“Texas generates the most renewable energy in the nation. Three Republican bills being advanced by the state legislature could halt Texas’ green energy progress and give fossil fuels a leg up in the state’s energy market.
Senate Bill 388, which has passed the state Senate, would require at least 50 percent of power generation installed after January 1, 2026, to come from “dispatchable” energy sources, which include natural gas, nuclear power, and coal. This bill effectively subsidizes fossil fuel projects by requiring utility providers to purchase power generation credits from dispatchable energy sources.”
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“A report from Aurora Energy Research estimates that this bill would add $5.2 billion to Texas power prices over the next decade; residents could pay an extra $200 per year in energy costs.”
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“Using the “police power” of the state ignores what regulators and the market are saying: Texas needs every energy source to meet future demand. That includes renewables.”
“Trump’s trade war has also damped the market outlook for nuclear power. While not an energy source that has received as much attention from the president as coal, oil, and natural gas, the Trump administration has dispersed federal financing to a nuclear power plant restart in Michigan. Looming tariffs are forcing Hyundai, one of the project’s construction partners, to look to domestic manufacturers. “Tariffs will have an influence on the total price,” a spokesperson for Hyundai told Bloomberg.
Nearly $8 billion worth of other clean energy projects were canceled or downsized in the first quarter of 2025 because of Trump’s tariffs and federal funding freezes. The Commerce Department recently slapped duties as high as 3,521 percent on Asian solar imports after a yearslong trade investigation. While the announcement may benefit domestic manufacturers, it is sure to slow down the deployment of solar panels in the United States.
Trump promised to unleash American energy. However, the president’s heavy-handed, protectionist approach to trade and domestic production in his first 100 days could end up setting American energy back.”
“the U.S. is heavily reliant on Canadian crude oil to make liquid fuels and other petroleum products. Most U.S. refineries were built in the 1970s to accommodate heavy oil from the Middle East and Canada. This was well before the American shale boom, which brought lighter-grade oil to the market. In 2023, nearly 60 percent of crude imports came from Canada and July 2024 saw a record 4.3 million barrels of oil per day imported from the country.
“Canada is by far our largest supplier, and we build refineries specifically to refine heavier Canadian crude,” explains Nick Loris, the executive vice president of policy at C3 Solutions, a free market energy think tank. “Depending on the tariff rate and how long they’re in place, gas prices could rise anywhere from 10-30 cents per gallon, with the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain Region getting hit the hardest,” Loris tells Reason.”
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“tariffs could also harm American nuclear power. Despite generating the most nuclear energy in the world, the U.S. relies on other nations for uranium to fuel its fleet. Canada is the largest supplier of raw uranium (27 percent of imports in 2022), followed by Kazakhstan (25 percent) and Russia (12 percent), the latter of which the U.S. depends on for roughly a quarter of its uranium enrichment needs.
With last year’s passage of a bill to ban imports of Russian uranium signed into law, Canada is primed to play an increasingly important role in America’s uranium supply. Tariffs would threaten this and could increase fuel costs for American nuclear power producers”
“Alaska is an energy behemoth with massive reserves of oil, natural gas, and petroleum. It also, oddly, faces a looming natural gas shortage—not good for a state where half of electricity production depends on the stuff. The problem is that most natural gas deposits are far from population centers and pipelines to transport the gas don’t yet exist and may never be built. So, to get gas to Alaskans, you need to transport it by ship. But federal law requires that only U.S.-flagged liquid natural gas (LNG) carriers be used, and there aren’t any.”
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“A century ago, Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (better known as the Jones Act) to prop up the country’s shipping industry. The law “among other things, requires shipping between U.S. ports be conducted by US-flag ships,” according to Cornell Law Schools’s Legal Information Institute. The ships must also be built here. So, to move natural gas from one part of Alaska to another, you need American LNG carriers. And here we find another shortage.
“LNG carriers have not been built in the United States since before 1980, and no LNG carriers are currently registered under the U.S. flag,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office found in 2015. And while there’s lots of demand for more LNG carriers for the export market, not just for Alaska, “U.S. carriers would cost about two to three times as much as similar carriers built in Korean shipyards and would be more expensive to operate.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection did make an exception to let foreign LNG carriers transport U.S. natural gas to Puerto Rico earlier this year, but only because the gas was first piped to Mexico before being loaded onto ships. Isolated Alaska doesn’t have that option.”
“Ukraine has said it will not extend the transit agreement with Russian state-owned Gazprom in order to deprive Russia of profits that Kyiv says help to finance the war against it.
Moscow’s suspension of gas for Austria, the main receiver of gas via Ukraine, means Russia will now only supply significant gas volumes to Hungary and Slovakia, in Hungary’s case via a pipeline running mostly through Turkey. In contrast, Russia met 40% of the European Union’s gas needs before Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.”
In a series of panels about promoting North American gas, oil, and uranium energy in ways that will boost the economy and make North America strong and independent vis-a-vis world challenges, people are worried about the effects of Trump’s proposed tariffs which will hurt both countries’ economies and make energy more costly.
“Noah acknowledges, in passing, one particular provision of the existing nuclear regulatory framework on the United States that’s very important: radiation is held to the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) standard, which makes it essentially impossible for nuclear to be cost-competitive.
Suppose I had a design for a cost-effective nuclear reactor, and I said I should be allowed to build it, because electricity is good and air pollution is bad. The regulator is going to look at it and say, “Well, that reactor seems awfully cheap to build, why not add a bunch more features to make the radiation levels even lower?” And then I will say, “That would be hideously expensive in a way that is net bad for public health, because it leads to more burning of fossil fuels and worse air pollution.” But the regulator comes back and says, “We’re not using a cost-benefit framework, we’re using ALARA.” And I say, “That doesn’t make sense, coal ash is radioactive — you are creating more radiation by raising my costs.” And the regulator says, “I don’t regulate coal plants, I regulate you — ALARA!”
As Jason Crawford writes, “any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.”
This is a deeply dysfunctional regulatory paradigm, and it reflects the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s origins in 1974 legislation that was explicitly motivated by a belief that the old Atomic Energy Commission was too friendly to the industry.
In 2019, Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which, among other things, “requires the NRC to develop new processes for licensing nuclear reactors, including staged licensing of advanced nuclear reactors.” The hope of NEIMA’s proponents was to change 45 years of the NRC fundamentally being an agency that says “no” to stuff and make them into an agency that would create a regulatory pathway under which new kinds of nuclear reactors could be licensed and built. And after several years, the NRC did get around to writing the new rules for SMRs, but they came up with an even longer and more cumbersome regulatory process.
Earlier this summer, the ADVANCE Act reiterated Congress’s determination for the NRC to change.
But the NRC staff, to the best of my knowledge, fundamentally does not believe that America’s elected officials genuinely want them to make it faster and cheaper to build nuclear reactors. And one reason they don’t believe it is that even though the Biden administration says lots of pro-nuclear stuff, has plenty of pro-nuclear appointees, signed the ADVANCE Act, and has done a lot to help with SMRs in terms of financing, they still coughed-up an NRC nominee who basically supports the status quo. You need a team of political appointees at the agency who are willing to both drive change and also personally take the heat when change makes people mad. You can’t “just use nuclear, bro.” You need to put people in place to actually drive specific policy change in a way that will let the industry grow and work.
And of course, even if you did that, it might not work.”