nation's broader energy goals, creating a synergy that accelerates progress toward sustainable energy independence. This approach not only addresses the immediate need for increased electricity production but also sets a precedent for innovative, cross-sector collaboration in tackling the nation's energy challenges.