The Problem

Most energy experts agree that a carbon-free grid needs nuclear power. If the transition from fossil fuels were to rely only on renewable power sources like solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal, it would consume vast amounts of land and water, require dramatically increased mining for critical materials, and generate environmental damage that would threaten public health and provoke political resistance. Nuclear is a proven carbon-free power source that runs around the clock at the scale a modern economy demands. America needs it, but the country cannot build it today.

China has 36 reactors under construction, about half the world's total, and is moving fast on small modular reactors, or SMRs, factory-built reactors small enough to fit on a few acres. South Korea has completed eight large-scale reactors in the past decade, four at home and four for the UAE, and is competing for contracts across the Middle East and Europe.

Meanwhile, the United States recently finished its first reactors built from scratch in a generation, two new units at Vogtle, in Georgia. They cost $35 billion, more than double the original budget, and took seven years longer than planned, even though they were an addition to an existing plant. The first planned American SMR, NuScale's Carbon Free Power Project, was canceled when costs spiraled and local utilities abandoned the initiative. No American SMR is running yet. The first construction permit for one, TVA's Clinch River plant in Tennessee, was issued in September 2026.

The number of certified American nuclear suppliers has collapsed 80 percent since the 1980s. Roughly a quarter of American reactor fuel has been enriched in Russia. Congress banned Russian uranium imports in 2024, but waivers let some shipments continue through 2027, and Russia has cut off its own exports to the United States until then. The one large enrichment plant on American soil, Urenco's in New Mexico, is expanding, though its output still falls short of Russian supply.

The reactors work. The failures have come from how they get built, with fragmented contracts and no accountability, designs that change mid-construction, no guaranteed buyers, no industrial supply chain, and a regulatory process that takes years to approve what other countries approve in months.

The Three Types of Reactor

Type	Output	Size	What It Powers	Status
Full-size	1,000-1,400 MW	Large industrial facility	A million+ homes, entire regions	Proven. Hundreds operating worldwide. The U.S. has 94.
Small modular reactor (SMR)	50-300 MW	Fits on a few acres, factory-built and shipped to site	A military base, a data center campus, a small city	Russia and China have operating units. The U.S. has none running yet. The first construction permit was issued in 2026.
Microreactor	1-20 MW	Fits on a truck or railcar	A remote base, a mine, a small community	Experimental. The DOD's first prototype (Project Pele) is expected to generate power as soon as 2028.

The Mission

The Mission for America will safely and rapidly build a new nuclear fleet to provide clean, cheap, around-the-clock energy for everyday life and for the hardest parts of the shift away from fossil fuels. The work will create hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs across the economy, along with nuclear education and research programs that will serve the country for decades.

The Department of Defense will build and operate the first wave of reactors. The military already possesses deep expertise in safely operating nuclear facilities, and building on bases clears the obstacles of speed, security, and siting that have stalled civilian construction.

Several full-size reactors will go up on select military bases, each one powering millions of homes and businesses across its region. The president will personally guarantee that at least one will be switched on and delivering power to the grid within their first term. The world record for building a full-size reactor is 39 months, shorter than a single 48-month presidential term, but the major components take two to three years to manufacture, so the work cannot wait for Inauguration Day. Sites will be scouted and construction partners lined up during the campaign and transition, the contracts and long-lead component orders will go out in the administration's opening months, and construction will start right behind them. Many will say this is impossible. It will be one of the clearest proofs that America can build again, and a key to the MFA president achieving the momentum for reelection.

A separate set of bases will be a proving ground for more compact, advanced reactor technologies. Small modular reactors will provide power and resilience for individual bases, or nearby industrial facilities. Microreactors will power remote installations the grid has never reached. Once the first builds prove the designs, a larger industry of small and microreactors will follow.

The workforce needs are large, and the Mission will invest in nuclear labor of all kinds. The Navy's reactor operator pipeline, the same one that has trained submarine crews for generations, will be expanded to feed the first wave of operators. Hundreds of thousands of new construction workers will be trained to lay the foundations of the plants, while a carbon-to-nuclear trades pipeline will move welders, pipefitters, and electricians out of declining industries and into higher-paying, longer-lasting careers in the sector. A new network of national nuclear education programs, modeled on South Korea's dedicated nuclear universities, will train the next generation of operators and engineers.

Upstream, the Mission will rebuild and expand the nuclear industrial base so the country no longer depends on foreign suppliers. A national heavy forging facility will produce reactor components currently available only from Japan, South Korea, and China. New American uranium enrichment plants will supply both the standard reactor fuel the traditional plants need and the higher-enriched fuel small reactors require, which almost no country outside Russia makes commercially today. Component factories will rebuild the supplier base for pumps, steam generators, and specialty materials that has atrophied since the 1980s.

In addition, every reactor currently running today will produce more. Equipment upgrades, better fuel, and improved monitoring will add the equivalent of several new reactors' worth of clean power from the existing fleet.

Finally, the country will have a working answer to the waste problem. A new National Nuclear Waste Corporation, sitting outside the Department of Energy and outside the annual budget process, will have direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund that Americans have already paid for and that Congress has frozen for decades. A consolidated short-term storage facility will hold spent fuel at a single site, hosted by a community that volunteers for the job and is well rewarded for it, with a binding benefit agreement that guarantees good local jobs, a direct share of the revenue, and federal infrastructure investment for the town. A permanent underground repository will follow on a longer timeline.

Every country that has expanded nuclear power quickly and cheaply picked a design, standardized it, and built the reactors over and over in batches. France licensed an American Westinghouse design and built 34 nearly identical reactors, then moved to an improved design for the next batch once that fleet was running. South Korea and China each have two standards. The United States has done the opposite, funding many designs, building one of each, letting every utility customize, and watching costs never come down.

The RFC, working with DOD, will select one design for full-size reactors and one for SMRs and standardize each across the government fleet. Microreactors are new enough that several designs will compete first, as they already do in the Army's program, and the fleet will standardize on the ones that prove themselves. Private companies will remain free to build other designs with their own money, but the federal buildout will concentrate on the chosen designs. Each fleet order will go to a single contractor at a fixed price, with the vendor putting up 15 to 20 percent equity so that the company pays for cost overruns. The design must be finished before construction starts and frozen for the duration of the fleet order, with the option to adopt an improved design for the next batch once the first is built and the lessons are in. An independent program manager, separate from the contractor, will report to the RFC.

Solutions

Solution 1: The Military Nuclear Fleet

The Department of Defense will build and operate all three sizes of reactor on military bases, with full-size plants for the power grid and small modular reactors and microreactors for the bases themselves and on-site industrial uses. The military will take on the first-mover risk no private utility will accept and drive costs down through repetition.

The military is already moving in this direction. A May 2025 executive order put the Army in charge of military nuclear energy and set a deadline of a working reactor on a military base by September 2028. The first prototype, a small microreactor called Project Pele built by BWXT, broke ground at Idaho National Lab in September 2024. Its fuel has been delivered, and it is expected to generate electricity as soon as 2028. In August 2026 the Army's Janus program awarded up to $2.2 billion to five companies to build microreactors at five bases: Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Hood, Fort Benning, and Fort Drum.

Full-Size Reactors

On Day One, the RFC will select a proven full-size reactor design, and the Westinghouse AP1000 is the obvious first choice. It is an American design, already certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and already operating, with two units running in the United States and four more in China.

Westinghouse is a private company, and the AP1000 is its proprietary design. The RFC will negotiate a fleet licensing agreement as part of the first order. Westinghouse will license the design to the military fleet and provide engineering support, and in return it will get the largest reactor order in American history. The agreement will include terms for the second fleet order, when RFC-financed utilities begin building their own AP1000s. Westinghouse has strong reasons to cooperate. A government commitment to build 3-4 reactors immediately, with a larger utility buildout to follow, is the commercial opportunity the company has been waiting for since Vogtle nearly destroyed it. If negotiations stall, the administration has options. The Defense Production Act allows the government to compel production and licensing of critical defense materials, and 28 U.S.C. § 1498 permits the government to use any patented invention for government purposes, with the patent holder entitled to reasonable compensation but unable to block the project. The goal is a willing partnership, and the timeline will hold either way.

The president will declare nuclear construction a national emergency and order the first 3-4 full-size reactors built on military bases. Not every base qualifies. The site must have access to a major water source for cooling, such as a river, lake, or coastline. The AP1000's passive safety systems handle emergency cooling without pumps, but normal operations still require a large, reliable water supply. Proximity to existing high-voltage transmission lines is preferred. Bases farther from them can still qualify, as the MFA Clean Power Mission will be constructing new lines across the entire country. A base that sits along the route of a planned transmission corridor could be an ideal anchor for new lines. Where new or upgraded transmission is needed, the Emergency Nuclear Deployment Act will streamline permitting under the same emergency authority. Utilities that volunteer to connect military reactors to their grid will receive RFC support for planning and executing the upgrades, as detailed in the Clean Power chapter.

The AP1000 was designed for modular construction, with 342 pre-assembled modules that can be built in factories while foundation and civil works proceed on-site. This parallel approach is what makes an aggressive timeline possible.

Speed requires buying from abroad. The major components that set the construction timeline, the reactor pressure vessel, steam generators, and heavy forgings, take two to three years to manufacture. Chinese factories have direct AP1000 production experience from building the Sanmen and Haiyang units and currently produce about 10 sets of major reactor components per year. Korean and Japanese factories add more capacity. By placing orders with all three countries on day one and running site preparation in parallel, the first components can arrive within 18-24 months, roughly a year faster than relying on any single country's supply chain. The Mission will buy abroad while it builds domestic capacity. The national heavy forging facility and component factories in Solution 2 will supply later fleet orders, but the first reactors cannot wait.

South Korea's nuclear construction firms, among the best in the world, will partner on the first builds, bringing experienced construction managers, engineers, and quality control teams to train American crews. France did the same in the 1970s. It brought in American expertise, and within a decade was building reactors faster and cheaper than anyone.

South Korea's experience shows that every time you double the number of reactors built, costs drop by about a third. A second, larger fleet order will follow based on performance and cost data from the first builds, and that is when RFC-financed utilities will begin building their own reactors.

SMRs and Microreactors: Prove It, Then Open It Up

Full-size reactors power regions. SMRs and microreactors power individual sites, such as a military base, a data center, a mine, or a remote community that will never get a grid connection. They are small enough to factory-build and ship, and they go where full-size plants cannot.

Russia and China have a handful of operating small reactors. Russia's floating reactor Akademik Lomonosov has been running since 2020, and China connected its HTR-PM to the grid in 2021. The United States has none running. NuScale's project collapsed when costs spiraled, and the first American construction permit for an SMR came only in September 2026, for TVA's Clinch River plant. The technology works, but America has not yet built one.

The DOD will build and operate the RFC's selected SMR design, and the microreactor designs competing on its bases, the same way it runs the full-size fleet. The RFC will select from existing private-sector designs, since companies like BWXT, which is already building the Project Pele microreactor, are years ahead of anything the government could develop from scratch. The company will keep its design, but as a condition of the contract, the RFC will negotiate broad licensing rights. In exchange for being the anchor customer that funds the first builds and absorbs the risk, the government will secure the right to license the proven design to other manufacturers.

Once a design is proven on military bases, those licensing rights will take effect. Other qualified manufacturers will be able to build the design under license, paying a royalty to the original designer. That will keep any single company from becoming a bottleneck. Multiple manufacturers will compete on execution, driving costs down and production up. Data centers, remote communities, industrial facilities, and allied nations will all get access to proven American reactor designs.

Why Military Ownership

Military ownership solves three problems at once.

First, speed. The military trains specialized workforces fast, and the same institution that produces nuclear submarine crews in 18 months can train reactor construction teams. Site preparation can begin under DOD authority while licensing is finalized, without years-long siting disputes on federal land.

Second, security. Nuclear plants require armed perimeter security, restricted airspace, and extensive background checks for all personnel. Military bases already have all of this. Building on a base means the security infrastructure is in place on day one, saving the enormous cost of building it from scratch.

Third, politics. The first reactors go on bases in energy-poor regions, including red states. The president who orders them gets to turn them on and lower electricity prices for entire regions.

How These Reactors Get Regulated

The NRC is the safety regulator for every reactor that sells power to the public grid. That does not change under this plan. These plants will power millions of homes, and the public has a right to independent safety oversight.

But the NRC's current licensing process was designed for one-off utility projects. A full review takes years, even for a design the NRC has already certified. The plan will keep the NRC and remove the redundant steps.

Congress will pass an Emergency Nuclear Deployment Act with five provisions.

1. Brings military reactors that sell grid power under NRC authority through an expedited pathway, in which the NRC confirms the existing design certification (the AP1000 is already certified) and then reviews and licenses only the specific site
2. Requires the NRC to complete this process within 18 months for pre-certified designs on federal land
3. Streamlines environmental review under NEPA. A standard Environmental Impact Statement takes 2-5 years for nuclear projects. For pre-certified reactor designs on existing federal land, the Act will establish a categorical exclusion or expedited environmental assessment, completed within the 18-month licensing window. Environmental review will still happen, but it cannot take longer than the construction it is reviewing.
4. Gives DOD clear authority to sell nuclear power to the civilian grid (existing law lets military bases sell power they generate, but whether that covers nuclear is unsettled)
5. Extends federal nuclear accident insurance (the Price-Anderson Act) to DOD-operated reactors of all sizes

For SMRs and microreactors that power only the base and do not sell to the grid, the military regulates its own reactors the way the Navy has regulated submarine reactors for more than 70 years.

Once a grid-connected reactor is operating, the NRC has the same inspection and enforcement authority it has over any civilian plant. The military will operate the plants, and the NRC will make sure they are safe.

Congress and the White House are already moving in this direction. The 2026 defense budget bill created a Pentagon lead for nuclear energy, a role the Army now holds, and ordered a working group to identify pilot projects. A separate Navy pilot program must report on what stands in the way of selling military nuclear power to civilian grids. A May 2025 executive order gave the NRC 18 months to approve or deny new reactor applications, the NRC finalized new licensing rules for advanced reactors in March 2026, and in April 2026 it proposed a rule that would fast-track reviews for reactor designs the military or DOE has already vetted.

Operations and Scale-Up

The military will own and operate the plants. Each reactor will sell power directly to the grid at wholesale rates, the same way any power plant does. A typical AP1000 produces about 1,100 megawatts. The base itself might use 50-200 megawatts. The rest, the large majority, will go to the surrounding region, lowering electricity prices for millions of homes and businesses. Revenue will flow into a dedicated fund that sustains the nuclear program, so it does not compete with aircraft carriers and fighter jets for annual defense appropriations. The permanent governance structure, whether DOD keeps operating the fleet or it moves to an RFC subsidiary or a new federal power corporation, will be decided based on operational experience.

The delivery rules, called the "American Delivery Model," will apply to every RFC-financed project.

1. One contractor, one price. A single fixed-price contract. No more fragmented multi-prime failures like Vogtle.
2. Vendor skin in the game. The reactor company puts up 15-20 percent equity. If costs overrun, the company loses the money.
3. Design finished before construction starts. Vogtle broke ground with the design barely past the preliminary stage, estimated at only 10-20 percent complete.
4. Design freeze for the fleet order. No modifications until the fleet order is complete, with an improved design allowed for the next batch.
5. Independent oversight. A program management firm independent of the contractor reports to the RFC.

From expensive first builds to cheap repeat builds. The first reactors off the line will be the most expensive. Drawing on the construction-cost record of the countries that have built nuclear in batches, France and South Korea above all, experts project the first units at roughly $89-150 per megawatt-hour, against something like $40-70 for natural gas today, with costs expected to fall toward $60-95 by the fifth through seventh unit as the workforce and supply chain mature. These are projections, and the actual figures will move with build data, but costs have fallen steeply everywhere nuclear has been built at scale. The Department of Defense will absorb the early premium as the price of grid resilience and energy security. As costs fall, RFC-financed utilities will begin building their own full-size units on the same design, workforce, and supply chain, licensed SMR and microreactor designs will enter the commercial market, and a targeted, fully refundable nuclear production tax credit, paid through direct pay, will cover any remaining gap.

What this delivers: 3-4 military-built full-size units and 5-10 SMRs/microreactors in the first fleet order, with utility-led expansion to follow. The industrial capacity, proven designs, and trained workforce to scale clean, always-on power for decades to come.

The Next Generation of Reactors

Proven reactors carry the Mission, but the United States should not leave the next generation of the technology to its rivals. China now leads the world in advanced reactor research. In 2025 its experimental thorium molten-salt reactor in the Gansu desert became the first machine anywhere to convert thorium into usable nuclear fuel while running. Thorium is abundant, leaves behind less long-lived waste, and is harder to turn into a weapon. Molten-salt designs promise high-temperature heat and strong passive safety, and because they need no river or coastline to cool them, they can be sited in the dry, energy-poor interior where many of the Mission's military bases already sit. None of it is ready to power a grid. China's reactor is a two-megawatt experiment, and a commercial version is decades off, so it changes nothing about how the Mission builds clean power this decade, which will rely entirely on reactors that already work. But the RFC will fund a national advanced-reactor research program, thorium and molten salt included, as a deliberate long-horizon bet, so that when the next generation is ready it runs on American designs.

Solution 2: Rebuilding the Industrial Base

The RFC will rebuild the domestic nuclear supply chain on four fronts.

• Uranium fuel production. Fuel poses two separate problems. For the AP1000 fleet, standard reactor fuel (enriched to about 5%) is available from allied suppliers. Urenco operates an enrichment plant in New Mexico and has facilities across Europe, and France's Orano adds more capacity. The first fleet order will not depend on Russian fuel. But many SMR and microreactor designs require a more concentrated fuel called HALEU (enriched to 5-20%), which currently has almost no commercial production outside Russia. The investment will build domestic enrichment capacity for both standard fuel and HALEU, so that neither the fleet buildout nor the SMR program depends on foreign suppliers long-term. The RFC will guarantee demand directly through a multi-year HALEU purchase commitment that gives enrichers a reliable buyer no private customer can offer, and where that is not enough, it will build the centrifuge capacity itself through a government-owned, contractor-operated plant run by an experienced enricher such as Centrus or Urenco. The target is a first domestic HALEU line operating within four years, with standard-fuel capacity scaled in parallel, so the SMR program never stalls for fuel and the fleet reaches full independence from foreign enrichment by the second fleet order.
• A national heavy forging facility. The massive steel components at the core of a reactor, pressure vessels and steam-generator forgings weighing hundreds of tons, can currently be made only in Japan, South Korea, and China, because they require some of the largest forging presses on earth, of which only a handful exist worldwide. The first reactors will use imported components while the RFC builds the domestic capacity directly, on the Defense Plant Corporation model, as a government-owned, contractor-operated heavy-forging plant, with the RFC financing the ultra-large press and an experienced operator running it. Standing up a press of this size is itself a multi-year build, so the RFC will order it in the opening months, the same day the first foreign component orders go out, and the facility is operational by the time the second fleet order begins and every reactor after the first wave is forged on American soil. The Natural Resources chapter addresses the broader critical mineral supply chains.
• Component manufacturing. Pumps, steam generators, electronics, and specialty materials. The certified supplier base has collapsed from roughly 500 companies in the 1970s and 1980s to about 100 today.
• Workforce training. Hundreds of thousands of new workers across several pipelines:
  • Construction trades. Welders, pipefitters, electricians. Workers at coal and gas plants are the natural pipeline, because their skills transfer directly to nuclear construction. Moving them into nuclear will redirect an existing skilled workforce into higher-paying, longer-lasting careers.
  • Factory workers. For new fuel fabrication plants, component factories, and SMR assembly lines. Closer to aerospace manufacturing than traditional construction.
  • Licensed operators and nuclear engineers. A National Nuclear Academy, modeled on South Korea's dedicated nuclear universities, will produce the licensed professionals the industry needs. The military will speed this up, since the Navy already trains nuclear reactor operators in 18-24 months. The same pipeline, expanded, will supply the first wave of operators for the military fleet.
  • Nuclear construction managers. The hardest bottleneck. You can train a welder in three years. Experienced managers who can run a multi-billion-dollar nuclear construction project take a decade or more to develop. The Vogtle project, for all its failures, produced a generation of managers who understand exactly what went wrong. They will be the core of the fleet buildout's management.

Solution 3: Solving the Waste Problem

The United States has about 95,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel sitting at more than 70 sites across 39 states. The federal government was legally required to start accepting it in 1998. It has not accepted a single fuel assembly. Taxpayers had paid $11.1 billion in damages to utilities for the broken promise through 2024, with an estimated $37.6 to $44.5 billion in liability still growing.

A $51 billion Nuclear Waste Fund, paid for by utility customers specifically to solve this problem, sits frozen because of a budget scoring rule. Spending from the fund counts as "new" discretionary spending, so it competes with defense and education in annual budgets. The money exists, but the accounting rules block it.

An independent waste corporation. Congress will create an independent National Nuclear Waste Corporation (NNWC), outside DOE and outside the annual budget process, with direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund. The NNWC will build a consolidated storage facility using dry casks, sealed steel-and-concrete containers that hold spent fuel safely above ground, a proven technology already in use at every reactor site in the country. Communities will volunteer to host the facility and receive binding benefit agreements in return. A permanent underground repository, buried deep in stable rock, follows on a longer timeline. Finland is preparing to open the world's first one, Onkalo, after completing trial runs in 2025, and its safety regulator cleared it to operate in August 2026. It took 43 years from the initial government directive to reach this point. The repository will take time, but the consolidated storage facility will move spent fuel now.

On recycling: Spent fuel is 95 percent unspent uranium and contains enormous potential energy. The United States is now actively pursuing commercial recycling for the first time. Oklo announced a $1.68 billion advanced fuel center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that would chemically extract the usable uranium from spent fuel and turn it into fresh fuel for next-generation reactors, using a process developed at Argonne National Lab. TVA is the first utility exploring a partnership to recycle its spent fuel at the facility. A nuclear fuel recycling bill cleared the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in October 2025, and a May 2025 executive order directed DOE to recommend a national recycling strategy, though the bill has not reached a floor vote and DOE's strategy, due in January 2026, has not been released. ARPA-E's NEWTON program is funding 11 groups working on ways to convert the most dangerous long-lived waste into shorter-lived or stable materials, with the goal of making full-stockpile recycling viable by the 2050s. Other startups, including Curio and SHINE Technologies, have completed lab-scale demonstrations at national labs.

Internationally, France has been recycling nuclear fuel at a commercial scale for decades. However, the cost is high. Recycling costs considerably more than using fresh uranium, and studies find it will stay more expensive unless uranium prices rise sharply. The process also creates its own waste streams. The plan will support the study of waste recycling through RFC financing and the Manhattan Projects R&D funding, but will not design the national waste strategy around the capability until the economics significantly improve. The NNWC's storage facility will be designed so that fuel can be retrieved later if recycling becomes viable. The solution requires no new federal appropriations, because the Nuclear Waste Fund already exists.

Solution 4: Building Public Trust

Nuclear power is safer than coal, gas, or rooftop solar by every statistical measure. Public fear is real and has to be addressed directly. The case for nuclear has to begin during the campaign.

During the campaign, the candidate will make nuclear power a visible part of the platform, stated plainly and repeatedly in front of audiences in the states where reactors will be built. The argument will be that these plants produce thousands of jobs, cheap electricity for the region, and energy independence from foreign suppliers. The candidate will name the goal, American-built nuclear power on American military bases, and let voters in energy-poor regions see themselves in it. Behind the public case, a team of volunteer experts will begin the groundwork that makes a first-term reactor possible, short-listing candidate bases against the hard constraints of cooling water and transmission, opening informal talks with Westinghouse and the Korean construction firms, and mapping the long-lead component orders, so none of it waits on the election.

During the transition, the incoming administration will identify the 3-4 military bases for full-size reactors and the bases for the first SMRs and microreactors. Site selection cannot wait until after the inauguration, because major components take 2-3 years to manufacture, so every month of delay pushes first power further out. The transition team will work with DOD to narrow the list based on the hard constraints (proximity to high-voltage transmission and cooling water), begin environmental reviews, and engage base communities so that component orders execute and site work breaks ground in the first weeks of the administration.

The transition is also when operator training begins. An NRC-licensed reactor operator takes 3-5 years to certify, and with the lead reactor scheduled to reach first power within the first term, the first candidates must enter the Navy's nuclear training pipeline in the administration's earliest days, so the transition team will coordinate with Naval Reactors to expand the existing pipeline and begin selecting candidates right away.

Once in office, the plan will fund a national education campaign built on data and local testimonials. Every project will sign a legally binding Community Benefit Agreement with its host community before construction begins, guaranteeing local jobs, infrastructure investment, and revenue sharing. Host communities will get permanent high-paying jobs, cheap power, and a binding, long-term commitment from the federal government.

Solution 5: Fleet Uprates, the Fastest Clean Power Available

America's 94 existing reactors can produce more power than they currently do. "Uprates," meaning equipment upgrades, better fuel, and improved monitoring, add capacity without building a new plant. Since 1977 the NRC has approved uprates adding about 8 gigawatts, and the Department of Energy is now aiming for another 5 gigawatts from uprates and restarted plants by 2030. (One gigawatt powers roughly 700,000 homes.) The cost runs from about $200 per kilowatt of added capacity for the simplest upgrades to a few thousand for the largest, compared to $7,500-16,000 per kilowatt for building a new reactor from scratch. Utilities already know how to do this work, and it needs no new designs, sites, or permits. Uprates are nuclear's most important first-decade contribution to the grid.

What this delivers: Gigawatts of additional clean power, the equivalent of several large new reactors, at a fraction of the cost and time.

Solution 6: Keeping the Grid Clean While Nuclear Scales Up

The MFA is electrifying transportation, buildings, and industry at the same time, which will sharply increase demand for electricity. If the gap between new demand and clean supply gets filled by natural gas, the plan fails. Gas plants built as a "temporary bridge" become permanent. Each one is a $2 billion asset with 30-year financing, an investor class that lobbies for its survival, and a workforce that depends on it.

Three measures will prevent this.

1. Deploy clean power in speed order. Nuclear uprates and a large renewable buildout will carry years 1-5. Enhanced geothermal and long-duration storage will arrive in years 3-7. New nuclear construction will dominate after year 7. Each source fills the gap until the next one arrives.

2. Match electrification to clean supply. EVs that charge at off-peak hours and heat pumps with built-in thermal storage can run on wind and solar now. But industrial furnaces and large-scale hydrogen production need power that runs 24/7 regardless of the weather, so they will wait until nuclear and geothermal reach scale. The plan applies this rule across chapters.

3. No new fossil fuel generation. The Clean Power chapter will establish a Clean Energy Standard that prohibits new coal and gas plants. The RFC will reinforce this by refusing to finance any fossil thermal generation. The standard will set the rules, and the RFC will control the money.

Presidential Leadership

The public wants cheap, clean, around-the-clock power but is afraid of accidents and of waste with nowhere to go. The president's first task will be to show, in person, that the plants are safe and that the country can still build them.

During the Campaign

The candidate makes the case in person. The candidate will run on cheap, around-the-clock American power and on proving the country can still build something hard, with one exact, personal pledge: at least one full-size reactor switched on and delivering power to the grid within the first term. The candidate will take on the safety question directly, including with a personal demonstration, committing to store sealed spent-fuel dry casks on the grounds of the White House itself, on the logic that what is safe enough for the public is safe enough for where the president lives. The candidate will travel through the military communities near the first sites, the coal and oil-patch regions whose welders, pipefitters, and electricians would move into longer-lasting nuclear careers, the Navy's reactor-training centers, and the university and forging towns a revived industry would feed, pledging a standardized national fleet built in batches, enrichment and heavy forging brought back onto American soil, a working answer to spent fuel, and high-wage jobs for workers leaving industries in decline.

Frame it as a race. China is building nuclear plants about as fast as it can pour concrete, pushing its own cost of energy down, while the United States has spent decades unable to finish a single plant on time or on budget. The candidate will treat the fossil-fuel companies as competitors in the race to power the country, and the Mission will beat them by delivering cheaper, cleaner, around-the-clock electricity. Where a community hesitates, the answer will be consent-based siting and binding benefits.

Long-lead groundwork. The major reactor components take years to manufacture, so the preparatory work has to start during the campaign. Volunteer engineers and former plant builders will short-list reactor sites, open talks with vendors, and map the long-lead component orders.

The Transition

Name the people. The president-elect will name the RFC nuclear mission-team lead, someone who has finished hard reactor builds, along with the Secretaries of Energy and Defense who will drive the build, and the independent program manager who will answer to the RFC.

Settle the sites and the licensing track. The incoming team will work with the Department of Defense to settle the first bases for the full-size builds and the proving-ground installations for small and microreactors, and will engage the Navy on widening the submarine-crew reactor-operator pipeline. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy will coordinate with DOD on a licensing track quick enough to match the build schedule.

Lock the deal with the RFC. With the RFC, the team will lock the standardized full-size and SMR designs and the fixed-price terms and vendor equity stake that keep cost overruns off the taxpayer, and will open talks with communities willing to host consolidated interim storage in exchange for substantial benefits.

Draft the legislation. Counsel will draft the full package for the opening window, including the RFC nuclear financing authorization, the charter for a National Nuclear Waste Corporation, and the statute freeing the long-frozen Nuclear Waste Fund.

Day One

The president will direct the Department of Defense to break ground on the first reactors at the transition-chosen bases and order the Navy to expand reactor-operator training at once. A companion order will instruct the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to open the expedited review path for pre-certified designs on federal land, and another will direct federal power authorities to prepare to take the output onto the grid. Breaking ground on Day One will show a wary public that the government can build and run these plants.

The First 100 Days

The legislation drafted in the transition will reach Congress, and the president will work the votes in person. It will charter the independent National Nuclear Waste Corporation and open the Nuclear Waste Fund to it. It will authorize the RFC's nuclear financing line and the enrichment, heavy-forging, and component build-out that will end the country's dependence on foreign nuclear suppliers, and it will direct the consolidated interim-storage program to the community that volunteers to host it.

Operational: Years 1–10

The president will publicly mark every plant that breaks ground and every reactor that comes online, making the safety case again each time, and will fight openly when entrenched interests or members of Congress move to stall the build, taking the fight into their districts at election time if necessary. The RFC mission team will run the financing, the standardized designs, and the independent program management. The White House will keep the NRC, DOE, and DOD aligned, and the Department of Defense will build and operate the fleet.

What the 10-Year Mission Delivers

The Mobilization by Year 1 (2030)

Reactors take years to build, so the first year will set up everything that follows. The Mission will pick the designs, lock the sites, break ground on the industrial base, and fill the training pipelines.

History shows America can move at this speed once it commits. During WWII, the Manhattan Project reactors produced plutonium for weapons. They still showed that the country could design, construct, and operate industrial-scale nuclear facilities at extraordinary speed when it chose to. The Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on the Hanford B Reactor in Washington State in October 1943 and had it running by September 1944, 11 months. Oak Ridge's X-10 reactor in Tennessee went from groundbreaking to operation in nine months in 1943. When the country turned to power generation, a small experimental reactor called BORAX-III, built and iterated through three versions in just over two years, lit the entire town of Arco, Idaho, for about an hour in July 1955, the first community in the world powered entirely by nuclear energy. The first American commercial reactor, Shippingport, in Pennsylvania, 60 megawatts and small by today's standards, went from groundbreaking in September 1954 to full power in December 1957, three years and three months. The country built nuclear reactors quickly when it treated them as a national priority with a hard deadline. The Mission for America will restore those conditions in year one.

By Year 1:

• DOD selects the standardized full-size and SMR designs and the microreactor designs to test, and places the first component orders abroad
• The first military bases for full-size reactors and the first SMR and microreactor sites are chosen and broken ground in the administration's opening months, with the lead unit on a 39-month schedule to first power within the first term
• The national heavy forging facility and the new uranium enrichment plants break ground
• The Navy reactor-operator pipeline and the carbon-to-nuclear construction-trades pipelines expand, with the first classes enrolled
• The National Nuclear Waste Corporation is chartered with direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund
• Fleet uprates begin rolling out across the existing reactors

The First Reactors Take Shape by Year 5 (2034)

The first full-size reactors are deep in construction, and the lead unit has reached first power within the president's first term. The world record for building a modern full-size commercial reactor is 39 months, set by Japan's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Unit 6 in 1996, and no country has matched it since. The Mission for America will build at that pace, and the lead military reactor, with ground broken in the administration's opening months, will show it. Even if it slips, it still comes online faster than any reactor built in the Western world in a generation.

By Year 5:

• The lead full-size reactor online and delivering power to the grid within the president's first term, with the rest of the first fleet order in advanced construction
• Fleet uprates delivered, adding clean power from the existing fleet
• SMR and microreactor proving grounds underway on military bases, first units approaching operation
• The domestic supply chain coming online, with forging, enrichment, and component factories starting production
• Tens of thousands of workers moving through the training pipelines, Korean-partnered crews training American teams
• A consolidated waste storage site selected with a volunteer host community under a binding benefit agreement

The Model Is Proven by Year 10 (2039)

The model works. The first reactors are online and powering their regions, the fleet build-out is scaling, and the waste solution is operating.

By Year 10:

• 3-4 military-owned full-size reactors operational and selling power to the grid, with the second fleet order under way
• Construction transitioning from Korean-partnered to American-led crews
• Domestic supply chain producing components for later fleet orders, the heavy forging facility operational
• RFC-financed utilities beginning their own builds using the same proven design, workforce, and supply chain
• Licensed SMR and microreactor designs entering the commercial market for data centers, industry, and remote communities
• Hundreds of thousands of workers trained across all pipelines
• Fleet cost data proving whether the $60-95/MWh target is on track, setting up costs competitive with gas
• The consolidated waste storage facility operating, a functioning national waste management system
• New nuclear capacity online and scaling, on track toward a self-sustaining nuclear industry by 2050