President Trump set a goal a little over a year ago for American companies to build at least three new experimental nuclear reactors by July 4, 2026, and the Department of Energy has spent the year helping them move faster by radically cutting back on the regulations required for those reactors.
Who Gets the Speed, Who Gets the Risk
Antares Nuclear announced on June 4, 2026, that it had gone critical. Valar Atomics said it went critical on June 18, 2026, and is now producing tens of kilowatts of heat from its new reactor core, which is operating out of a tentlike structure in the Utah desert. Those are the milestones the program is built to celebrate. The people who live with the consequences don’t get a vote in the design of the race.
With less than a week to go before the deadline, two companies had already reached the goal of switching on their reactor, or “going critical” in nuclear-speak. Other companies are getting close to making the deadline, and all this happened in less than the span of a year. Nick Touran, chief nuclear officer at Ocean Atomics, said, “We haven't done anything this fast, basically ever.” Ocean Atomics seeks to put nuclear power onto civilian ships, and Touran said his company isn’t part of the program but has been tracking it closely.
Touran praised the pace. “I'm just excited that we're now actually building these little reactors and trying it out and we're going to look at what the economic story is and find out if there's a market,” he said. “It's going to be so much better than sitting there talking about it like we did for the last 40 years.” That’s the language of the market, not the public. Build first, ask later.
What They Call Progress
For others, the speed has sparked alarm. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the race “essentially an exercise in public relations.” He said the slashing of regulations undoes decades of safety lessons learned in the nuclear industry. “This is taking us back to the 1950s, and that is not progress,” he said.
Much of the work is happening at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, where several of the companies have set up shop. One of them is Radiant, which hopes to build small reactors for everything from disaster relief to data centers. Rita Baranwal, the firm’s chief nuclear officer, said the company is assembling its reactor inside a special secure building called the DOME. “By July 4, we're tracking to get the reactor into DOME and to initiate the testing,” she told NPR this month.
Initiating testing isn’t the same as going critical, and Baranwal said Radiant probably won’t be critical by the July 4 deadline. She said she does expect Radiant’s reactor to be running soon. “The only thing we will not be doing at [Idaho National Laboratory] this summer is generating electricity,” she said. That’s a neat summary of the whole setup: public land, private ambition, and no electricity yet.
Radiant’s reactor looks radically different from the massive reactors that exist today. It is far smaller, and its nuclear fuel takes a different form. In a modern power reactor, nuclear fuel is loaded into long tubes, but Radiant’s reactor uses little nuclear fuel balls filled with grains of uranium. “Do you remember gobstoppers?” Baranwal said. She said the nuclear gobstoppers can operate at higher temperatures and are more resistant to melting down. Radiant and several other companies plan to use this type of fuel along with other technology to build a bunch of smaller, more mobile reactors.
Baranwal said, “We have broken ground on our factory to mass-produce reactors. We're targeting around 50 per year.” The report said 96 reactors are currently operating in the United States. The push here isn’t just for a few test units. It’s for a factory rhythm, a production line, a system that turns nuclear hardware into another mass commodity.
Who Decides, Who Pays
The Energy Department rewrote its safety and security standards this year to make it easier for companies to win regulatory approval. The department said the cut regulations were “unnecessary” and that safety hasn't been compromised. It consulted with the companies but not with the public, and it exempted the new reactors from environmental reviews.
That’s the hierarchy in plain sight. The companies get consulted. The public gets the bill.
Lyman said, “Yes, of course, if you bend all the rules, you can do things quickly.” He said the test reactors might be working, but “that should not be confused with anything related to a nuclear power reactor that's capable of producing electricity in a stable and safe way.” He said he worries that deregulation will erode standards for things like how much security is required or how much environmental monitoring should be done, at a time when these mass-produced little reactors could start popping up at locations all over the country.
The deadline itself hangs over the whole operation like a dare from above. President Trump tied the goal to July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and the Department of Energy turned that political stunt into a program that strips away safeguards and calls it efficiency. The companies get speed. The agencies get to say they made history. Everyone else gets told to trust the apparatus.
What’s being built here isn’t just reactors. It’s a model of power: executive order, agency rewrite, corporate consultation, public exclusion. The machinery moves fast when the bosses want it to.