Democratic governors seldom see eye to eye with President Donald Trump when it comes to energy policy.
A notable exception: expanding nuclear power.
Kathy Hochul of New York, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and JB Pritzker of Illinois are among a growing list of Democratic governors who have taken steps this year to encourage nuclear development.
Their motivation differs from Trump — whose desire to add 10 new reactors has nothing to do with climate change or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But the effect is the same: Democratic officials are embracing nuclear energy in a way that would be unthinkable even a few years ago.
Nuclear power “will provide clean, reliable energy at scale for generations to come and meet our growing energy demands,” Sherrill said last month in a press release.
The embrace of nuclear energy by Sherrill and other Democratic leaders is being driven in part by circumstance.
Governors of both parties are trying to keep pace with galloping demand for electricity — much of it from a surge of data centers.
Some Democrats see nuclear power as a way to meet that demand over the long term while still achieving goals to eliminate power sector carbon emissions. While renewable energy is still key to those plans, many states are struggling to add enough new wind and solar energy and face a slowdown in federal funding for clean energy projects.
The converging trends have pushed Democratic to lean into nuclear power, despite concerns about the potential impact on consumers and the environment.
Even so, states such as Illinois still see promise in nuclear power. Illinois is part of the nation’s largest power market, PJM Interconnection, where energy demand is rising faster than new power projects are being plugged into the grid. There, Pritzker has signed an executive order seeking to bolster what’s already the nation’s largest nuclear fleet.
In New Jersey, a bill Sherrill signed last month began an effort to add more than a gigawatt of new nuclear generation to the state’s power mix with a mid-2028 deadline for state regulators to approve a project. Not to be outdone, Hochul of New York wants 5 GW of new nuclear power online by 2040.
Other Democrats are on board too.
This spring, six New England governors, including four Democrats, signed onto a joint statement calling for support of existing nuclear plants and exploration of advanced nuclear energy technologies. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has gotten behind efforts to build a pair of small modular reactors at the site of the Palisades nuclear plant, which is being recommissioned after shutting down in 2022.
Barry Rabe, a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, believes billions of dollars flowing from the Trump White House in support of nuclear power help explain Democrats’ interest in the technology.
“From a political economy standpoint, if you’re Pritzker or any of the other governors, that’s probably attractive,” Rabe said.
Growing political acceptance of nuclear energy, especially on the left, tracks with broader public support, according to recent polling.
A 2025 Gallup poll showed 46 percent of Democrats favor the use of nuclear energy, up from 34 percent in 2016 when a majority of Americans opposed the technology.
State officials are following suit. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s main lobbying voice, 14 governors expressed support for nuclear in their state of the state addresses this year — more than ever.
“State officials, in particular, are really recognizing nuclear’s unique attributes, whether you’re a state that focuses more on clean energy and carbon reduction, or you’re focusing on energy reliability and making sure we can keep the lights on,” said Kristy Hartman, who oversees state policy for the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Reversal of fortune
The renewed love for nuclear energy represents a remarkable comeback story for a technology that not long ago was being crowded out by cheap wind power and new natural gas. Reactors in several states were being decommissioned early or threatening to close because of anemic wholesale power prices and slack electricity demand growth.
The bad PR didn’t stop there. Nuclear plants were at the center of major scandals in Ohio and South Carolina and what was to be a symbol of the nation’s last nuclear renaissance, Georgia’s Plant Vogtle expansion, was beset by delays and massive cost overruns.
In Illinois, the state with the nation’s largest nuclear fleet, the Legislature twice had to pass bills to bail out nuclear plants. The second time, lawmakers acted just a day before the plants’ owner, Exelon, began decommissioning two of the plants.
But nuclear’s fortunes quickly changed. In Illinois, nuclear subsidies turned into bill credits for ComEd customers under 2021 legislation that provided for consumers — not nuclear plant owners — to benefit from rising electricity prices..
And Pritzker, who vetoed a bill in 2023 that would have fully lifted the state’s 1987 moratorium on new nuclear plants, signed legislation in January repealing the ban. The next month, he issued the executive order seeking to expand the state’s nuclear fleet.
Pritzker’s order calls for the state to issue a notice of inquiry to developers for at least 2 GW of new nuclear capacity to begin construction by 2033 and a second notice to Illinois communities looking to host a project.
Nine Illinois communities have raised their hands, many of them counties that are already homes to nuclear plants.
Pritzker’s order reflects an effort to get ahead of rising electricity demand and a need for additional carbon-free electricity at a time when the grid operator for northern Illinois, PJM, has been slow to bring renewable energy online and federal funding for clean energy is being reduced, said Andres Correa, a spokesperson for the governor.
State Sen. Sue Rezin, a Republican, is a longtime champion of nuclear energy. Her district southeast of Chicago is surrounded by three of Illinois’ six nuclear plants and she was lead sponsor of each of the bills seeking to lift the nuclear moratorium.
Rezin sees the increasing willingness of Pritzker and other Democrats to embrace nuclear energy is a product of a changing economy.
“My colleagues across the country are seeing that the demand is increasing for energy and they’re very cognizant of making sure that we try to keep the price down,” Rezin said in an interview. “So it has created this problem that we haven’t seen before, and because of that I’ve seen a change in terms of an acceptance towards nuclear.”
Lingering concerns
The cascade of nuclear announcements, especially from Democrats, is causing heartburn for anti-nuclear activists who rattle off a list of economic and environmental issues that governors aren’t talking about.
They also question how state leaders reconcile the nuclear blitz with an increased focus on reducing costs and Trump’s overhaul at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Over the past year, the NRC has proposed streamlining environmental reviews, speeding up licensing of new reactor designs and scrapping a half-century-old radiation standard.
“Expanding nuclear while cutting back or eliminating adequate regulations as the Trump Administration is proposing … is a formula for disaster,” said David Kraft, director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service, an Illinois watchdog group.
One prominent Democratic governor not on the nuclear bandwagon: California’s Gavin Newsom.
Just last week, Newsom said he won’t act to extend the life of California’s lone nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon. The NRC in April granted a 20-year license extension for the plant to 2045, but state approval is also needed — a decision that the governor will leave to his successor. While many environmentalists are put off by Democratic governors’ nuclear pursuit, another key constituency of the party is elated: labor.
Unions see potential for thousands of high-wage construction trades, manufacturing and operational jobs that would be created if the oft-promised nuclear renaissance actually happened.
Even Minnesota, which has had a moratorium on nuclear construction for more than 30 years, is dipping a toe in the waters of nuclear expansion. Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill in May that sets aside $500,000 for the state to study the impact of new nuclear generation.
Dozens of organizations and companies in Minnesota are part of a coalition seeking to lift the moratorium, including utilities, chambers of commerce, the Minnesota Farm Bureau and labor unions.
Among them is Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) Minnesota and North Dakota. Kevin Pranis, marketing manager for the group, said one of the key objectives of the study is to identify communities in Minnesota that have interest in hosting a project.
Pranis sees a generational shift happening when it comes to public opinion — something that polling data backs up — with younger Americans more likely to get behind nuclear power. People in their 20s and early 30s are more likely to view climate change as a significant threat.
What’s more, they hadn’t graduated high school the last time a nuclear reactor melted down at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan and hadn’t been born for the Chernobyl meltdown or Three Mile Island — the major incidents that captured global headlines and helped shape many older Americans’ views on nuclear energy.
“You have lawmakers and policy advocates who really kind of cut their teeth in anti-nuclear protests in the ’70s, and younger generations that don’t have that same-they don’t have those same associations,” Pranis said.
