The Trump administration released three executive orders on nuclear energy on the Friday afternoon before the Memorial Day weekend — a time often used to dump bad news. And these orders were as disastrous as they come.

With these orders, President Donald Trump has embraced a dangerous strategy to promote the most expensive power there is: nuclear. His plan for new nuclear plants would require hundreds if not thousands of reactors, cost the nation over $4 trillion, and raise electricity bills substantially.

Worse, he is weakening design and safety oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And he’s doing so just as the NRC is starting to get flooded with new experimental — and highly risky — applications for previously untested small modular reactor (SMR) designs that appear to cut costs by skimping on safety.

Scientific American warned in March that Trump’s policies, which would weaken regulatory oversight of nuclear, “severely increase the risk of expensive, unexpected nuclear accidents.”

Spoken like someone with actual DOE experience, and specifically running EERE. Oh, look … he did.

I ultimately ran the billion-dollar Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which supported many of the winning and emerging solutions we have today, including solar, wind, and geothermal power as well as advanced batteries, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. These solutions — as well as overhyped, costly, deeply flawed technologies like nuclear, direct air capture, fusion, and hydrogen — are the subject of my new book, The Hype About Hydrogen: False Promises and Real Solutions in the Race to Save the Climate.