From CFACT

By CFACT Ed, Rabbi Yechezkel Moskowitz

Every few weeks, some deep-tech influencer posts on X something like this, “If the Navy can run hundreds of nuclear reactors safely and cheaply, why can’t the private sector?” Or alternatively, they ask, “Why can’t the navy run the nuclear private sector?”

It’s a fair question — and a flawed one. The Navy didn’t make nuclear work because it was simple; it made it work because it was sacred. Admiral Hyman Rickover built a system designed not to fail standardized, centralized, and ruthlessly disciplined. It served its mission perfectly. But what works for warships doesn’t always work for markets. Rickover’s genius was that he eliminated uncertainty. Every submarine and carrier reactor shared the same DNA. Training, design, operations — all uniform, all accountable to one command. That’s why the Navy’s record is spotless. The Ford-class carrier’s twin A1B reactors can operate for fifty years with only one refueling — a feat of engineering discipline as much as physics. Rickover’s model worked because the Navy had one job: deterrence and defense. It didn’t need ten competing designs. It needed one that never failed. In other words, in that world, standardization isn’t bureaucracy — it’s survival.

But the private sector plays a different game. It thrives on iteration, competition, and failure that leads to progress. Rickover’s model worked for the Navy precisely because it removed those variables. He built a monopoly on excellence — and that was exactly what the Cold War required. But if we apply that same command-and-control philosophy to commercial nuclear, we don’t get innovation — we get procurement. And when government procurement becomes industrial policy, we end up with a handful of politically protected players instead of a dynamic marketplace. That’s not how you rebuild a nuclear economy. That’s how you stall one.

None of this is to say Rickover was wrong — only that he was right for his mission. The Navy’s nuclear program exists to guarantee performance under the most extreme conditions imaginable. A free market has a different mission: to discover what works best by letting ideas compete on merit. If the government locks us into one “approved” design or technology class, it isn’t creating stability — it’s picking winners and losers before the race even starts. That said, the private sector doesn’t need to abandon Rickover’s discipline; it needs to adapt to it with a new set of rules that works for an environment of innovation and progress. The nuclear startup scene needs to learn from his focus on safety, standardization, and lifetime reliability. But also embrace what his world couldn’t: openness, competition, and creative risk. We don’t need forty unproven startups chasing hype, we already have folks calling next-gen nuclear nuke bros and claiming there is an SMR bubble, so some choices are going to be made, and we need to allow a handful of strong contenders to rise or fall based on results, not relationships. No old school nuclear nuke bro start-up should ever be too big to fail.

The right framework is a hybrid — the Navy’s rigor married to the market’s dynamism. Set the boundaries, keep the standards high, and let the best reactors win. The federal government’s role should be to build the field, not pick the team. To get there, we need policy alignment — the kind seen under the Trump administration, which deserves credit for re-centering nuclear energy as a matter of national strength. By tying energy, security, and industrial policy together and supporting advanced reactor licensing and public-private partnerships through DOE, we are seeing, for the first time in decades, that Washington is treating nuclear not as a regulatory burden but as a strategic asset.

That mindset shift must continue. We need the same clarity that Rickover demanded of his sailors: know the mission, execute it flawlessly, and never confuse caution with cowardice. But the mission today isn’t deterrence — it’s deployment. As the DOE begins working on accelerating the deployment of advanced reactors, we must standardize where it matters — fuels, safety protocols, regulatory pathways and supply chains — and compete where it counts: in design, cost, and performance. If the U.S. wants to lead the second nuclear era, it must allow multiple paths to success under one uncompromising standard of safety and excellence and ensure that merit — not politics — is what wins the day.

Rickover’s Navy proved that nuclear power could be safe, reliable, and enduring. Now it’s up to the private sector to prove it can also be scalable, efficient, affordable, and competitive on the national and international stage Because while in the Navy, one reactor powers the fleet. In an evolving energy market, ever hungry for more power, only competition powers progress.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy