Hey, What's News listeners.
It's Sunday, July 27th.
I'm Alex Osula for The Wall Street Journal.
This is What's News Sunday,
the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world.
On today's show, startups are aiming for an audacious reboot of America's nuclear energy program.
The sector is receiving unprecedented private support and enthusiasm from the Trump administration.
Could the U.S. be seeing the dawn of a new nuclear age?
We'll get into what this would look like and what it would take to get there.
U.S. electricity consumption reached an all-time high last year, according to the U.S.
Energy Information Administration.
And as A.I. continues to take off, That demand is only expected to grow.
Recent executive orders from President Trump aim to quadruple nuclear power generation in the next 25 years.
It's a challenging prospect.
For many Americans,
memories of meltdowns like Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in 2011 still linger.
Due to factors like competition from cheaper energy sources,
the number of new nuclear plants in the U.S. has declined since the 1990s.
And traditional nuclear plants can cost tens of billions of dollars to build.
Enter small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs.