All of the Above—Done Seriously
America needs energy that is clean, reliable, and abundant—and we need a lot more of it. Artificial intelligence, reshored manufacturing, and the electrification of transportation are driving the first sustained surge in electricity demand in a generation. Meeting it while cutting emissions isn't a choice between the economy and the environment. It's an engineering and permitting problem, and other countries have already shown it can be solved.
Our approach is genuinely all-of-the-above: build the nuclear power we keep talking ourselves out of, capture the cheap hydropower already sitting in dams we've built, keep scaling solar and wind, and modernize the grid that ties it all together. We don't pretend fossil fuels vanish overnight, and we don't pretend renewables are a fantasy. We build.
If you're serious about clean energy, you have to be serious about nuclear power. It is the single most reliable, scalable source of carbon-free electricity on Earth. It runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, regardless of whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. A single nuclear plant can power a million homes while producing zero carbon emissions during operation. On every objective measure—energy density, reliability, land use, lifecycle emissions—nuclear outperforms or matches every other clean energy source available.
And yet, the United States has essentially stopped building nuclear plants. Not because the technology doesn't work. Not because it's unsafe—modern reactor designs are extraordinarily safe, and nuclear power has the lowest death rate per unit of energy produced of any major power source, including wind and solar. We stopped building them because we made it virtually impossible to build them.
The regulatory and permitting timeline for a new nuclear plant in the United States is staggering. From initial application to commercial operation, the process routinely takes 15 to 20 years and costs billions of dollars more than originally projected. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing process alone can take a decade. Environmental reviews, state permitting, legal challenges, and constantly shifting regulatory requirements pile on top of each other until the economics become untenable. Companies don't avoid nuclear because they think it's a bad idea—they avoid it because the regulatory environment has made it a financial impossibility.
Compare that to France, which built 56 reactors in about 15 years during the 1970s and '80s using standardized designs, and today gets roughly 70% of its electricity from nuclear power with some of the lowest carbon emissions and electricity prices in Europe. South Korea builds reactors on budget and on schedule using the same standardized approach—their APR-1400 design has been successfully deployed domestically and exported internationally. Canada's regulatory framework processes new reactor applications in a fraction of the time ours does. These aren't countries cutting corners on safety. They're countries that figured out you can have rigorous safety standards and a functional permitting process at the same time.
The United States needs to fundamentally reform its approach to nuclear energy. That means streamlining NRC licensing timelines without compromising safety standards. It means adopting standardized reactor designs so that every new plant isn't a one-off engineering project that has to be permitted from scratch. It means creating predictable, transparent regulatory pathways that give companies the confidence to invest billions of dollars without the risk that the goalposts will move mid-construction. And it means fast-tracking the approval process for next-generation reactor technologies—small modular reactors, advanced molten salt designs, and other innovations that American companies have developed but can't deploy in their own country because the regulatory timeline makes it financially irrational.
This isn't about deregulation for its own sake. Safety has to remain paramount—nuclear power demands it. But there is an enormous difference between rigorous safety oversight and a bureaucratic process so slow and unpredictable that it effectively bans new construction. Other countries have proven that you can maintain world-class safety records while actually building plants. We should learn from what works, adopt standardized timelines and designs, and unleash what is arguably America's greatest untapped clean energy resource.
Some of the cheapest, fastest clean energy available is sitting in infrastructure we have already built. The United States has more than 92,000 dams, but only about 3 percent of them generate electricity. Retrofitting the suitable non-powered dams could add on the order of 12 gigawatts of clean, dependable power to the grid—enough for millions of homes—without damming a single new river. Because the dam already exists, a retrofit is typically cheaper and faster to bring online than a new power plant, and it avoids the enormous ecological impact of a new impoundment.
We should direct a serious federal evaluation of America's non-powered dams to identify the best candidates for hydroelectric retrofits, streamline permitting for genuinely low-impact projects, and move the strongest ones forward. We should also invest in "uprating" existing hydropower plants—upgrading decades-old turbines with modern, more efficient equipment to squeeze more clean power from dams already in service. Not every dam is a candidate, and some aging dams are better repaired or removed than powered. But studying the opportunity and building the ones that make sense is a low-risk, common-sense clean-energy win.
Here at home, we need smart energy policy that doesn't pretend fossil fuels will disappear overnight but also doesn't pretend renewable energy is some far-off fantasy. Solar, wind, and nuclear energy are real, they work, and they create jobs. Solar and wind are now among the cheapest sources of new electricity ever built, and paired with rapidly falling battery-storage costs they can carry a growing share of the load. We should keep scaling them—starting with the places we’ve barely touched: the rooftops of warehouses, big-box stores, and strip malls; canopies over parking lots; and land that genuinely can’t grow food, and offshore where it makes sense. What we should not do is pave over good farmland. Putting a low, wall-to-wall solar field on prime cropland takes it out of production for 25 to 30 years or more, at a time when the country and the world can least afford to lose it—and we should be just as honest that intermittent sources need reliable, always-on partners like nuclear and hydro to keep the lights on around the clock.
The goal isn't to pick winners from Washington. It's to let clean, reliable power compete and win by clearing away the permitting bottlenecks, interconnection backlogs, and red tape that slow every kind of project—renewable and nuclear alike. The countries that figure out clean energy first will dominate the next century's economy. There's no reason that shouldn't be us.
None of this matters if the power can't get where it's needed. America's transmission grid is aging, congested, and badly in need of expansion—and the single biggest bottleneck for new clean energy today isn't generation, it's the years-long backlog of projects waiting to connect. Hundreds of gigawatts of solar, wind, and storage are stuck in interconnection queues, and major new transmission lines routinely take a decade or more to permit across multiple states and jurisdictions.
We should treat the grid as the critical national infrastructure it is: streamline the permitting of high-voltage transmission lines that cross state lines, fix the interconnection process so shovel-ready projects aren't stranded for years, and invest in grid hardening and modern technology—advanced conductors, storage, and smart controls—to make the system more reliable and more resilient against extreme weather and physical threats. Building generation without building the wires to carry it is like manufacturing cars with nowhere to drive them.