It has been more than seven years since President Donald Trump signed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA) into law – and it has taken all seven years (including four during the Biden Administration) for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to issue a final rule implementing its provisions.
Even the Washington Post admits that the new Part 53 rules, intended to reduce review times from decades to 18 months or less, will make President Trump’s goal of revitalizing the U.S. nuclear energy industry more competitive – “to everyone’s benefit,” says the Post.
The old NRC permitting review process was built around light-water-cooled reactors (like the Westinghouse AP1000) and included prescriptive safety requirements specific to those designs – not the advanced reactors of all sizes being planned and built today.
Many nuclear companies are designing reactors that use liquid metals (like molten salt) or gases as coolants, enabling them to operate at higher temperatures. These reactors are ultimately safer than the (still very safe) water-cooled reactors, as they rely on natural forces like gravity or convection rather than pumps and motors to automatically stop the reactor in case of an incident.
The NRC says its final rule responds to NEIMA by creating an alternative, technology-inclusive regulatory framework that can accommodate licensing of future commercial nuclear plants, including advanced reactor designs that may not employ light-water technology. The new rules will hopefully expedite permitting of small modular reactors, microreactors, and even full-size reactors already under development.
The NRC says its alternative requirements and implementing guidance incorporate technology-inclusive approaches and risk-informed and performance-based techniques to ensure an equivalent level of safety to that of operating commercial nuclear plants. Part 53 is designed to provide optionality and flexibility for licensing and regulating a variety of technologies and designs for commercial nuclear reactors.
Not everyone is convinced that an agency with a lifelong track record of thwarting nuclear reactor permits has fully reformed. Noting that the real timeframe for the Part 53 rules is decades (not just 7 years), nuclear energy advocate Steven Curtis says “It’s hard to imagine the NRC being objective enough to lessen the burden for licensing, even for safer SMRs. The NRC sees its mortality in simplifying their process, so what is their incentive?”
NANO Nuclear Energy CEO James Walker calls the new Part 53 rules “a bridge to fleet deployment,” in that it does not fully eliminate site-specific licensing, environmental review installation review, or lifecycle issues around refurbishment, refueling, decommissioning, and relocation,” all needed for the microreactor industry. The NRC is reportedly developing guidance and another round of rulemaking – suggesting that Part 53 is foundational, not final.
The proof of a reformed NRC, if indeed it is now eager to move permits forward, will soon be made evident. Previous Presidents waited in vain. Trump waited 7 years for Part 53 regulations; the real microreactor rules have yet to be formally proposed.
More evidence that the Trump Administration is serious about a nuclear energy revival comes from the National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC), which announced last week that its Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) test bed is now complete. This first-of-its-kind facility, located at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), will enable the rapid development, testing, and demonstration of privately developed advanced nuclear reactors.
The Department of Energy says DOME is an actual 100-foot-tall dome that is 80 feet in diameter – large enough to provide a safe environment to test experimental reactor concepts and gather performance data for use in informing future commercial licensing applications. Its completion dovetails with the new Part 53 NRC rules – as the U.S. seeks to accelerate the development and demonstration of advanced nuclear technologies.
Built from the repurposed Experimental Breeder Reactor-II containment structure, DOME will help reactor developers accelerate testing timelines – saving money and reducing project risk – and hopefully deployment timelines.
These microreactors are designed to be factory-built and portable, able to be placed in remote communities or to respond to natural disasters but perhaps primarily to serve independent microgrids (such as data centers), field-level military operations, and even space travel.
DOME is the only test bed in the world specifically designed to host fueled microreactor experiments that can generate up to 20 megawatts of thermal energy that can be used as heat or converted to electric power. [This is comparable in size to the reactors that have powered America’s nuclear submarines ever since the USS Nautilus was deployed in 1954.]
DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Reactors Dr. Rian Bahran says the DOME is a vital component of reestablishing U.S. leadership in advance nuclear technologies – yet one wonders how many decades ago such a facility could have been built. Nuclear submarines can operate for 20 to 30 years without refueling, whereas conventional subs need refueling several times a year.
Better late than never – the DOME has already started a scheduled year-long test of Radiant Industries’ Kaleidos Demonstration Unit, a microreactor that uses TRISO fuel and is cooled by helium to produce 1 MW of electrical power or 3.5 MWt of thermal power. The U.S. Air Force is but one entity awaiting authorization for deploying Kaleidos. Other companies are queuing up to test their designs in DOME.
With the DOE envisioning nuclear megacities for such activities as uranium enrichment and fuel fabrication, at least four states have announced their willingness to serve as hosts even if managing high-level nuclear waste is part of the commitment. Idaho and Tennessee have long-term experience in nuclear energy, while Utah and Nebraska are looking at the jobs and revenues to be gleaned from joining the nuclear community.
By contrast, Nevada has fought against managing nuclear waste and Texas and New Mexico have also objected to private interim nuclear waste storage (despite Texas’ push for nuclear energy development).
Meanwhile, the U.S. continues its ban on reusing nuclear waste to power reactors designed to burn (and thus dramatically reduce the volume of) nuclear waste by 95% and dramatically lower the cost of nuclear energy generation while virtually eliminating the controversial issue of nuclear waste storage.
Of course, a major increase in the number of nuclear powerplants in the U.S. will necessitate a major increase in the supply of nuclear fuel – and there is good news on that front as well. Newly launched FluxPoint Energy announced it is developing what would be the first new uranium conversion facility in the U.S. in 70 years.
FluxPoint says its mission is to “establish a fully American, vertically integrated nuclear fuel capability – supporting energy independence, enabling advanced reactor development, and strengthening national security.” Development of the facility, which will convert uranium oxide (U3O8) into gaseous uranium hexafluoride (UF6) that can be enriched in fissile uranium-235 for use as nuclear fuel, is “well under way.”
For that matter, these and other developments – and a reinvigorated nuclear energy industry – are signs that the U.S. is “well under way” to restoring its faith in a future and a renaissance already signified by the highly successful and warmly received Artemis II mission to the moon, another area of American excellence that was put into mothballs for decades.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
The Genesis Revitalizing U.S. Scientific Research
April 08, 2026
One day after the launch of the Artemis 2 mission to the moon – the first in over half a century – the Department of Energy announced the launch of the Genesis Mission – a bold initiative to transform how the U.S. conducts scientific research and engineering. By democratizing access to advanced computing capabilities, the initiative could unlock new levels of scientific discovery and innovation that benefit the entire country.
The White House says the Genesis Mission has the potential to dramatically accelerate breakthroughs in fusion energy, power grid optimization, and materials science. The mission is built on three pillars – a computing platform for accelerating discovery, a portfolio of national challenges to serve as proving grounds, and a university engagement effort to rethink STEM education.
First announced last November, the mission is led by DOE Under Secretary for Science Dr. Dario Gil. President Trump lured Gil away from a 22-year career at IBM, where he had risen to senior vice president and director of IBM Research. Gil says the Genesis Mission “is building something like ‘an internet’ of science. It’s an intelligence layer connecting all the scientific instruments, laboratories, and universities into a seamless ecosystem for discovery.”
To kick off the Genesis Mission, the DOE announced a $293 million Request for Application (RFA), “The Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI.” The agency invited interdisciplinary teams to leverage novel AI models and frameworks to address 26 national challenges spanning advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear energy, and quantum information science.
The RFA is open to teams from DOE National Laboratories, U.S. industry, and academia. Phase I awards range from $500,000 to $750,000 for a 9-month project period. Phase II awards range from $6 million to $15 million over a 3-year project period. Phase I applications and Phase II letters of intent are due April 28, and Phase II applications are due May 19. Successful AI models and workflows may be integrated into the American Science Cloud.
In concert with the mission, the DOE, in collaboration with Idaho National Laboratory INL), Argonne National Lab (ANL), Microsoft, and Everstar, used AI mapping to convert a safety analysis document needed as part of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing process.
The team utilized Everstar’s Gordian AI solution, built on the Microsoft Azure platform, to convert the Preliminary Documented Safety Analysis for DOE’s National Reactor Innovation Center’s Generic High Temperature Gas Reactor into sections equivalent to an NRC license application.
The 208-page final document took just a single day to generate using the AI tool, whereas heretofore it took a team of people 4 to 6 weeks to complete the same task. As lagniappe, the AI tool also comprehensively identified missing or incomplete information needed to successfully complete an NRC application.
The next step toward full implementation is for a reviewing agent to evaluate the AI-generated documents against NRC guidance to validate they are ready for formal submittal. The team is also developing a benchmarking rubric to provide a confidence grade for the Gordian AI’s performance.
This project follows an earlier collaboration between INL and Microsoft to deploy an Azure AI-based solution to show how advanced AI models can generate engineering and safety analysis reports.
A recent NRIC study highlighted how AI has the potential to reduce both document development time and regulatory review cycles by up to 50% while also improving accuracy, consistency, and traceability. Using these and other AI tools therefore has the potential to dramatically lower the cost – and shorten the time -- for nuclear reactor permitting.
These and other hoped-for breakthroughs come under the auspices of the “Delivering Nuclear Energy That is Faster, Safer, Cheaper Challenge” under the Genesis Mission.
The DOE is using a suite of explainable AI solutions, including surrogate models, agentic workflows, autonomous labs, and digital twins to meet its goal of cutting both timeframes and operational costs for nuclear energy deployment at least by half – for design, licensing, manufacturing, construction, and operation.
Fusion energy is another prime example of how AI can compress timelines. Up till now, developing high-performance computing simulation codes that match real-world observations take weeks or even months to run at the desired level of fidelity.
But by training neural networks on the output of these validated simulations, researchers can produce AI-based models that issue predictions up to tens of thousands of times faster. In sum, AI tools may bring fusion energy much closer to reality than “30 years away.”
According to Gil, some practical applications of the Genesis Mission involve the nation’s electric grids. According to grid operators, 80% to 90% of developer interconnection applications are deficient. Should the DOE Office of Electricity’s AI-agentic framework, now under development, become operational, applicants could identify and correct errors before submitting applications and thus allow interconnection studies to begin up to a year earlier.
Brookhaven National Laboratory is building an AI emulator called Grid FM that can accelerate power flow calculations by a factor of 100. For the Texas transmission grid (ERCOT) there are 2,000 nodes, more than a thousand potential connection points, 4,000 contingencies, and 10 different 24-hour load scenarios at 5-minute increments – adding up to roughly 10 billion power flow simulations. What would take 20 years with conventional methods can be completed using Grid FM in about 2 months.
Nuclear-related challenges also include several related to nuclear weapons, nuclear energy research, and cleanup and restoration of nuclear reactor sites. Other challenges go far beyond nuclear energy and grid security, including reenvisioning advanced manufacturing and industrial productivity, reimagining construction and operation of buildings, scaling the biotechnology revolution, and securing America’s critical minerals supply.
The Genesis Mission will also address discovering quantum algorithms with AI, realizing quantum systems for discovery, recentering microelectronics in America, securing U.S. leadership in data centers, predicting U.S. water for energy, unleashing subsurface energy assets, designing materials with predictable functionality, achieving AI-driven autonomous laboratories, and accelerating materials discovery, production, and qualification for strategic deterrence.
Like the Artemis mission, the Genesis Mission is part of President Trump’s grand strategy to restore American dominance and stimulate the U.S. economy through a revival of manufacturing and global leadership across the sciences.
While the Artemis mission has captured global attention, Gil promises astounding results from the Genesis Mission, boasting that “We ain’t seen nothing yet!”
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
