Nuclear Energy Now tracks the latest nuclear energy developments across technology, diplomacy, industry trends, and geopolitics.

Public Support for Nuclear Energy is Climbing

Views on nuclear energy have shifted in recent years, according to the Pew Research Center. Almost 60 percent of adults in the United States now favor using nuclear energy to generate electricity, up from 43 percent in 2020. This shift has been supported by both Democrats and Republicans. For example, the Biden administration, in November 2024, launched a plan to expand nuclear energy in the United States, and the Trump administration has built on this, issuing four executive orders related to nuclear energy earlier this year and preserving tax incentives for nuclear power in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. While solar and wind still remain more popular forms of energy overall, support for both has declined—especially among Republicans—while nuclear energy has gained bipartisan ground. However, Republicans tend to favor nuclear energy more than Democrats. Generally, those who support nuclear energy expansion do so because they believe in its low-carbon benefits, efficiency, and safety, while those who oppose nuclear power highlight safety concerns, environmental impacts, and nuclear waste management.

Amazon Triples the Size of Its First Nuclear Power Plant 

Big Tech has taken a special interest in nuclear energy over the past year, and Amazon is scaling up its nuclear ambitions. One year after investing in small modular reactor (SMR) developer X-energy, the company has announced plans to triple the size of its planned nuclear power plant in Washington state. The project—the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility—will feature up to 12 of X-energy’s 80-megawatt (MW) high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, and will be built in three phases, eventually totaling 960 MW of capacity. Amazon will fully finance construction, with power supplied to Energy Northwest, which serves the company’s expanding network of data centers in the region. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centers made up 1.5 percent of global electricity demand in 2024, but demand has grown at a rapid pace—12 percent per year in the last five years. By 2030, data center electricity consumption will grow to 15 percent per year, which is “four times faster than the projected growth of total electricity consumption from all other sectors.” With this in mind, Amazon’s decision to scale up the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility highlights the importance of securing long-term, carbon-free power for its operations. Construction is expected to begin by the end of this decade, with operation starting in the 2030s, and will contribute to Amazon’s goal of bringing five gigawatts of new nuclear capacity online in the United States by 2039.

US Army Launches the Janus Next-Generation Nuclear Energy Program

In May of this year, Donald Trump signed the executive order “Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security,” which required the US Army to create a program where nuclear energy could be used for “both installation energy and operational energy.” To fulfill this requirement, the US Army launched the Janus program, a next-generation nuclear power initiative, which will be the third active defense nuclear project. The Janus Program will build on lessons learned from Project Pele, which is a 1.5 MW transportable, gas-cooled reactor that is being built by BWX Technologies at Idaho National Laboratory, and which is expected to begin producing electricity by 2028. Like Project Pele, the Janus program will build microreactors designed to provide resilient power for defense installations. The program will be carried out in collaboration with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and modeled on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which successfully used public-private partnerships and milestone-based contracts to accelerate innovation. With energy dominance being a core focus of the Trump administration and energy security having become a global priority in the last few years, the Janus Program is an important next step in reducing the military’s dependence on civilian energy infrastructure, which has made bases vulnerable to cyber and physical attacks, natural disasters, and other disruptions. The Janus initiative reflects the growing recognition that maintaining military readiness requires energy resilience and that advanced nuclear technology has an important role to play in ensuring the US military remains secure, independent, and mission-ready.

About the Author: Emily Day 

Emily Day is an experienced researcher, writer, and editor with expertise in geopolitics, nuclear energy, and global security. She is an Associate Editor of Energy World and Techland at The National Interest and a Senior Research Associate at Longview Global Advisors, where she provides insights on global political and economic trends with a specialization in utilities, risk, sustainability, and technology. She was previously a Della Ratta Energy and Global Security Fellow at the Partnership for Global Security. 

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