By Kennedy Maize
What would a nuclear power boom to rival that of the 1970s mean for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Will the agency need to go on a hiring spree to cope with the onslaught of new regulatory business? Or would the Trump administration’s zeal for eliminating government jobs, and its plans for “reform” of the agency embodied in May’s executive order 14300, Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, mean retrenchment?
The executive order contains a lot of historical and technical misinformation along with a critique of the agency’s approach to regulation predictably mimicing long-standing industry criticisms. The order also bows to Elon Musk’s now largely discredited “Department of Government Efficiency” attack on the federal bureaucracy.
Order 14300 has chilling language: “The NRC shall undertake reductions in force in conjunction with this reorganization, though certain functions may increase in size consistent with the policies in this order, including those devoted to new reactor licensing.”
It also calls for the traditionally important Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards to be “reduced to the minimum necessary to fulfill ACRS’s statutory obligations. Review by ACRS of permitting and licensing issues shall focus on issues that are truly novel or noteworthy.” The implication is that the ACRS has focused on trivia, which is false.
In July, The Hill reported that the White House (specifically the Office of Management and Budget) assigned a member of the DOGE team named Adam Blake to the office of the chairman of the legally independent agency. Politico then reported that Blake “told the chair and top staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency will be expected to give ‘rubber stamp’ approval to new reactors tested by the departments of Energy or Defense.”
NRC’s newly installed Republican Chairman David Wright responded, “We don’t rubber stamp anything at the NRC.”
The NRC today has three commissioners: Wright and Democrats Bradley Crowell and Mathew Marzano. The administration has nominated two replacements: Ho Nieh, a Southern Company executive and former NRC staffer and Douglas Weaver, a Westinghouse exec and also a former NRC staff member.
The Ho Nieh nomination has cleared the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and is scheduled for a Senate floor vote this week and is almost certain to be confirmed. Weaver was just nominated (Nov. 5) to replace Republican Commissioner Annie Caputo, who resigned suddenly in July, and has not had a committee hearing. He would fill her term, which expires in June.
Since the advent of the Trump administration, the NRC has seen the extraordinary firing of Christopher Hanson, the Democratic chairman, the early departure of Caputo, the departure of senior staff, a hiring freeze, and a shutdown as part of the now ended government-wide paralysis.
Crowell told the Senate environment committee in September, long before the October shutdown, “The agency has been directed to do more with less, despite growing workload and aggressive timeframes. This is an unsustainable dynamic,”
More recently, evidence of a kinder and gentler approach may have appeared. At this month’s annual winter meeting of the American Nuclear Society in Washington, Seth Cohen, DOE’s chief counsel for nuclear policy, told the group not to worry about E.O. 14300.
As the Washington Examiner reported, Cohen said, “Despite some of the language in the executive order, the NRC is almost certainly going to be growing in the coming years.” He denied that the administration’s goal is to “make this the tiniest Nuclear Regulatory Commission it can be.”
Cohen said, “The president fully anticipates that the NRC will likely need to grow to accommodate an increase in applications that can support 300 additional gigawatts of nuclear power by 2050.”
At the ANS meeting, the NRC staffer David Curtis, a special assistant to Wright on implementing the new ADVANCE Act Congress passed last year designed to reform the NRC procedures and also the implementation of the executive order, appeared on the same panel as DOE’s Cohen. Curtis said, “There’s been much in the press about folks who have been with the agency for a long time leaving the agency, and although that may be true … there are lots, thousands of people who have been with the agency for decades,” Curtis said. “So it’s not like the core of the agency has disappeared
Underlying these discussions and actions is a fundamental question about the scope of the NRC’s authority. A recent legal analysis by the Hogan Lovells law firm probes “a long-standing but often overlooked question: which agencies actually have the authority to build and operate nuclear reactors, and under what legal framework?”
The analysis observes that while the Atomic Energy Act gives the NRC authority over all civilian reactors, the law has “narrow carve outs” for the Department of Energy and the Pentagon. “Both agencies are now actively exercising that authority in new ways—DOE through its advanced reactor demonstration projects and DOD through defense-driven initiatives aimed at energy resilience,” according to the paper.
The Hogan Lovells review concludes that “DOE has a limited authority to self-authorize and oversee the deployments of nuclear reactors—but that authority is narrow in scope. DOE may authorize reactors only for its own programs or internal missions and may not use this authority to demonstrate commercial suitability or to operate a reactor as part of a commercial power enterprise.”
DOD has broader authority than DOE under the AEA, according to the analysis: “DOD may regulate the facility when its primary purpose is military or national security and any grid support or electricity sales are incidental; if commercial or electric-utility use predominates, NRC licensing is required.”
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