Despite Fukushima Trump Hands Nuclear Regulation To Silicon Valley

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The goal, Trump said, was to quadruple nuclear energy output and provide new power to the data centers behind the AI boom.

As DOGE gutted agencies, departures mounted in the nuclear sector. Career experts in nuclear regulations and safety departed or were forced out. When Trump fired Hanson, a Democratic NRC commissioner, the president's team explained the move by saying,“All organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction.”

In an unsigned email to ProPublica, the White House press office wrote:“All commissioners are presidential appointees and can be fired just like any other appointee.”

In August, the NRC's top attorney resigned and was replaced by oil and gas lawyer David Taggart, who had been working on DOGE cuts at the DOE. In all, the nuclear office at the DOE had lost about a third of its staff, according to a January 2026 count by the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit focused on science and technology policy.

In the summer of 2025, Cohen and a team of DOGE operatives touched down at the NRC offices, a series of nondescript towers across from a Dunkin' in suburban Maryland. He was joined by Adam Blake, an investor who had recently founded an AI medical startup and has a background in real estate and solar energy, and Ankur Bansal, president of a company that created software for real estate agents. Neither would comment for this story.

Many career officials who spoke with ProPublica were blindsided: The new Trump officials at the NRC seemed to have no experience with the intricacies of nuclear energy policy or law, they said. One NRC lawyer who briefed some of the new arrivals decided to resign.“They were talking about quickly approving all these new reactors, and they didn't seem to care that much about the rules - they wanted to carry out the wishes of the White House,” the official said.

At one point, Cohen began passing out hats from nuclear energy startup Valar Atomics, one of the companies vying to build a new reactor, according to sources familiar with the matter and records seen by ProPublica. NRC staffers balked; they were supposed to monitor companies like Valar for safety violations, not wear its swag.

NRC ethics officials warned Cohen that the hat handout was a likely violation of conflict rules. It betrayed a misunderstanding of the safety regulator's role, said a former official familiar with the exchange.“Imagine you live near a nuclear power plant, and you find out a supposedly independent safety regulator - the watchdog - is going around wearing the power plant's branded hats,” the official said.“Would that make you feel safe?” The NRC and Cohen did not respond to requests for comment about the hat incident.

Valar counts Trump's Silicon Valley allies as angel investors. They include Palmer Luckey, a technology executive and founder of the defense contractor Anduril, and Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir, the software company helping power Immigration and Customs Enforcement's deportation raids.

It was among three nuclear reactor companies that sued the NRC last year in an attempt to strip it of its authority to regulate its reactors and replace it with a state-level regulator. Before the Trump administration came into office, lawyers watching the case were confident the courts would quickly dismiss the suit, as the NRC's authority to regulate reactors is widely acknowledged. But new Trump appointees pushed for a compromise settlement - which is still being negotiated. The career NRC lawyer working on the case quietly left the agency.

Valar and its executives did not reply to requests for comment.

'Going so fast'

The deregulatory push is the culmination of mounting pressure - both political and economic - to make it easier to build nuclear power in the US. Over the years, a bipartisan coalition supporting nuclear expansion brought together environmentalists who favor zero-carbon power and defense hawks focused on abundant domestic energy production.

Anti-nuclear activists still argue that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are safer and more economical. But streamlining the NRC has been a bipartisan priority as well. The latest major reform came in 2024, when President Joe Biden signed into law the ADVANCE Act, which went as far as changing the mission statement of the NRC to ensure it“does not unnecessarily limit” nuclear energy development.

Some nuclear power supporters say the Trump administration is merely accelerating these changes. They cite instances in which the current regulations appear out of sync with the times. The NRC's byzantine rules are designed for so-called large light-water reactors - massive facilities that can power entire cities - and not the increasingly-in-vogue smaller advanced reactor designs popular among Silicon Valley-backed firms.

Rules that require fences of certain heights might make little sense for new reactors buried in the earth; and rules that require a certain number of operators per reactor could be a bad fit for a cluster of smaller reactors with modern controls. Advances in sensors, modeling and safety technologies, they say, should be taken into account across the board.

The NRC has said it expects over two dozen new license requests from small modular and advanced reactor companies in coming years. Many of those requests are likely to come from new, Silicon Valley-based nuclear firms.

“There was a missing link in the innovation cycle, and it was very difficult to build something and test it in the U.S. because of mostly licensing and site availability constraints in the past,” said Adam Stein of the pro-nuclear nonprofit Breakthrough Institute.

The regulatory changes are in flux: This spring, the NRC is starting to release thousands of pages of new rules governing everything from the safety and emergency preparedness plans reactor companies are required to submit to the procedures for objecting to a reactor license.

“It's hard to know if they are getting rid of unnecessary processes or if it's actually reducing public safety,” said one official working on reactor licensing, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.“And that's just the problem with going so fast - everything just kind of gets lost in a mush.”

Lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been sent to the NRC to keep an eye on the new rules, a move that further raised alarms about the agency's independence.

Nicholas Gallagher - a relatively recent New York University law school graduate and conservative writer whom ProPublica previously identified as a DOGE operative at the General Services Administration - has been involved in conversations about overhauling environmental rules.

He's working alongside Sydney Volanski, a 30-year-old recent law school graduate who rose to national attention while she was in high school for her campaign against the Girl Scouts of America, which she accused of promoting“Marxists, socialists and advocates of same-sex lifestyle.”

NRC lawyers working on the rules were told last October that Gallagher and Volanski would be joining them, and they both appear on the regular NRC rulemaking calendar invite.

The White House maintains, however, that“zero lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been dispatched to work on rulemaking.” Neither Gallagher nor Volanski replied to requests for comment.

The administration is routing the new rules through an office overseen by Trump's cost-cutting guru Russell Vought, a move that was previously unheard of for an independent regulator like the NRC. The White House spokesperson noted that, under a recent executive order, this process is now required for all agencies.

Political operatives have been“inserted into the senior leadership team to the point where they could significantly influence decision-making,” said Scott Morris, who worked at the NRC for more than 32 years, most recently as the No. 2 career operations official.“I just think that would be a dangerous proposition.”

Morris voted for Trump twice and broadly supports the goals of deregulating and expanding nuclear energy, but he has begun speaking out against the administration's interference at the NRC.

He retired in May 2025 as part of a wave of retirements and firings.

At a recent hearing before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board - an independent body that helps adjudicate nuclear licensing - NRC lawyers withdrew from the proceedings, citing“limited resources.” The judge remarked that it was the first time in over 20 years the NRC had done so.

Meanwhile, some staff members, other career officials say, are afraid to voice dissenting views for fear of being fired.“It feels like being a lobster in a slowly boiling pot,” one NRC official who has been working on the rule changes told ProPublica, describing the erosion of independence.

The official was one of three who compared their recent experience at NRC to being in a pot of slowly boiling water.“If somebody is raising something that they think that the industry or the White House would have a problem with, they think twice,” the official said.

Inside the NRC, the steering committee overseeing the changes includes Cohen, Taggart and Mike King, a career NRC official who is the newly installed executive director for operations. The former director, Mirela Gavrilas, a 21-year veteran of the agency, retired after getting boxed out of decision-making, according to a person familiar with her departure. Gavrilas did not respond to a request for comment.

Any final changes will be approved by the NRC's five commissioners, three of whom are Republicans. In September, the two Democratic commissioners told a Senate committee they might be fired at any time if they get crosswise with Trump - including over revisions to safety rules.

Draft rules being circulated inside the NRC propose drastic rollbacks of security and safety inspections at nuclear facilities. Those include a proposed 56% cut in emergency preparedness inspection time, CNN reported in March.

Even some pro-nuclear groups are troubled by the emerging order. Some have tried to backchannel to their contacts in the Trump administration to explain the importance of an independent regulator to help maintain public support for nuclear power. Without it, they risk losing credibility.

“You have to make sure you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater,” said Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes nuclear energy and supports many of the regulatory changes being proposed by the Trump administration.

Greenwald's group favors faster timelines for approving nuclear reactors, but she worries that the agency's fundamental independence has been undermined.“We would prefer that they yield back more of NRC independence,” she said.

'Nuke bros' in Silicon Valley

One Trump administration priority has been making it easier for so-called advanced reactor companies to navigate the regulatory process. These firms, mostly backed by Silicon Valley tech and venture money, are often working on designs for much smaller reactors that they hope to mass produce in factories.

“There are two nuclear industries,” said Macfarlane, the former NRC chair.“There are the actual people who use nuclear reactors to produce power and put it on the grid... and then there are the 'nuke bros'” in Silicon Valley.

Trump's Silicon Valley allies have loomed large over his nuclear policy. One prospective political appointee for a top DOE nuclear job got a Christmas Eve call from Thiel, the rare Silicon Valley leader to back Trump in 2016. Thiel, whose Founders Fund invested in a nuclear fuel startup and an advanced reactor company, quizzed the would-be official about deregulation and how to rapidly build more nuclear energy capacity, said sources familiar with the conversation.

Nuclear energy startups jockeyed to spend time at Mar-a-Lago in the months before the start of Trump's second term. Balerion Space Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in multiple companies, convened an investor summit there in January 2025, according to an invitation viewed by ProPublica. Balerion did not reply to a request for comment.

A few months later, when Trump was drawing up the executive orders, leaders at many of those nuclear companies were given advanced access to drafts of the text - and the opportunity to provide suggested edits, documents viewed by ProPublica show.

Those orders created a new program to test out experimental reactor designs, addressing a common complaint that companies are not given opportunities to experiment. There are currently about a dozen advanced reactor companies planning to participate. Each has a concierge team within the DOE to help navigate bureaucracy. As NPR reported in January, the DOE quietly overhauled a series of safety rules that would apply to these new reactors and shared the new regulations with these companies before making them public.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright - who served on the board of one of those companies, Oklo - has said fast nuclear build-out is a priority:“We are moving as quickly as we can to permit, build and enable the rapid construction of as much nuke capacity as possible,” he told CNBC last fall. Oklo noted that Wright stepped down from the board when he was confirmed.

The Trump administration hopes some of the companies would have their reactors“go critical” - a key first step on the way to building a functioning power plant - by July 2026. Then the NRC, which signs off on the safety designs of commercial nuclear power plants, could be expected to quickly OK these new reactors to get to market.