I'm Peter Van Doren, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of the quarterly regulation.

And I'm David Kemp, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

Today, Peter and I are going to talk about nuclear power.

Nuclear power seems to pop up in the news over and over again.

And there's a lot of support and discussion about nuclear and the role can play in America's energy future.

This takes a lot of different forms in recent years.

There have been a lot of major deals between large tech companies like Amazon and Google and small nuclear startups.

There's been government support for nuclear through subsidies.

Recently, there was a series of executive orders from President Trump, signaling that he

is taking the role and expansion of nuclear power very seriously.

And prior to that, the Biden administration and the Congress in 2024 passed, in this word, you'll find strange, bipartisan

legislation to, again, modify the rules at the NRC and, quote, speed things up, right?

There's a perception on both the left and the right that the NRC is the source of difficulty in the

lack of commercial success of nuclear power. And by golly, both sides want to speed things up

and get rid of the NRC, or not get rid of, but to streamline.

Streamline, make sure it's not in the way, right?

And not just the Trumpsters, but also the prior administration and 88 senators in Congress.

I mean, you don't get 88 senators voting for things much, except to adjourn.

And so today we're trying to go through the puzzle of, okay, well, everyone disagrees on

everything in Washington, except now both the left and the right are pro-nuke.

So what's going on?

And I think outside of Cato in the libertarian sphere, bipartisan support is often a good thing.

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