By Kennedy Maize
The Trump administration is proposing to create a government-owned corporation to manage much of the civilian nuclear power fuel cycle, including previously banned atomic bomb fuel plutonium to be recovered from reprocessed spent nuclear fuel.
This audacious proposal comes in another of Trump’s avalanche of executive orders. On Friday (May 23) he signed an order aimed at reviving the failed 1960s vision of a civilian plutonium-uranium nuclear fuel cycle. Little in the order is possible immediately, some will require congressional action, and the most likely outcome is a lengthy failure.
The misspelled executive order — REINVIGORATING THE NUCLEAR INDUSTRIAL BAS – calls on the energy department, the defense department, the transportation department, and the White House Office of Management and Budget, as part of a lengthy study, to prepare “an analysis of legal, budgetary, and policy considerations relevant to efficiently transferring spent nuclear fuel from reactors to a government-owned, privately operated reprocessing and recycling facility.”
The order begins with conventional hortatory language about goals to “secure our global industrial and digital dominance, achieve our energy independence, protect our national security, and maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of nuclear fuel through recycling, reprocessing, and reinvigorating the commercial sector.”
It then calls for the 240-day study involving the Department of Energy, the Pentagon, the transportation secretary, and the White House Office of Management and Budget to produce a report recommending a “national policy” on spent fuel and high-level waste management; legislation needed to implement the policy; and an ‘evaluation’ of current reprocessing technologies.”
This study should also include “a recommended national policy to support the management of spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste and the development and deployment of advanced fuel cycle capabilities to establish a safe, secure, and sustainable long-term fuel cycle.”
This executive order, one of two directly addressing civilian nuclear power policy, also calls on DOE to “prioritize work with the nuclear energy industry to facilitate 5 gigawatt of power uprates to existing nuclear reactors and have 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030.” Funding would come from DOE’s Loan Program Office, an indication that the administration does not support eliminating the loan office, which many on the right have advocated, including the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report.
As rumors floated about the upcoming order on reprocessing, Ernest Moniz, energy secretary during the Obama administration and a theoretical nuclear physicist at MIT, commented in advance, “Plutonium-based fuels and reprocessing have a poor track record when introduced in civilian nuclear energy programs. Reviving them through executive order would likely:
- Lead to the creation of additional stocks of weapons-usable materials
- Encourage states without nuclear weapons to develop and deploy technologies that are usable in nuclear weapons programs
- Produce new radioactive waste streams that must be managed, at considerable cost and risk
- Increase the cost of deploying nuclear energy, which already faces economic challenges in key markets, including the United States
- Introduce new fuels to the nuclear energy enterprise, requiring new regulatory safety analysis and approvals
- Elevate the risk of a safety or security incident at a nuclear facility.”
Moniz, the last energy secretary with any background in nuclear energy, is now the CEO and co-chair of the Nuclear Threat Institute (NTI).
In a separate executive order on Friday — ORDERING THE REFORM OF THE NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION – the administration would handcuff the NRC, blaming the safety agency for the woes that have befallen the U.S. nuclear industry.
Among other items in the order, it calls for an 18-month deadline for NRC to review applications for combined construction and operation licenses for new plants. It weakens the independent agency’s focus on safety in order to promote new plants through staff reductions. It calls for a purge of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) “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 NRC order also resurrects a long-standing controversy over the health effects of radiation, claiming that the agency “utilizes safety models that posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure. Those models lack sound scientific basis….”
That assertion is itself unsound. The issue is “dose-response” — determining if there is a safe exposure to a dangerous substance, such as a drug, environmental pollutant, or radiation exposure before regulation is required. The issue came before the NRC in the 1980s and the agency adopted the position of the International Commission on Radiological Protection that there is no support for a safe limit of exposure to radiation above normal levels, known as the “linear no-threshold dose-response relationship” or LNT.
In 2020 during the first Trump administration, the NRC reiterated, “This dose-response model suggests that any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) accepts the LNT hypothesis as a conservative model for estimating radiation risk.”
The NRC order also sets a goal for the U.S. to bring on 300 new nuclear plants by 2050, adding to the 94 now in service. This isn’t ambitious. It’s preposterous. Do the simple math. That’s 12 new reactors a year for 25 consecutive years, starting this year. The tally this year so far, almost six months in: 0. Already way behind schedule.
It is in everyone’s interest that this progress continue and not be undermined by staffing cuts or upended by conflicting directives. — Judi Greenwald, Nuclear Innovagtion Alliance
The NRC executive order prompted a tart reply from an important Washington-based industry lobbying group, the Nuclear Innovation Alliance. CEO Judi Greenwald commented, “The NRC must modernize to ensure effective, efficient, and predictable licensing of new nuclear reactors. However, some of the provisions in the EOs would actually undermine the Administration’s goals. Our assessment is that NRC is already making significant progress on reform in compliance with congressional direction including the 2024 ADVANCE Act. It is in everyone’s interest that this progress continue and not be undermined by staffing cuts or upended by conflicting directives. NRC effectiveness, efficiency and independence are critical to the public, the industry, and potential customers of U.S. nuclear technology both here and abroad.”
Both executive orders raise the question of where the White House is getting its scientific advice. Michael Kratsios, 37, is Trump’s science advisor and head of the White House Office of Science Technology Policy. He was the associate director of the OSTP in the first Trump administration. His academic credential is a Bachelor of Arts in Hellenic studies from Princeton. His work experience is in hedge fund management and as a staffer to computer entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and far-right political puppet master Peter Thiel.
The recommendations in neither order touch on nuclear economics, instead arguing fatuously that government policy killed reprocessing and stifled nuclear power plants. Economics killed the three major attempts to create a viable reprocessing industry over the past 60 years, at West Valley, N.Y., Morris, Ill., and Barnwell, S.C. Construction cost overruns, delays, and sticker shock on consumer electric bills strangled civilian power plants.
The Quad Report: to subscribe, for back issues, and a searchable archive.
To comment: