Power Should be Cheap, Clean, and Abundant

Guest Opinion by Morgan Murphy

Technology brings abundance. When we humans invent a more efficient way of doing things, we tend to use more, not less. 

Take the car—we travel exponentially more miles than we did by horse. Email made our communication easier, and with that, our inboxes overfloweth. The formula is the same with all human advancement. 

Except power.  

Most of the country is still using 19th century tech to light our homes and power our businesses. The reason? What I call the impenetrable wall of government stupid.

Today, more than 8,200 power plant proposals are stuck in line waiting to be plugged in. Competition is zilch.  And brilliant American designs are flickering out instead of lowering our electricity bills.

Thorium power is a good example.  In 1968, a few hours up the road at Oak Ridge, Tenn., American engineers invented a nuclear reactor whose fuel was already liquid so there was no solid core to melt down. The Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment logged more than 13,000 hours at full power, in TVA country, on American know-how. It solved the two greatest fears of nuclear power: accidents and waste. Homer Simpson could run the plant and not screw it up. 

So naturally, Washington shelved it.

Guess who picked it up? In November 2025, China announced its experimental molten-salt reactor in Gansu province had turned thorium into uranium fuel. In 2012, the Obama Administration gave them our technology, literally setting up a server at Oak Ridge to transfer the tech to Beijing. And the Chinese are spending billions working towards a 100-megawatt demonstration.

We should take back the lead, and Alabama can help.

Start with the rocks. Thorium is about three times more abundant than uranium, and the United States holds an estimated 595,000 tonnes of it, roughly six times China's supply. It comes out of monazite, the same rare-earth mineral stream we're trying to stop buying from Beijing. Southern Company is already planning a facility in Shelby County to pull rare earths out of coal ash. Every ton of critical minerals we produce at home is a ton China can't hold over our heads.

Next, the runway. For decades the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was where good reactor ideas went to die. President Trump changed that. His May 2025 executive orders put an 18-month clock on new reactor licenses and set a goal of quadrupling American nuclear power to 400 gigawatts by 2050. Within a year, the NRC finished Part 53, a licensing path that explicitly covers molten-salt reactors, nearly two years ahead of its deadline. Four Energy Department pilot reactors went critical by July 4 of this year. None of that mentions thorium by name. It didn't have to. The door is open. Somebody has to walk through it.

Alabama is standing right there. Browns Ferry in Athens runs three reactors producing up to 3,764 megawatts, enough for more than 2 million homes and businesses. The NRC just licensed it into the 2050s and finished the review about three months early. We have the workers who know how to run nuclear plants safely, year after year.

We have the rocket scientists, too. Huntsville's Flibe Energy was founded by Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA Marshall engineer, to develop thorium reactors. In February, Flibe shared a federal research award, with Alabama A&M and TVA as partners, to work on recycling spent fuel into liquid reactor fuel. The Legislature is on record as well, with resolutions backing U-233 for Alabama and advanced reactors built here. They're nonbinding, but they tell you where Montgomery stands.

Then there's the kitchen table. Alabama Power has 4 gigawatts of data-center demand under contract. That's the AI boom landing in our backyard. Alabama Power has frozen retail rates through 2027, and TVA is charging data centers 10% more starting Oct. 1, the goal being that families don't pay for Big Tech's appetite. Alabama's new data-center cost law, SB 270, takes effect the same day. These are fine guardrails, but technology and productivity should bring energy prices down—not just keep the status quo of where they are. 

One last thing. Some Washington bureaucrats are still being stupid, disposing of the country's critical U-233 supply, which is the critical match that can light America’s thorium industry. The American Nuclear Society says surplus material like U-233 should go to industry, and thankfully, my former boss Senator Tommy Tuberville has been leading the way to keep our government from shredding the seed corn. Alabamians can expect Coach to be a champion of new power technology when he becomes our next governor.  

We invented this. We have the fuel, the workforce and a president who cleared the runway. Let's not read about the thorium age in a Chinese press release.

Morgan Murphy is a former White House official and press secretary to the Secretary of Defense.

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