The massive, bipartisan Senate’s “National Defense Authorization Act” includes major changes to the regulation of civilian nuclear power by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy, including a 20-year extension of the controversial Price-Anderson insurance subsidy for nuclear power plants.
The Senate DOD bill, which passed 86-11, includes the entire “Accelerating Deployment of Versatile Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act of 2023” which cleared the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on May 31 by a 16-3 vote. Aka the ADVANCE Act, the measure was largely written by the nuclear industry, which has long asserted that the NRC is too bound to its regulatory approach to nuclear power plant safety developed to oversee what is now the stagnant market for traditional and conventional light-water atomic energy plants conceived in the 1960s and 1970s.
A July 6 fact sheet from the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s Washington lobbying group, said that “for future investments in nuclear power, there needs to be certainty with respect to how legal liability will be handled in the unlikely event of a nuclear incident. For more than 65 years, the Price-Anderson Act has provided that certainty.”
The environment committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, was the prime sponsor. She, along with Democratic Chairman Tom Carper of Delaware and influential Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, persuaded the Senate leadership to include the bill in the defense authorization, which funds the U.S. military. In the EPW committee, the only votes against the legislation came from Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and John Fetterman (D-Pa.). The bill also had the support of West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which also has significant nuclear authority, including administering Price-Anderson.
After the committee vote, Markey said he was concerned about loosening export controls of nuclear technology. “There are nonproliferation concerns that are essential to ensuring that there’s a gold standard of safety in nuclear exports,” he said. “Otherwise, plutonium and uranium could end up in the hands of the wrong people.”
Congress created Price-Anderson in 1957 to revive a fading infant civilian nuclear power industry. Private insurers, concerned less about the probabilities of a major reactor accident than about the magnitude of an accident, refused to provide adequate insurance coverage. Two leaders of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy – Sen. Clinton Anderson (D-N.M.) and Rep. Melvin Price (D-Ill.) — came up with a plan that would have power plant owners cover the maximum amount the private insurers would offer, while the federal government would cover an amount over that figure, with an overall limit to the federal aid in the case of a serious accident.
Price-Anderson became controversial in the 1960s and later, as skepticism and opposition to nuclear power grew. But the law has been consistently renewed since, most recently in 2005. The Department of Energy administers the program and, in January, the Biden administration’s DOE recommended renewal when the act was scheduled to come before Congress again in 2025. The Senate defense authorization would push the renewable to 2045. Price-Anderson coverage has never been triggered.
A 2025 reauthorization of Price-Anderson would likely have been controversial, with groups and individuals skeptical of nuclear gearing up for at least a surfacing of questions about the direction of nuclear energy in the U.S. Among the questions skeptics would have raised would have been based on claims if that “small modular reactors” and “advanced reactors” are as safe as advocates claim, why are insurance subsidies necessary?
In addition to extending Price-Anderson (Section 302), other provisions in the ADVANCE Act, include:
- Section 101. The NRC is told to develop an “International Nuclear Reactor Export and Innovation Branch within the Commission’s Office of International Programs.”
- Section 102 gives DOD and the State Department authority to deny imports of “covered fuel,” defined as “enriched uranium that is fabricated into fuel assemblies by an entity that is: (1) owned or controlled by Russia or China; or (2) organized under the laws of Russia or China. The section prohibits the possession or ownership of covered fuel, unless the Commission specifically authorizes such possession or ownership.”
- Section 103. “This section ensures advanced nuclear technologies approved for export are in compliance with nonproliferation standards.”
- Section 104. This section creates “an initiative to modernize civil nuclear outreach to embarking civil nuclear energy nations. Qualifying nations are nations that do not have a civil nuclear program, are developing or expanding a civil nuclear program, or are pursuing the development of advanced nuclear reactor technology.”
- Section 203. The NRC must develop and submit to Congress withing a year of passage a report “identifying unique licensing issues or requirements related to the: (1) flexible operation of nuclear reactors; (2) use of nuclear reactors for nonelectric applications; and (3) colocation of nuclear reactors with industrial plants or other facilities. Nonelectric applications include hydrogen or other liquid and gaseous fuel or chemical production; water desalination and wastewater treatment; heat for industrial processes; district heating; energy storage; industrial or medical isotope production; and other applications as identified by the Commission.”
- Section 205. This provision would “exclude fusion reactors from the technology-inclusive regulatory framework for advanced nuclear fission reactors.”
- Section 206. The NRC must “develop and implement strategies and must initiate a rulemaking to enable and support the licensing of nuclear facilities at brownfield sites.” This is specifically aimed at shuttered coal-fired power plant sites.
- Section 403. “This section directs the Commission to submit a report to Congress, not later than 180 days after the date of enactment, on the readiness and capacity of the Commission to license additional conversion and enrichment capacity and fuel cycle facilities to reduce reliance on Russian nuclear fuel.”
- Section 406. “This section directs the Commission to establish an initiative to enhance preparedness and coordination to qualify and license advanced nuclear fuel,” aimed at domestic production of “High Assay, Low Enriched Uranium.”
–Kennedy Maize
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