Vission / est. 2026
Nuclear is the cleanest, most reliable electricity we know how to make. The plants we already have. The small and advanced reactors coming next. The fuel to run them, the rules that set the pace, and fusion on the far horizon. Cheaper to run. Steadier. Made here. Let's build all of it.
01 — At the pump
You can't fill a tank from a reactor. But you can drive on one.
About half of what you pay at the pump is the price of crude oil, set on a world market that moves with every war, embargo and OPEC meeting.1, 2
Electricity can go the same way. When natural gas spiked in 2022, the average U.S. home electricity price rose 11% in one year, mostly from fuel costs at power plants.3
A reactor is different. Fuel is a small share of its cost: double the price of uranium and its electricity costs roughly a tenth more. At a gas plant, fuel can be about 90% of the running cost.4
Reactors on fuel bought years ahead and stored on site. Cars and heat pumps on that electricity. A bill that can stop following the news from the Gulf.
The pump
½
of the price of gasoline is crude oil
Set on a world market you don't get a vote on.1
The electric bill
+11%
average U.S. home electricity price, 2022
In one year, mostly from fuel costs at power plants.3
Per mile
~40%
the cost to drive on electricity vs. gasoline
About 5¢ a mile at 2025 home rates vs. about 13¢ on gasoline at July 2026 prices.5
02 — Cleaner than what we burn
Coal & gas
Particulates, sulfur, mercury. Peer-reviewed estimates put early deaths from fossil-fuel air pollution in the millions a year worldwide.8 Leaked methane traps roughly 80 times more heat than CO₂ over twenty years.7
Nuclear
That plume is water vapor. Byron, Illinois: two reactors in farmland that is still farmland. Lifecycle emissions about 12 g of CO₂ per kWh, against roughly 490 for gas and 820 for coal.7
Photo: Bill Tracey, CC BY 2.0
Counting accidents and air pollution together, nuclear is about as safe per unit of energy as wind and solar, and hundreds of times safer than coal.6 Three of Texas's four reactors ran straight through the February 2021 freeze; the fourth tripped and was back on the grid in about two days.9
03 — Made here
A reactor refuels every 18 to 24 months, and a 1,000-megawatt unit goes through about 20 tonnes of fuel a year, bought years ahead and kept on site.12 Nobody can blockade a tanker that isn't coming.
The gap is upstream. In 2024 about a fifth of the enrichment work U.S. reactors bought came from Russia.13 Congress banned Russian uranium imports in May 2024, with waivers that wind down by 2028.14 Most advanced reactors need HALEU, uranium enriched to between 5 and 20%; the first 20 kilograms made in America in decades came out of a demonstration cascade in Piketon, Ohio, in November 2023, and 900 kilograms had been delivered by mid-2025.14 Australia, Kazakhstan and Canada hold about half of the world's known uranium.15 The ore is in friendly ground. The enrichment is the work still to do.
04 — The whole field
"Fission" on the masthead is a starting point, not a boundary. Here is the field as it stands, with what has actually happened and when, so you can tell the built from the planned from the hoped-for.
Light-water fleet
94 reactors made about 19% of U.S. electricity in 2024, at a capacity factor above 90%.10 The NRC has already cleared more than a dozen of them to run for 80 years.16 Power uprates approved since 1977 add up to more than 6,500 megawatts, the output of several new reactors, without pouring a new foundation.17
Status: built, running, extendable.
Small modular reactors
The NRC certified its first SMR design in January 2023 and approved a larger 77-megawatt version in May 2025.18 Canada licensed construction of the first SMR at Darlington, Ontario, in April 2025; the NRC issued the first U.S. construction permit for the same design at Clinch River, Tennessee, in September 2026.19
Status: designs approved, first units in construction, none yet generating in North America.
Molten salt & Gen IV
Oak Ridge ran a molten salt reactor from 1965 to 1969.20 In December 2023 the NRC issued its first construction permit for a non-water-cooled reactor in more than 50 years, a salt-cooled test unit in Oak Ridge; in September 2024, the first for a liquid-fuelled reactor, a 1-megawatt research unit at a Texas university.20 In March 2026, a permit for a sodium-cooled power reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming.21 The international Gen IV roadmap names six such systems.22
Status: permits, not power plants, so far.
Fast reactors & recycling
Idaho's EBR-II fast reactor ran from 1964 to 1994 with its own on-site recycling.23 Spent fuel leaving a reactor today is roughly 95% uranium and about 1% plutonium; France recovers both at La Hague and reuses them.23 America has the technology and does not use it.
Status: proven in the 20th century, idle in the 21st.
Microreactors, ships, space
Three test microreactors reached first (zero-power) criticality under Department of Energy authorization between June 4 and July 1, 2026.24 The Navy counts more than 162 million miles and 6,900 reactor-years without a reactor accident.25 NASA ground-tested a one-kilowatt space fission reactor in 2018, and radioisotope generators have powered both Mars rovers and the Voyagers since 1977.26
Status: test reactors critical; commercial units not yet.
Fusion: the long bet
No fusion power plant exists, and none is under construction. On 5 December 2022 the National Ignition Facility got 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy from 2.05 megajoules of laser light, the first laboratory ignition; the lasers themselves drew far more from the wall. Its record stood at 8.6 megajoules in April 2025.27 ITER's 2024 schedule puts research operation at 2034 and full deuterium-tritium runs at 2039.28 The NRC published a proposed licensing framework for fusion machines in February 2026.29
Status: worth funding. Not worth waiting for.
Heat, not just power
Industry burns gas for heat as much as for electricity. A chemical plant on the Texas coast has applied to build four high-temperature reactors, about 80 megawatts electric and 200 thermal each, to raise its process steam; the NRC's safety and environmental reviews were complete by October 2026, with the permit decision pending.30 The datacenter story is below.
Status: first permit under review.
05 — Datacenters
A typical AI datacenter draws about as much electricity as 100,000 households; the largest under construction, about twenty times that.31 Datacenters used about 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and could reach 7 to 12% by 2028.32 Plug that into the public grid and everyone's bill goes up. A better pattern is already on paper: pay for the reactor.
Deals are not electrons: the two running plants above keep running, and none of the restarts or new reactors is generating yet. But the principle is right. If you want to build the future, power it yourself, cleanly, without sending the bill to the family next door.
06 — Three things you've heard
Isn't the waste an unsolvable nightmare?
All the spent fuel from seventy years of American nuclear power, about 90,000 metric tons, would fit on one football field stacked less than ten yards high.37 It sits in steel-and-concrete casks you can stand next to, and most of it is uranium that could be used again.23 The waste from coal and gas goes into the air.
Photo: NRC, CC BY 2.0
Isn't it dangerous? Remember Three Mile Island.
No deaths or injuries were attributed to the Three Mile Island accident.38 At Fukushima, the UN's radiation committee found no health effects among residents that could be attributed to radiation; Japan's government has compensated a small number of workers' cancers, including one death, under its occupational rules.39 Counted per unit of energy, nuclear is about as safe as wind and solar.6
Isn't it too expensive?
Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia, finished in 2023 and 2024, cost more than $30 billion, partly because they were the first American reactors built from scratch in more than thirty years.40 South Korea, which kept building the same design, is the one country whose reactor construction costs fell over decades instead of rising.41 Fleets get cheaper. One-offs don't.
08 — The ask
Support for nuclear is near a record: 61% of Americans in favor in 2025, up in both parties.47 The policy is behind the public. Five fixes:
Palisades in Michigan has been refuelled and is working toward the first restart of a closed American plant; Three Mile Island Unit 1 is targeted for 2027.34, 48 Bring back every plant that can come back, and license sound plants to 80 years.16
Order the same design by the dozen, built by the same crews, so the tenth is cheaper than the first. That is how France and South Korea did it.41
The ADVANCE Act of 2024, an 18-month decision deadline ordered in May 2025, and the NRC's technology-neutral Part 53 rule finalized in March 2026 are the start.49 Now hold the agency, and the applicants, to the dates.
Finish the enrichment and HALEU capacity the 2024 import ban assumes, so no adversary holds our fuel supply.13, 14
Fast reactors, recycling and fusion deserve steady money and plain labels: proven, demonstrated, or not yet. Overselling the far horizon costs the near one.
09 — Go deeper
Figures are rounded and written as "about" on purpose; each one was checked against the source listed and was current when written in November 2026. Where a project is a permit, an agreement or a target rather than a running plant, the text says so. Corrections are welcome; a contact channel is coming. See also Legal.