The Big Tech Campaign to Fast Track Nuke Energy. Senators Whitehouse and Booker Take the Lead in Congress

By Peter Castagno

(This article was originally published on the front page of the May/June 2026 print edition of the Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper. To get a copy of the print newspaper, go to capitolhillcitizen.com)

In September 2014, a Google engineer hosted a private meeting at the company’s Mountain View headquarters. The guests included a nuclear energy investor and staff from the influential think tank Third Way. 

By the end of the meeting, the small group agreed to “fund a bit of work in DC” to influence policy in favor of nuclear energy. That meeting set in motion a decade-long campaign that would transform Democratic politics on nuclear energy – and leave the regulatory framework governing atomic safety vulnerable to the most aggressive deregulatory assault in its history. 

The Trump administration leveraged the bipartisan legislative architecture that Democrats helped build to gut the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Ross Koningstein – Google’s former director emeritus of nuclear energy R&D – hosted the Mountain View gathering. 

As he explained in a 2024 article, the tech giant quietly supported Third Way, the Clean Air Task Force, ClearPath and other advocacy groups for over a decade, helping lawmakers craft pro-nuclear legislation. 

Third Way and its partners have since taken credit for “creating an entirely new policy discussion around advanced nuclear energy,” helping draft overhauls to nuclear policy, and working “behind the scenes” to shift Democrats’ nuclear views. 

In the early years of this effort, public support for nuclear energy was at a low point. In 2016, Gallup found a majority of Americans opposed nuclear energy for the first time since it began surveying the issue in 1994. Only 34% of Democrats favored it. By 2025, that figure climbed to 46% of Democrats – a 12-point change in less than a decade. 

That shift coincided with a surge of Silicon Valley nuclear investment and advocacy. Jeff Navin, a lobbyist for Bill Gates’ small modular reactor (SMR) startup TerraPower, described 2015 as a pivotal year for nuclear support in Capitol Hill. 

At that year’s Paris Climate Talks, Gates announced the Breakthrough Energy Coalition with co-investors including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Richard Branson. Peter Thiel, another top Silicon Valley nuclear investor, published – The New Atomic Age We Need – a New York Times op-ed within the same 48-hour window. 

Breakthrough Energy has since grown into a $4 billion juggernaut spanning venture capital, philanthropy, and policy advocacy, with $7.9 million in direct lobbying expenditures since 2020. 

Taken together, Breakthrough entities and the Gates Foundation have given more than $60 million to the key pro-nuclear groups that reshaped policy, the majority since 2022. 

This includes more than $20 million to Third Way, over $10 million to the Clean Air Task Force, more than $9 million to ClearPath, and nearly $4 million to the Breakthrough Institute. Laying the groundwork for Trump Third Way’s ties to Gates go beyond receiving more than $20 million from his philanthropies. 

The think tank’s most recent 2024 tax filing lists lobby firm Boundary Stone Partners as its top contractor for ‘strategic consulting.’ Third Way has paid Boundary Stone Partners over $2 million since 2020, while the lobby group was simultaneously providing “comprehensive legislative and strategic support” to Gates’ nuclear firm TerraPower, which paid it $900,000 in lobby fees over the same period. 

Former Office of Nuclear Energy chief of staff Andrew Richards, who led Boundary Stone Partners’ nuclear practice until March 2025, is now TerraPower’s vice president of government affairs. Jeff Navin, Boundary Stone Partner’s co-founder, has long helped coordinate Third Way’s nuclear strategy. He was Terra- Power’s director of external affairs until last April.

Navin and Josh Freed, Third Way’s energy and climate chief, approached the White House together to set up its first nuclear energy summit. Before joining Third Way, Freed was a senior advisor to the Gates Foundation. Gates has also exerted influence directly. He told Bloomberg in 2022 he had quietly lobbied elected officials including former Senator Joe Manchin, for years on federal climate policy, helping secure tax incentives for nuclear energy in the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The billionaire told the former West Virginia senator that coal workers could potentially transition into building reactors for TerraPower – he donated $2,900 to Manchin in May 2022, months before the IRA’s passage. Manchin would later lead the ouster of Democrat NRC commissioner Jeff Baran, who frequently raised concerns about safety issues of experimental SMRs like TerraPower. 

TerraPower’s client case study for Boundary Stone Partners notes it successfully lobbied for bills, including the 2024 ADVANCE Act. The law required the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to rewrite the language of its mission statement to promote the benefits of civilian nuclear expansion. 

Victor Gilinsky, who served as a NRC commissioner in the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, observed the bill showed “every sign of having been written by interested parties and with little vetting” in a 2024 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists op-ed. He warned the subtle shift in language could open the door to severe consequences, eroding the agency’s independence to expedite licensing of experimental reactors. 

“TerraPower foresees selling hundreds of such reactors for domestic use and export,” Gilinsky wrote in a 2024 analysis. “The new law is largely directed at clearing the way for the rapid licensing of such reactors by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It does so in part by providing additional resources but also—more ominously – by weakening the agency’s safety reviews and inspections in the name of efficiency.” 

The ADVANCE Act passed 393-13 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate, where only Markey and Sanders voted no. Both senators have repeatedly opposed building new nuclear plants due to environmental concerns, such as the ongoing absence of a long-term solution to the nation’s roughly 100,000 tons of radioactive waste. 

During his floor speech, Markey expressed skepticism that rapidly licensing experimental nuclear reactors was justified on climate grounds. 

“It’s shortsighted to me to make such a herculean effort to promote new nuclear technologies when we’re yet to solve the longstanding problems resulting from our existing nuclear fleet,” Markey said in his floor speech. “To this day, the Navajo Nation is dealing with the legacy of uranium contamination, including more than 500 abandoned uranium mines and homes and water sources polluted with elevated levels of radiation.” 

TerraPower-linked groups were heavily involved in pushing the ADVANCE Act through Congress and celebrated its passage, including the nation’s most prominent industry group, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). 

The NEI and Silicon Valley have deepened their relationship in recent years. Amazon is now a dues-paying member. The CEO of X-Energy, backed by $500 million in Amazon investment, sits on NEI’s board, alongside TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque and Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte – whose firm was seeded by Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. NEI’s PAC has donated hundreds of thousands to the ADVANCE Act’s Democratic champions, including a total of $66,000 to Congressman Frank Pallone (D-New Jersey), Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. 

Pallone and several other pro-nuclear Democrats have since expressed alarm at the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law they enacted. 

Last May, Trump signed a series of executive orders to radically overhaul nuclear safety oversight, citing the ADVANCE Act as justification for transforming the NRC’s culture, directing the agency to approve new reactors within 18 months, and consult with DOGE on a wholesale revision of its regulations. Since then, the administration has secretly overhauled nuclear safety rules, proposed to severely cut inspections and radiation standards, exempted new reactors from environmental reviews, and triggered an exodus of 400 NRC employees since Trump took office. 

Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) each gave closing remarks at a nuclear energy summit in 2016. Third Way partnered with the Nuclear Energy Institute to host the Washington event. 

In Third Way’s telling, the summit marked the beginning of a years-long partnership with lawmakers who “continued to champion” the nuclear legislation it helped write. 

In 2020, the Democratic Party included support for nuclear energy in its national platform for the first time since 1972. That year, the Democratic National Committee paid digital consulting firm Bully Pulpit International more than $30 million. 

From 2017 to 2023, the Nuclear Energy Institute paid the same firm $6.4 million to frame nuclear energy as “critical in the effort to lower carbon emissions” – achieving, according to Bully Pulpit, “consistent positive attitudinal shifts among DC elites and policy influencers.” Bully Pulpit was co-founded by former Obama campaign staffers. 

The firm that helped elect Democrats was simultaneously taking millions from the nuclear industry to shift Democratic opinion. Booker became the face of Democrats’ nuclear shift during his 2020 presidential campaign. 

He disparaged anti-nuclear Democrats, which a Gallup poll found made up 57% of the party at the time, during a 2019 interview: “As much as we say the Republicans when it comes to climate change must listen to science, our party has the same obligation to listen to scientists.” Booker’s framing is inaccurate. 

On whether decarbonization requires nuclear energy, expert opinion is deeply divided –  with leading experts including Daniel Kammen, Arjun Makhijani, and MV Ramana contending that 100% renewable pathways are viable. Yet this framing – disputed by leading experts – nonetheless became the political rationale for a sweeping legislative agenda Booker and Whitehouse would champion for the next half decade. 

The senators were primary architects of the legislative architecture that the Trump administration has since used for maximal deregulation. This includes The ADVANCE Act and the 2019 Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA), which directed the NRC to create a new licensing pathway – called “Part 53” – for experimental reactors. 

The Trump administration issued its Part 53 rule in March. It allows applicants to propose reactors in densely populated areas and use fast-tracked reviews from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy as evidence for their safety, and lacks specific guidance for carrying out systematic risk analyses. 

As ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, Whitehouse has repeatedly lambasted Trump administration officials for gutting nuclear safety standards. 

“Despite so much commonsense, bipartisan work, the Trump Administration has upended progress in a flamingly partisan manner,” he said at a June 2025 hearing. “In this case, by DOGE-ing the NRC in flagrant disregard for nuclear safety, for the bipartisan direction of Congress, and for the law.” 

The purpose of the hearing was to consider two Trump nominees, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and EPA assistant administrator Usha-Maria Turner. Whitehouse voted against the EPA nominee due to her history of working in the fossil fuel industry: “The corruption and conflicts of interest are happening in plain view. For that reason, I will not support this nomination.”

However, Whitehouse voted in favor of Wright, a former fossil fuel executive and board member of nuclear startup Oklo. He withdrew his support a month later in protest of the Department of Energy’s “hostile takeover” of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

Yet despite his vocal concerns about the dangers of ongoing nuclear safety rollbacks, Whitehouse introduced the Nuclear Refuel Act in June 2025 and voted to move it to the Senate floor in October 2025. 

The bill would streamline new nuclear reprocessing facilities, which separate fissile material from spent fuel. The extracted materials are then repurposed for use as reactor fuel, but also can be used to create nuclear weapons. 

As over a dozen experts explained in a July 2025 letter to elected officials, security and economic concerns have long prevented the U.S. from using plutonium for civilian nuclear fuel. Experts warned a U.S. reprocessing program could lead to the spread of nuclear weapons technology – President Carter banned the practice after India used it to make a bomb in 1974 –  and weaken U.S. diplomats’ ability to discourage other countries from similarly extracting weapons-grade plutonium from their fuel. 

The Senate EPW press release for the Nuclear Refuel Act featured a celebratory statement from Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte, who plans to use plutonium-bearing fuel for his breeder reactor. This comes as the Trump administration aims to transfer 20 tons of plutonium to private industry while cutting security standards meant to safeguard against the theft of nuclear materials. 

Unlike Whitehouse, Markey has opposed this effort: “Oklo Inc., a nuclear technology start-up, is the main company interested in receiving plutonium from [the Department of Energy],” Markey wrote in a September letter to Trump. “Oklo is also, with DOE’s support, building a $1.7 billion reprocessing plant in Tennessee. Your Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, served on the Board of Directors of Oklo until his confirmation in February. 

In 2024, Wright and his wife also made contributions to your presidential campaign totaling about $458,000 and made contributions to the Republican National Committee of about $330,400.” Whitehouse and, to a greater extent, Booker have also received generous support from nuclear interests, including at least $200,000 from Breakthrough Energy and Google leaders. 

Holtec executives donated $68,100 to Booker’s committees in 2022, while the New

Jersey firm was under a state criminal investigation for defrauding tax credit applications and under national scrutiny for safety violations. 

That year, Booker helped pass IRA nuclear subsidies Holtec is now using to restart its Palisades plant. Whitehouse’s most recent financial disclosure reports holdings of at least $1.8 million in tech giants invested in nuclear expansion, including Google, Amazon, and Meta.

Whitehouse invests up to $5 million in Nvidia, which recently announced a partnership with Oklo for the AI-assisted fabrication of plutonium- bearing fuel. 

Whitehouse and Booker also received donations from nuclear policy lobbyists, including $13,500 from KDCR Partners, a firm paid more than $4 million since 2020 by TerraPower, Breakthrough Energy, NEI, and Google to lobby on nuclear policy. 

KDCR’s founder was President Clinton’s deputy assistant for legislative affairs, one of multiple veterans of Democratic administrations recruited by the nuclear industry to shepherd its agenda through the party. In the mid-2010s, the Nuclear Energy Institute retained consulting firm Kivvit – co-founded by David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign strategist and senior advisor –  to help create the “Nuclear Matters” front group. As the Climate Investigations Center noted in 2016, Kivvit explained how its Nuclear Matters operation implemented a robust public affairs campaign, which includes advertising, sponsored event series, media relations, grasstops recruitment, third-party advocacy, and targeted social media engagement.” 

Nuclear Matters is funded almost entirely by NEI, but it describes itself as “a national coalition of grassroots advocates, working to inform the public and policymakers about the clear benefits of nuclear energy.” 

But the shell group transfers nearly its entire revenue to PR firm APCO Worldwide, which has received more than $20 million from Nuclear Matters and its parent nonprofit since 2016. 

Nuclear Matters’ first president Neal Cohen was the former president of APCO, where he helped develop Phillip Morris’ PR playbook. Carol Browner – former Clinton EPA administrator and Obama climate advisor – is Nuclear Matters’ most prominent third-party recruit. The group has paid her at least $850,000 since 2018. 

Browner recanted her formerly anti-nuclear views in a 2014 Forbes op-ed and announced she was joining a bipartisan “public education campaign” alongside former Senators Evan Bayh and Judd Gregg, to whom Nuclear Matters has paid $345,000. 

Bayh received $1.95 million from a lobby group that represents nuclear clients during the same period. Nuclear Matters lists Third Way among its partners and the groups frequently collaborate. 

Browner represented Nuclear Matters at the 2016 Third Way summit where Whitehouse and Booker gave closing remarks – in a room that also included Google’s Koningstein, Oklo’s future CEO, and TerraPower – a meeting Third Way later described as the milestone that launched a decade of successful bipartisan nuclear advocacy.

When Gates announced Breakthrough Energy at the 2015 Paris Climate Talks, he asserted the impending climate catastrophe brought an urgent need for “high risk” investments in clean energy technologies. 

The billionaire struck a different tone a decade later in a public memo ahead of the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference. 

Gates explained he still views climate change as serious, but not a “doomsday” level threat, and advocated a different approach to address it – one that benefits his nuclear company.

The first priority in Gates’ memo is to lower the “Green Premium” – “the cost difference between the clean and dirty way of doing things.” 

Gates wrote he was hopeful he could bring down TerraPower’s 50% Green Premium, before advocating government leaders promote policies to fund and support Green Premium technologies. 

Amazon-backed SMR startup X-Energy similarly noted its reliance on government support in its recent IPO filing. Yet while its technology is supported by more than a billion in public funding, X-Energy has an “Intellectual Property-driven business model” to generate “attractive free cash flow” from the use of its complex proprietary technology. 

Gates built his fortune on Microsoft’s copyright and patent protections. He co-founded TerraPower with former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold in 2008, as the first spinout company of Myhrvold’s patent portfolio firm Intellectual Ventures. TerraPower – which has so far received more than $2.5 billion in government funding – already has more than 500 patents. 

The Trump administration greenlit TerraPower to begin construction of its first plant in March, nine months ahead of schedule. The company credited Trump’s May executive orders and bipartisan reforms that Third Way and its partners helped create for the rapid timeline.

Experts, such as Union of Concerned Scientists director of nuclear power safety Edwin Lyman, excoriated TerraPower’s rapid approval, noting the NRC itself conceded the reactor had unresolved safety issues in its reviews. 

While Gates has expressed no public concerns about the nuclear safety rollbacks he helped engineer, the billionaire published a celebratory memo about TerraPower’s fast-tracked permit in March: 

“If you’re an electricity nerd like me, this is an exciting moment. Earlier this month, TerraPower – the next-generation nuclear power company I created in 2008—received federal approval to start building the nuclear reactor at its Kemmerer, Wyoming plant.”