There was already a feeling in the nuclear power industry that a great leap in the fortunes of the industry was at hand. But President Donald Trump has escalated those hopes with four executive orders.

There are intimations that fusion’s time may have arrived. After more than 70 years of research, huge public funding and many false starts, overblown expectations and sorry disappointments, are the prospects of an electricity-producing fusion plant at hand? Has the key to turn in the door of a vast storehouse of clean electricity become available?

There are great expectations for small modular reactors.

In nuclear circles they represent the arrival, at long last, of the nuclear renaissance, the dawn of a new nuclear age.