Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

12. Department of Energy and Related Commissions · Notable

Start no new civilian reactor demonstration or commercialization projects

Reversed

375 12. Department of Energy and Related Commissions

“While respecting existing contractual obligations, NE should not initiate any new civilian reactor demonstration and commercialization projects.”

What has happened

  1. Reversed

    A refrain-from ask, sorted and leveled under playbook 3b: the Office of Nuclear Energy is the actor and its own inaction is the compliance, so the ask is `done` while no new project is initiated and `reversed` the day one is. It was `done` for the first four months of the window and has been `reversed` since. Executive Order 14301, signed 2025-05-23 and published on this date, does not merely reform reactor testing: section 5 directs the Secretary to "create a pilot program for reactor construction and operation outside the National Laboratories" and to "approve at least three reactors pursuant to this pilot program with the goal of achieving criticality in each of the three reactors by July 4, 2026" — an instruction to start exactly the projects the Quote says not to start. DOE created the Reactor Pilot Program on **2025-06-18** — "the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the start of a new pilot program to expedite the testing of advanced nuclear reactor designs under DOE authority outside of the national laboratories", issuing the Request for Application and "ensuring at least three reactors achieve criticality by July 4, 2026" — and announced its **initial selections on 2025-08-12**, naming ten companies across eleven projects (Aalo Atomics, Antares Nuclear, Atomic Alchemy, Deep Fission, Last Energy, Oklo, Natura Resources, Radiant Industries, Terrestrial Energy and Valar Atomics). It opened the DOME microreactor test bed at Idaho National Laboratory in April 2026, established the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad in March 2026 with four initial selections, and awarded $94 million to eight companies in May 2026 to speed near-term small modular reactor deployment. Five DOE-authorized reactors reached criticality between June and August 2026. The event is dated to the order because that is the instrument that ended the forbearance; the executions that followed are in DOE's own one-year account, cited below.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

The Quote’s qualifier — while respecting existing contractual obligations — is not the issue: the new starts are new, not legacy commitments.

  • Reviewed 2026-09-01: this is a refrain-from ask, one the administration satisfies by not acting, so the Status moved from not started to reversed, with the event dated 2025-05-29 (the date of the instrument that ended the forbearance) rather than 2026-08-31 (the date of the earlier search). The earlier reading treated it as an ask the administration moved against, which fits asks the administration never began; a refrain-from ask begins satisfied, so the record here is compliance followed by reversal.
  • EO 14301 section 5 was read in full at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-05-29/html/2025-09799.htm; the pilot-program and criticality language quoted in the note is verbatim from it.
  • Reviewed 2026-09-03: the two dates in the note are cited. Both come from the publication time in the pages’ own metadata — 2025-06-18T12:20:24-0400 and 2025-08-12T11:01:44-0400 — and are cross-confirmed by the August article’s own sentence, “DOE announced the Reactor Pilot Program in June 2025, following President Trump’s Executive Order 14301”. DOE dates cannot be read off the page text: every energy.gov article carries the newest press release’s date in its menu.
  • The Office of Nuclear Energy’s pages at energy.gov/ne/articles and energy.gov/ne/listings/ne-news no longer exist. Its press-release listing, energy.gov/ne/listings/ne-press-releases (pages 0 to 14), reaches back into 2025 (155 distinct NE articles). energy.gov’s own site search cannot be relied on: it silently drops the search terms, so it finds nothing even where a page exists.
  • The event date is left at 2025-05-29. The new material puts the first act of starting a project at 2025-06-18, which is later than the recorded event, not earlier; the settled reading is that the order is the instrument that ended the forbearance, and nothing here disturbs it.
  • A broken refrain-from ask is written as a single reversed event: the four-month compliance period rests on a negative with no dated instrument of its own, and the site will not record a done event without a source URL.
Action
restrict
Object
civilian reactor demonstration and commercialization projects
ID
951