The Rolls Royce in this nuclear deal with Japan has never made a single car. BMW bought the naming rights in the late 1990s for about £66 million. The Rolls-Royce that kept the actual company name has been building nuclear reactors for British submarines since 1954 and in January 2025 signed a £9 billion contract with the UK Ministry of Defence to build more. That engineering firm launched a commercial arm called Rolls-Royce SMR, which stands for Small Modular Reactor. Its design is 90% assembled in a factory, then trucked to the site and connected. Each unit produces 470 megawatts of electricity, enough to power one million homes for 60 years with no carbon emissions. Three are already under contract in Wales, three more in the Czech Republic. Before March 2011, Japan had 54 nuclear reactors providing 30% of the country's electricity. Then a tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi plant, causing three separate reactor meltdowns, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Within 14 months, every single reactor in the country was offline. Nuclear dropped from 30% of Japan's power grid to zero. To fill the gap, Japan began importing natural gas and coal on a massive scale. By 2013, roughly two thirds of the country's electricity came from fossil fuels, and Japan had become one of the world's largest buyers of liquefied natural gas, a fuel that has to be shipped in tankers from halfway around the world. Japan reversed course in 2022. A 2025 energy plan set a target of 20% nuclear by 2040. Nine days ago, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry published the country's first numerical nuclear replacement targets since Fukushima: replace up to 14 aging reactors by the 2050s, adding 16 gigawatts of capacity, roughly half Japan's current nuclear fleet. Right now, 15 reactors are back online, producing 8.5% of Japan's electricity. A Japanese automation company, Yokogawa, already signed in February 2026 to supply the control systems for Rolls-Royce SMR's global fleet. The country that suffered the worst nuclear accident in a generation is now one of the most aggressive buyers of next-generation reactor technology.

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it. But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

Underway on Nuclear Power linkedin.com/posts/naval-rea…?

In support of the Genesis Mission, Antares collaborated with @INL, @ORNL, @Argonne, and @SandiaLabs to develop an AI iterative workflow from design to manufacturing to 3D print the reactor’s neutron sensor bracket, which condensed a multi-month process into weeks.

JUST IN: @Energy’s @GovNuclear & @NRICnuclear  announced the first developers selected for the newly established Nuclear Energy Launch Pad.⚛️ The initiative helps private #nuclear developers move their technologies from concept to commercial deployment. inl.gov/news-release/nationa…

From Power Crisis to Progress⚡ #SheikhHasina - The Power Behind Bangladesh’s Energy Revolution. @KremlinRussia_E @RosatomGlobal @KremlinRussia @mog_russEN @PMOIndia @mog_russEN @mog_Russ @avarakai @theAshleyMolly @sanjoychakra @paulocasaca1 @RT_India_news @mfa_russia @RT_com

#NorthDakota legislators toured @INL facilities this week, meeting with our experts to learn about advances in #NuclearEnergy and how #AdvancedNuclear technologies may relate to the state's existing infrastructure & future #energy considerations.⚛️🤝 🔗inl.gov/nuclear-energy/