by WorldTribune Staff, December 10, 2025 Real World News
The Trump Administration plans to finance up to 10 new nuclear reactors in a bid to “kickstart” a nuclear energy “renaissance.”
The Department of Energy will use its rebranded Office of Energy Dominance Financing to provide low-interest loans for the reactors, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told The Washington Free Beacon in a Dec. 9 report.
The U.S. nuclear industry has struggled for decades to get new projects up and running.
“The government smothered the nuclear industry for 40-plus years. We’ve got to get it back up on its feet again,” Wright said during a tour of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), a government facility that focuses on cutting-edge nuclear energy research.
“We are going to use our loan program office at the Department of Energy for credit-worthy hyperscalers that are putting equity capital in front of us,” Wright said. “We’re going to back that up with low-interest loans. We’ll supply it to maybe the first 10 reactors that get built. That’ll incentivize people to move fast.”
In May, President Donald Trump set a goal of quadrupling the nation’s nuclear capacity over the next decade.
Last month, the Department of Energy closed on a $1 billion loan for a project to partially restart the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.
The future financing Wright spoke of in his interview with the Free Beacon will support new projects and new technology.
The government loans could help finance the development of small modular reactors, the report said.
“Traditional reactors typically produce around one gigawatt of electricity—enough to power about a million homes—but are stationary, costly, and must be custom-built for their location,” the Free Beacon’s report said. “Modular reactors are small enough to be transported, can be assembled in a factory, and will still be able to generate as much as 300 megawatts of electricity, enough to power roughly 300,000 homes.”
There are only two operational small modular reactors in the world—one in China and one in Russia.
“Maybe the only way to get these projects done is through the loan program,” Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson, who serves on the House Appropriations energy subcommittee and toured the Idaho facility alongside Wright, told the Free Beacon. “Because how are you going to find investors that are going to invest long term? These are long-term investments.”
Wright added: “We don’t need a little more energy, we need a lot more energy. We want to get the huge benefits from AI. We want to reshore manufacturing in this country. We want to do things we never dreamed of before. All of those take massively more energy. If you’re serious about better energizing the world, you also should be all in on natural gas and nuclear.”
Boom: Energy Dept to ‘kickstart’ U.S. nuclear energy renaissance added by Editor Two on
View all posts by Editor Two →