The NRC’s new Mission Impossible: Making Atoms Great Again

In early May, drafts of presidential executive orders surfaced that would “reform” (e.g., dismantle) the long-established independent safety and security framework under which the United States regulates commercial nuclear power. For those who held out hope that the leaked orders were trial balloons and would be shot down by stakeholders who value regulatory stability and clarity—such as nuclear power plant operators—disappointment loomed. On May 23, President Donald Trump signed the orders, which in some respects had gotten even more extreme than originally advertised.

One order mandates that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) fundamentally change its mission to support the absurd and reckless goal of quadrupling of US nuclear energy capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050—which would, if achieved, add the equivalent of 300 large nuclear plants to the US fleet—by prioritizing speedy licensing over protecting public health and safety from radiation exposure. This would effectively make the NRC a promotional agency not unlike its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, thereby undoing the NRC’s 51-year history as the independent safety regulator established by the 1974 Energy Reorganization Act. Congress considered but ultimately watered down a legislative provision to do just that last year. Now President Trump wants to finish the job by requiring the NRC to “facilitate nuclear power” in addition to “ensuring nuclear safety.”

The order requires that the agency undertake “a wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance documents” and produce draft and final versions of the new rules within nine and 18 months, respectively. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with this massive body of regulatory detail—refined over decades of increasing technical knowledge, facility operating experience (including the 1979 Three Mile Island and 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accidents), and often impassioned debate about “how safe is safe”—surely knows this is a nigh impossible task. The challenge is compounded by the vague criteria provided to guide the revision, which invoke subjective terms that are the bane of regulators, such as “reduce unnecessary burdens” and “focus on credible, realistic risks.”

This exercise in busywork on a massive scale will only serve as a disruptive distraction from the NRC’s important work overseeing the operating fleet of US nuclear reactors, likely leading to regulatory paralysis and delays.

Specifically, even though the NRC has already been working to shorten approval timelines under pressure from Congress, the order directs the commission to establish fixed, 18-month deadlines for approving applications for new reactors of any type, providing no leeway except for “instances of applicant failure.” Imposing such a rigid schedule may appease arrogant vendors of new nuclear designs who resent the scrutiny of regulators, but such a dictat is terrible for nuclear safety. New nuclear reactors in the licensing pipeline are mostly experimental in design; they have had little to no operating experience and introduce novel safety concerns that require painstaking and time-consuming experiments and analyses to resolve. Forcing technical reviewers to paper over such gaps in knowledge to meet arbitrary deadlines may lead to faster approvals, but it is sure to create implementation headaches and serious safety problems for anyone who tries to build and operate these first-of-a-kind reactors. And dedicated safety professionals at the NRC are not likely to remain in an environment where they are compelled to compromise their integrity, depleting the workforce needed to process a growing number of applications.

NRC reviews often uncover safety issues that reactor applicants miss. A case in point is the NuScale small modular reactor. During the review of the original NuScale design, NRC staff identified a mechanism that could cause the reactor to become critical and melt down following an emergency shutdown, leading the company to make last-minute design changes.

In the anti-science push that we have come to expect from the Trump administration, the order also deems well-established models of the risks of low-level radiation exposure to “lack sound scientific basis.” It directs the agency to “specifically consider adopting determinate radiation limits”—that is, to accept the view of a small minority that there is a “safe” level of radiation and incorporate it into its regulations—despite an actual lack of sound scientific basis supporting such a claim. The NRC recently affirmed in a unanimous vote that the “linear no-threshold model” (the principle that any level of radiation is harmful, but the cancer risk is proportional to the dose), which is the foundation of international radiation protection standards, remains an effective basis for the NRC’s regulatory framework. Compelling the NRC to rewrite its regulations based not on the current state of scientific knowledge but on pseudoscience will only create chaos and ultimately put the public at unnecessary risk.

Perhaps recognizing that this NRC “reform” will likely render the agency non-functional for the foreseeable future, the administration hedged its bets by issuing two other orders that would bypass NRC licensing altogether. Those orders encourage approval of reactors within the purview of the Defense Department and the Energy Department. This would have a detrimental impact on nuclear safety in both cases: Defense lacks the expertise to conduct such reviews (as it hasn’t approved its own nuclear reactors in decades); and Energy’s self-regulation of nuclear plants would be tainted by conflicts of interest, as the agency would directly benefit from approval of these projects. One order calls for deploying reactors to power artificial intelligence data centers at Energy Department sites, even if they are privately owned and operated. Whether this order actually expands Energy Department authority to approve reactors for commercial purposes is a complicated question best left for the lawyers. But there is clear intent to sideline the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the relatively high level of public engagement and transparency that the agency offers compared to the Defense and Energy departments.

Another goal of the orders is to “promote American nuclear exports.” But what the administration doesn’t realize is that the NRC’s image (deserved or not) as the world’s “gold standard” nuclear safety regulator is a critical selling point for the US brand and US nuclear vendors. This is especially true for countries new to nuclear power that lack their own regulatory expertise and put their faith in NRC licensing. Yet nearly every action in the orders will undermine global confidence that the NRC is continuing to make independent safety judgments about new reactor designs and isn’t merely doling out seals of approval to Trump’s preferred cronies of the moment. Also, adopting radiation protection standards that violate international norms is not likely to bolster confidence in US designs around the world.

The NRC has been given a new mission to facilitate nuclear power at the expense of public health and environmental protection. But it doesn’t have to choose to accept it. It’s no surprise that an administration that embraces conflicts of interest would not care about preserving NRC’s non-promotional status. But unless the Supreme Court says otherwise, it is far from clear that independent agencies are obligated to follow executive orders—and as an independent agency, the NRC would be well justified in rejecting any attempt to negate Congress’ chief rationale for creating it in 1974. Chairman David Wright often says that safety is the NRC’s “North Star.” Now he can show that he means what he says by rebuffing President Trump’s crude and possibly illegal attempt to effectively destroy the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and undermine its authority to protect the public from potentially disastrous corner-cutting by the nuclear industry.

For decades, the nuclear industry has blamed overregulation for the cost overruns and delays that have plagued new projects and caused it to lose the confidence of investors. Now, these dangerous executive orders call the bluff. If the NRC complies with them and reduces itself to a rubber-stamp, the public will be increasingly at risk. Only time will tell if the industry, even without needed oversight and reasonable regulation, can build nuclear plants on schedule and on budget, or if it will finally have to grapple with the real root causes of its failure to thrive.