A lot of policy changes regarding energy are happening very quickly around the world, according to Robert Bryce of Substack.com. They are especially changing in regard to nuclear energy. “The politics and policies around nuclear energy have shifted faster than at any other period in the post-Chernobyl era,” said Bryce.

“Germany, the world’s long-time anti-nuclear poster child, just did a screeching U-turn. Under its new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, Germany will cooperate with France and treat nuclear as a “green” power source under EU regulations. The move comes just 25 months after Germany took its last three nuclear plants offline. As one German official said, the move is a ‘sea-change policy shift.’”

The announcement from Berlin came just days after Belgium’s federal parliament voted by a large majority to repeal a 2003 law mandating the phase out of nuclear energy and banning the construction of new reactors.

On May 20, Bryce reported that the Danish government announced it was reconsidering its ban on nuclear power, which has been in place since 1985. The country’s former prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told the Financial Times, “Wind and solar are good as long as you have wind and sunshine. But you have to have a non-fossil base-load and it’s ridiculous to exclude nuclear power.”

On May 13, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey (a Democrat) announced a plan to repeal a state law passed by voters in 1982. Healey’s administration is pointing to a recent report by ISO New England, which found that nuclear power can reduce emissions more cheaply than wind and solar.

Further, the move comes as offshore wind, which a few months ago was the darling of East Coast Democrats, is slowly sinking under the weight of market realities and political headwinds, said Bryce.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis (a Democrat) signed a bill into law that allows nuclear to count as a “clean” resource to meet the state’s decarbonization mandates. “Polis signed the bill despite his 2019 campaign promise to run the state solely on wind, solar, batteries, and a soupçon of fairy dust.”

Bryce went on to say, “I wrote about the challenges facing the nuclear renaissance in the US and gave five reasons why the US won’t be able to quadruple the size of its reactor fleet by 2050.” He said he stands by that statement. “Nothing about the nuclear comeback will be cheap, quick, or easy. . . . new reactors cost too much, building them takes too long, there are too many reactor designs, and the US has to develop domestic sources of nuclear fuel.”

But it’s also apparent that the politics of nuclear is changing like never before. “Politics leads policy,” said Bryce, “And now, in heavily Democratic states and in European countries where nuclear bans have been in place for decades, politicians are changing their rhetoric and their policies.”

This tectonic shift will gain momentum when the White House releases four executive orders on nuclear power, which sources tell me will be released later this week. The orders will be the most consequential endorsements of nuclear energy by a US president since Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Atoms For Peace speech in 1953.

Bryce said that a draft of the White House release proclaims that the US is losing the race to deploy new reactors and that China has announced plans to:

“Bring 200 new gigawatts of nuclear power online by 2035, at which point its total nuclear output will more than double that of the United States. Further, as American development of new reactor designs has waned, 87% of nuclear reactors installed worldwide since 2017 are based on Russian and Chinese designs. These trends cannot continue. Swift and decisive action is required to jump-start America’s nuclear renaissance and ensure our national and economic security by increasing fuel availability, enabling research and development, and preparing our workforce.”

The order assesses the situation in the US, stating, “Between 1954 and 1978, the United States licensed 135 civilian nuclear reactors at 81 power plants. Since 1978, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authorized only five new reactors, and of these, only two have been built. It charges applicants by the hour to process license applications, with prolonged timelines that maximize fees, throttling American nuclear power development. The NRC has refused to license new reactors even as significant technological advances promise to make nuclear power safer, cheaper, more adaptable, and more abundant than ever.”

The same order directs the agency to “undertake a wholesale revision of its regulations.”