President Donald Trump‘s new Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, former CEO of the fracking company Liberty Energy, on Friday issued his first Secretarial Order which directs the Department of Energy to “prioritize true technological breakthroughs – such as nuclear fusion, high-performance computing, quantum computing, and AI.”
The order highlights commercial nuclear power as a priority: “The long-awaited American nuclear renaissance must launch during President Trump’s administration.”
As seen below on Fox News, Wright says the “biggest holdup” of building nuclear power in the U.S. has been “regulatory” and believes there’s public support for nuclear energy “and I believe it will grow rapidly in the coming years.”
With President Trump’s leadership, @Energy will work rapidly grow America’s nuclear energy capabilities. pic.twitter.com/Q934a78yHD
— Secretary Chris Wright (@SecretaryWright) February 11, 2025
While the Secretary’s first order also calls for the modernization of the nation’s nuclear weapons systems and vows to continue to protect national security, Secretary Wright has been criticized for reportedly granting access to a DOGE representative (a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern) to the Energy Department’s IT system — reportedly without a standard background investigation.
[Note: Elon Musk’s DOGE team has sent so-called “buyout” emails to federal agency employees (including more than 1,100 DOE employees). Some federal workers are filing lawsuits against the Trump administration alleging that DOGE’s “access to their sensitive personal data is illegal.”]
U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), a longtime member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee who voted for Trump’s last Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, voted against the nomination of Wright.
Cantwell said Wright “fell short of giving a concrete answer” during his Senate nomination hearing when asked whether he would uphold the newly negotiated agreement between the State of Washington, DOE, and the EPA which ensures the on-going cleanup of the Hanford nuclear site in the Tri-Cities.
Hanford, which was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, was the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world — the plutonium manufactured at the site was used in the first atomic bomb. The reactors shut down in 1971 but the cleanup continues.
The potentially combustible DOGE and DOE combination threatens more than just current Energy Department employees. Musk’s tendency toward indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts sometimes turns up collateral damage.
Because of the way technological innovations like those Wright prizes derive from sophisticated (and expensive) research projects that rely on government support, Elon Musk and DOGE will have to be onboard if DOE is to achieve Wright’s “renaissance.” And that’s true especially if Musk’s DOGE operation continues to hold enormous sway over how federal funds — even those already appropriated by Congress — are allocated in the future.
A cautionary tale may be found in DOGE’s recent directive severely restricting NIH grant money to top American research universities. Those cuts were aimed largely at medical research, but top institutions doing other scientific work, including nuclear research, are also in the DOGE crosshairs.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham, for example, set a record bringing in $774.5 million in federal grants in 2023. While about half of those funds came from NIH, UAB also accessed record amounts of federal funds from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy.
At UAB, one of numerous institutions working on nuclear challenges and facing DOGE cuts, researchers at The Burns Research Laboratory are working on a “A Single-Step Approach for Used Nuclear Fuel Recycle” that aims at “one of the greatest challenges facing the nuclear power industry…achieving a sustainable nuclear fuel cycle by implementing the recycling of UNF.”
