Silicon Valley companies recommend the United States to embark on a nuclear energy rebirth. They received the support of President Donald Trump, who recently signed four decrees that seek to quadruple the national electricity production from nuclear energy in the next 25 years.
The massive energy needs of the data centers necessary to carry out artificial intelligence operations (AI) have led large technological companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Meta to buy electricity from pre -existing nuclear power plants, to reopen closed and to encourage the construction of new reactors. Microsoft even signed an agreement in September 2024 to restart the unit 1 reactor to Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania – the worst civilian nuclear accident site in the history of the United States when the nucleus of the reactor of unit 2 melted in March 1979.
The role of private enterprise is not new in the conduct of technological innovation in nuclear fission. The Manhattan project itself had companies such as Dupont, Union Carbide, Bechtel and Westinghouse strongly involved under the leadership of the federal government. After the Second World War, the federal government took the initiative to feed the American nuclear energy industry. It has subsidized and regulated nuclear energy in order to promote this new source of electricity to public service providers while reducing the risks to the public health of accidents.
Executive orders of the Trump administration on nuclear intestine regulations in the name of efficiency and cost cuts. But if the history of the emergence and expansion of nuclear energy offers us lessons on this subject, it is because the federal government was essential for the growth, reliability and safety of nuclear energy.
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For almost a decade after the United States abandoned atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the federal government has kept scientific knowledge linked to nuclear energy and weapons as “limited data”. But in 1954, the congress changed speed and adopted the law on atomic energy. Unlike its 1946 predecessor, this law allowed the marketing of nuclear know-how. The role of the government was essential in the creation of an atomic market because it had to determine which private technologies could exchange, without pose risks to American national security – a most important principle at the start of the Cold War to prevent nuclear proliferation.
This early technological ambiguity posed safety challenges. In a case, the American Vitro International company ended up selling plans for a plutonium reprocessing plant in India – a useful key infrastructure both to generate nuclear power and to develop a nuclear weapon. The sale ended up helping to advance the nuclear weapons program of India, exposing the need for clear rules and laws governing the sale of nuclear information, which only the federal government could design.
In addition to setting rules on what companies could do with nuclear information, the government has offered subsidies to stimulate nuclear energy growth in the United States. He also encouraged US companies to sell nuclear reactors abroad as part of a broader objective of maintaining American technological primacy in the post-war world.
The federal government has also adopted regulations to guarantee nuclear energy security and safety. In 1957, the Congress adopted the Price-Anderson law, which limited responsibility for the nuclear industry for accidents and also provided the public with remuneration request mechanisms when they occurred. In other words, the nuclear industry has accepted the regulations because the government provided the majority of funding to build nuclear power plants. However, this acceptance would change in a decade.
At the end of the 1960s, the will and the ability of the federal government to support nuclear energy had decreased – for reasons that have little to do with energy policy. The United States had to accumulate major deficits due to military climbing in Vietnam, which caused a budgetary crisis. In addition, while the public has become more skeptical of the political elites and the government due to anti-war feelings against Vietnam, and later, the Watergate scandal, the opposition to major projects led by the state such as nuclear energy has increased. The American Atomic Energy Commission has even been reorganized, starting with the administration of President Richard Nixon, to reduce the power of the Commission. During the Carter years, the Commission had become the Ministry of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which to date, but whose regulatory powers provide that the Trump administration plans to reduce considerably.
While government financing for the nuclear energy industry has dropped, private finances have entered the void. But, being mainly motivated by profit, private banks have not found a lucrative nuclear energy, in particular due to frequent costs of reactor construction projects, administrative formalities and regulations. Thus, private funding did not correspond to the same levels of economic support that the State had once provided. Without government subsidies, the nuclear energy industry experienced financial difficulties – years before the Three Mile Island accident shocked the nation in 1979.
The Reagan administration has tried to relaunch the industry by reducing regulations, or what it called “anti-crust policies of the Carter era”, while increasing the funding of nuclear energy by 36% in 1981. But the effort to save industry failed. Although strengthening funding was quite generous in the context of an administration that reduced spending on social service programs, it was not enough to cover the constant cost of nuclear energy projects. In addition, the general public came to be wary and reject nuclear energy projects, still disillusioned by the three -thousand island disaster. The new operators even feared financial responsibility in the event of future accidents.
In 1986, the serious nuclear accident in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union further increased opposition to nuclear energy in the world. In the United States, the construction of new nuclear power plants has stopped. The only new nuclear units to add to the grid in the 1980s were those whose construction began in the 1960s and 1970s.
The current thrust for nuclear energy seems very different from that of origin in the 1950s. Unlike the past, when the majority of nuclear energy financing came from the State, private investments in Silicon Valley are now heading for the American nuclear energy sector at unprecedented levels. Nuclear energy startups have Chamed, many of them funded by Big Tech. This threatens to tilt the state technocratic and regulatory power. President Trump’s decrees support this inclination through a variety of measures, including the reduction of the power of the nuclear regulatory committee and emphasizing advanced reactors outside the national laboratories which are centers of American scientific and technological innovation resulting from the Manhattan project.
And yet, historically, the American nuclear energy industry prospered when the government provided solid advice. When the federal government fell, the industry has suffered enormously. China, Russia and France have also learned this lesson, also adopting the state industries and funded by the State.
The philosophy of Big Tech to “move quickly and break things” could stimulate unprecedented innovation in nuclear energy, in particular thanks to the construction of small modular reactors, micro -reacchers and even fusion. But, like Silicon Valley itself, which has historically prospered through the invisible hand of the State, the nuclear energy industry could also require increased advice from the government in order to be safe, safe and reliable.
Jayita Sarkar is professor of world history of inequalities at the University of Glasgow and author of the award -winning book, Plowshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022). She is currently completing her next book, Atomic Capitalism (Princeton University Press, under contract). She is a British academy world innovation scholarship system for 2024-25 at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC
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