Trump recently became the first President to fire a chairman of the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission that oversees the safety of 94 US commercial nukes.
Only one person now reigns over atomic safety regulation in the United States: Donald Trump.
Trump has personally invested in the latest “nuclear renaissance” being boosted by the “Epstein Billionaire” class.
As part of the atomic push, the Trump Media & Technology group is joining a $6 billion deal with TAE, a California’-based tech scam pushing fusion energy to power future data centers.
https://tae.com/trump-media-and-technology-group-to-merge-with-tae-technologies
Without a hint of concern for an obvious conflict of interest, Trump has also taken full control of the “regulation” of atomic power reactors, fission and fusion, small and large, present and future.
Trump recently became the first President to fire a chairman of the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission that oversees the safety of 94 US commercial nukes.
His long-time Reich-funder Elon Musk used his DOGE campaign to strip the NRC of at least 100 staff, gutting the Commission's bare-bones ability to maintain safety standards at existing reactors, or at the proposed “Small Modular Reactors” now being hyped by billionaire Tech Bros and mainstream politicians across the board.
Trump has issued a stunning of set of “revised” safety regulations that decimate previous already lax requirements.
The new rules hugely raise the quantities of radiation atomic reactors can legally emit into the general environment, and into the bodies of downwind neighbors and on-site workers.
The industry already has a long history of irradiating its work force. In 1970, Dr. John Gofman, first health and safety chief of the Atomic Energy Commission, warned that a reactor fleet then much smaller than today’s might be killing with radioactive emissions not only large numbers of on-site staff, but also some 32,000 downwind civilians every year.
A veteran of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, Gofman spent the rest of his career warning against the massive health impact of a technology he helped birth.
Trump’s newly gutted regulations guarantee a vastly expanded death toll.
The DOGE bloodbath means the already weak Commission will be virtually powerless to even lightly inspect or maintain sound operations at the aging US fleet.
Trump’s firing of a Commission chair, and unilateral imposition of virtually meaningless safety regulations, serve Trump’s short-term personal investments in the industry.
They clearly signal that any NRC employee who dares to report on reactor defects or even immediate dangers at a US nuke site is virtually certain to be ignored and quickly fired.
Emissions from standard operations or a likely accident are now certain to be downplayed by the Trump-run regulatory apparatus.
The NRC even before Trump was notorious for ignoring and purging it own staff, even on serious safety concerns.
Best-known may be Dr. Michael Peck, the Commission’s resident site inspector at California’s infamously dangerous Diablo Canyon reactors.
During his five-year full-time posting at the double-reactor site, which is surrounded by earthquake faults, Peck warned that the aging structures might not withstand a likely seismic shock.
A disaster at Diablo would send apocalyptic radioactive clouds straight into Los Angeles, and could permanently irradiate the entire North American continent.
Rather than order structural changes, the Commission dismissed Peck’s report. Soon thereafter he was gone from the NRC.
Meanwhile Governor Gavin Newsom has backstabbed an agreement he signed in 2018 to phase out the reactors in favor of a widely popular transition to renewables.
Newsom has since fought to guarantee the uninsured reactors are likely to operate at least through 2030, if not longer.
Because of massive heat and radiation emissions, Diablo is in direct violation of state and federal clean water regulations, none of which Trump or Newsom are likely to enforce.
As a result of Diablo’s soaring operating costs, in tandem with Newsom’s all-out attack on a once-booming rooftop solar industry, California’s utility rates are now the highest in the continental US.
Newsom has joined a fleet of Democrat governors in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts and elsewhere that are pushing atomic power.
The hype includes massive commitments to “Small Modular Reactors” which are still in development, and whose delivery schedule remains very much in doubt.
The soaring costs of SMR development have already led to the cancellation of the industry’s first major order, with a company called NuScale. Others are certain to follow.
A definitive study from the CATO Institute, an extreme right-wing free market think tank, essentially predicts that the SMR gambit will never materialize due to its inability to compete with far cheaper, faster-to-build renewables.
https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2025/next-nuclear-renaissance
Ultra-hyped future data and AI centers are being used to justify unlimited commitments to apparently infinite future electricity demand,
Democrats like New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Illinois’s JB Pritzker, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer are all gung-ho.
Whitmer is even pushing the unprecedented re-start of an already dead old reactor at Palisades, on the coast of Lake Michigan. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro is doing the same for Three Mile Island.
Soaring costs and un-affordability in competition with renewables seem to have no bearing. Hochul wants an astonishing $33 billion to keep operating four decrepit New York nukes that can’t begin to compete with renewables.
Hochul has even boasted her new nuclear push comes with a sign-on from Trump Himself.
Without exception all nuclear advocates, Democrat or otherwise, claim the technology is “absolutely safe.” Old or new, small or large, they forever assure the public no harm can come from atomic power.
They fail to mention that seventy years after the first reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, the commercial industry remains uninsured.
And that it's already lax safety regulations have been gutted.
And that now, in the wake of DOGE, the agency meant to enforce them, is in the direct regal domain of Donald Trump.
Author of SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH and co-author of KILLING OUR OWN: THE DISASTER OF AMERICA’S EXPERIENCE WITH ATOMIC RADIATION, Harvey “Sunny" Wasserman co-convenes most Mondays at 2pm PT the Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Zoom (www.grassrootsep.org)
