Washington D.C. In this blog, Todd Allen (NIA Board Chair and Chair of the University of Michigan Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences) and NIA Senior Fellow Jessica Lovering argue for the importance of continued federal investment in nuclear research and development to complement demonstration and deployment efforts. While the President recently signed Executive Orders on nuclear energy that set ambitious goals for new projects, the history of defunding nuclear R&D in the 1990s serves as a cautionary tale for policymakers today: short-term budget cuts can have long-term impacts. It took the U.S. nuclear industry decades to recover and gave the advantage to Russia and China in the global market.
On Friday, May 23rd, President Trump signed four new executive orders aimed at accelerating the deployment of new nuclear energy in the United States and promoting the export of U.S. technology internationally. The stated goal was to “unleash innovation, and restore America’s position as the world’s leading energy producer.” These executive orders signify a significant acknowledgment of the importance of nuclear energy.
To view NIA’s fact sheet on these EOs, click here.
Potentially worrisome though is that these Executive Orders come at the same time as significant staff reductions at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Additionally, the administration’s recently released fiscal year 2026 budget proposal also cuts the funding for the Office of Nuclear Energy by 25%, targeting “nonessential research on nuclear energy” without specifically defining “nonessential.” This is deeply concerning for those of us who have seen these kinds of steep cuts to nuclear R&D before, in the 1990s. Let’s revisit the history of nuclear energy in the U.S. to see how halting basic research programs can hurt the longer-term trajectory of innovating and deploying new technologies.
The United States led the first wave of commercial nuclear energy, which began in 1957 with the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, as we led the world in both basic research and the deployment of commercial power plants. By 1975, approximately 25 years after Shippingport, the U.S. was placing about four new gigawatt-sized nuclear power plants online each year and was also the world's leading supplier of commercial reactors, research reactors, and fuel.
However, by 2000, just twenty-five years later, our new commercial deployments had evaporated and our federal nuclear energy research programs had stagnated, being declared “no longer needed.”
Today, after another twenty-five years, we have a vibrant program again with strong Presidential support and bipartisan support in Congress. What happened in the intervening years, and how do we ensure a vibrant program over the next twenty-five years?
In thinking about the future of nuclear energy, the current zombie-focused television show, The Last of Us, is actually quite instructive. In The Last of Us, the character Joel goes to great effort to save a young girl named Ellie, who happens to be immune to the bite of the flesh-eating zombies and is the key to create a vaccine that would save the world from these zombies. Joel and Ellie use a portion of their current resources to ensure a better future.
So what do zombies have to do with nuclear energy? Well, nuclear energy had its own fight with budgetary zombies in the 1990s. Following a steady decline in federal spending on nuclear energy R&D that started around 1978, President Clinton dramatically reduced federal funding for nuclear energy R&D from $548 million in 1993 to $85 million by 2001. In his 1993 address to a joint session of Congress, he specifically said, “my recommendation makes more than 150 difficult reductions to cut the Federal spending by a total of $246 billion. We are eliminating programs that are no longer needed, such as nuclear power research and development.” Many early-career personnel left the field, research reactors were shut down, and most university nuclear engineering programs saw their enrollment decline. National labs went into survival mode more than innovate mode.
These programs slowly resumed in the 2000s following the commencement of the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative and then the completion of the Generation IV Roadmap in 2001, but it took until around 2016 to build up the bipartisan consensus supporting nuclear energy. The emergence of large numbers of private companies, paired with federal programs to support deployment, revitalized the support for nuclear energy in the United States. From universities to national laboratories to industry, the U.S. nuclear programs are strong in 2025.
Although the programs survived, and are now thriving, following the Clinton cutbacks, nuclear energy lagged in picking up on major technical advances such as high-performance computing, advanced manufacturing, and advanced construction management. A dramatic slowdown in investment in R&D took twenty years to recover from and Russia and China are clearly ready to pass us by if we slow down again.
What did that slow recovery from 1996 look like? The figure above shows some key events, starting with the cancellation of the Integral Fast Reactor program, a key part of the U.S. advanced reactor programs in the early 1990s (and the program that established much of the knowledge that makes some of today’s advanced reactors possible).
The keys to the recovery were reestablishing basic research programs, strengthening national laboratory infrastructure and programs, rebuilding strong workforce programs, and using the national capabilities to support an emerging class of privately-funded reactor concepts and business approaches. Along the way, Congress supported, through both appropriations and guidance, the revitalization of the federal nuclear energy programs.
We are now well-positioned to lead the international deployment of advanced reactors. Where might we be if we hadn’t terminated our own progress in the 1990s? A more important question for 2025 is: Will we have a vibrant program in 2050 if we do not maintain a world-leading nuclear energy R&D program now?
As noted, over this twenty-five-year recovery period, a significant number of the companies leading with new products came from university programs. NuScale started as a research project at Oregon State University. Kairos started as a research collaboration between the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Wisconsin. Oklo started as a project of Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate students.
A perusal of the leadership pages for the advanced reactor companies shows a list of mid-career leaders who gained their foundational skills in their university research programs. Three companies - CAELUS, Alpha Nur, and RenU Fuel Solutions -- have spun out of the Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp, a partnership between the Nuclear Innovation Alliance and universities.
University programs are advancing new ideas in the areas of artificial intelligence, digital twins, advanced manufacturing, design science, and cyber-physical protection. Without this work, we will struggle to compete against countries with heavily state-supported industries like China, which continue to invest in nuclear engineering innovation.
Within President Trump's executive orders are several elements highlighting the importance of university programs in developing a workforce and unleashing innovation. The orders propose novel approaches such as increasing “access to R&D infrastructure, workforce, and expertise at Department of Energy National Laboratories for college and university nuclear engineering students,” indicating a determination to optimize the success of university research programs.
To continue to successfully lead the world in the deployment of nuclear technology in both the near and far future requires a strong basic research program paired with advances in commercialization.
Choices that advance the future by investing in the present are typically referred to as “Not eating your seed corn.” In The Last of Us, Ellie’s natural resistance to zombie bites is the seed corn for civilization. The seed corn for nuclear energy development and deployment is basic research.
Congress should ensure that funding for nuclear energy contains program elements that range from basic research to deployment of first-of-a-kind systems. The university programs should be idea generators and the nurturers of next-generation talent. Let’s make sure we defeat the anti-innovation zombies by continuing a strong basic research program over the next twenty-five years.