Eric Lipton

speaker

759 appearances 6 recordings 4 series first heard Feb 2025 last heard 5 Aug

Eric Lipton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · How Trump made an estimated $2.2 billion last year · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

that they're trying to diversify themselves.

And so, dating back to Trump's first term, they wanted access to the Westinghouse, which is an American-based, Canadian-owned company that builds these massive nuclear power plants.

They've wanted access to that technology.

And so for the first time, the United States is now saying, we will let you buy that technology and actually build nuclear power plants with it and also share the uranium, which has to power those plants.

And that's where the concern comes, because that same uranium could be processed ultimately, if it's not handled properly, and made into plutonium or other radioactive materials that can be used in nuclear weapons.

So there's some concerns about nonproliferation that result from that deal.

But that's what Trump has agreed so far to share the civilian nuclear power technology with Saudi Arabia.

That deal is unclear whether or not it's going to move ahead because shortly after he announced it, there was a fair amount of criticism.

And then the president said publicly for the first time that in order for Saudi Arabia to get this, it would have to agree to the Abraham Accords, which is to normalize relations with Israel.

And Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to do that because of the complicated nature of what's going on in the Middle East.

And so Trump's demand that they agree to the Abraham Accords in exchange for access to civilian nuclear could mean that the deal does not move forward.

Well, I mean, it's sort of similar to what we've seen with cryptocurrency and with mining and with the predictions markets.

Again, the Trump sons and President Trump himself are moving to invest in the nuclear power sector right now.

And it is one of the president's top initiatives.

And again, the Commerce Secretary is involved in this.

And

The United States needs more electric power desperately because the AI data centers are consuming a massive amount of electricity.

Also, just consumers, air conditioning, electric vehicles.

We need more electricity, and we aren't building enough electric power plants.

So one way to deal with that is to build nuclear power plants, which we haven't done on a large scale in decades in the United States because of concerns about the safety of nuclear power.

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