by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As Appearing on The Daily Caller
AI needs vast amounts of electricity, more than America can reliably deliver. That is becoming hard to miss as data centers spread across the country to feed the AI boom. The trouble is that America has not built enough dependable power for them, much less for the factories, defense production and mineral-processing projects politicians keep promising to bring home.
Nuclear power should be an obvious part of the answer. It generates enormous quantities of electricity on a compact footprint, around the clock. It can power data centers, factories and defense production without blanketing the countryside with windmills, solar farms, batteries and miles of transmission lines.
China is building while America dithers.
Nine of the 10 nuclear reactors whose construction began in 2025 were in China. Chinese and Russian designs accounted for 94 percent of global reactor construction starts over the past decade. While China is building nuclear reactors, America is still buried in paperwork.
