By Kennedy Maize
White House actions going back to April and put into place last week combine to complicate the bureaucratic lives of two major independent energy regulatory agencies: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The two agencies are faced with a need to detail how they plan a regulatory housecleaning while trying to cope with the White House induced government shutdown that began last week.
An analysis by the Womble Bond Dickinson law firm characterizes the complex regulatory two-step as “uncharted territory. It is a regulatory ‘Y2K’ event, marked with uncertainty around whether a coming change will fundamentally disrupt existing systems or whether concerns are, in the end, unfounded.”
The first step was Trump’s April executive order “Zero-based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy,” (EO 14270) a direct product of the White House Office of Management and Budget. The order requires a span of regulatory agencies including FERC and the NRC to identify by Sept. 30 regulations that could be erased a year later.
The order is filled with caveats, exceptions, and convoluted implementation. Agencies can extend the death sentence for regs identified for extinction for five years following a public comment procedure. They can then implement further five-year extensions indefinitely after further regulatory gymnastics.
While implementing the EO, agencies must tiptoe around existing law, primarily the Administrative Procedures Act, which could well trump (to choose a careful word) agency actions that are arbitrary and capricious. Arbitrary and capricious often seems to be standard operating procedure for the Trump White House and OMB.
On top of that for the NRC, a separate Executive Order in May — Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (EO 14300) – a calls for a new regulatory regime to correct a White House claim that “instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion.”
Translated, the administration wants to go back to the days of the Atomic Energy Commission. Congress abolished the AEC in 1974, with roots back to World War II, for the commission’s failure to take safety seriously while often heedlessly promoting nukes.
An analysis by the Morgan Lewis & Bockius law firm notes that the OMB order requires a reorganization “to promote the expeditious processing of license applications and the adoption of innovative technology,” as well as a “review and wholesale revision,” under what the law firm describes as “an aggressive schedule,” and a revision of the agency’s Reactor Oversight Process, the NRC’s long-standing regulatory roadmap.
The White House also orders NRC to “Adopt science-based radiation limits,” claiming inaccurately that the NRC’s current and long-standing policy of the “linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ standard’ (ALARA), which is predicated on LNT” is unscientific.
There has been a decades-long dispute among scientists over ALARA, with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration calling it “The Gold Standard in Radiation Safety.” The NRC has consistently ruled conservatively on radiation exposures.
The NRC executive order also includes at least one entirely incorrect factual statement. Reflecting some claims at the time of April’s widespread electric blackout in Spain and Portugal just before the administration published EO 14300, the order says, “Recent events in Europe, such as the nationwide blackouts in Spain and Portugal, underscore the importance of my Administration’s focus on dispatchable power generation—including nuclear power—over intermittent power.”
Some early claims about the cause of the cascading blackout blamed a loss of frequency control on the grid as a result of wind and solar generation causing frequency collapse in the shift from direct current to alternating current. Those were hypothetical claims. They were wrong.
According to both the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E), and the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the early off-the-cuff assessment does not withstand scrutiny.
The European grid monitor reported that the root cause of the outage that impacted some 60 million people on the Iberian peninsula was “cascading overvoltage.” ENTSO-E Chairman Damian Cortinas said the event was when one power spike triggers additional spikes, spreading throughout the power system.
“It’s important for every power generation to have voltage control,” he said, adding that the EU grid system currently “does automatically regulate this phenomenon.” He added that “it’s not complicated, but needs to be required. We will advocate clearly for changes in future regulation.”
NERC’s Mark Lauby at FERC at the end of June confirmed that the problem was operational – loss of voltage control by the grid operators – not engineering. He said the operators didn’t understand what they were facing as they tried to smooth out cascading voltage oscillations.
The grid was “lightly loaded” at the time of the incident, Lauby said. The Spanish system suffered from “weak grid conditions – higher voltage sensitivity to network change. What’s more important, the U.S. has well-established procedures in place that mean what happened in Spain won’t happen here.”
Both FERC and NRC have begun their regulatory fandangoes just as Trump and the Republicans have shut down the federal government. This may not prove to be a problem if the shutdown is short. Both agencies say they have enough money on hand or available to operate for a while without significant disruption.
FERC says it saw no problems if the shutdown does not exceed five days, which has now passed. After that, “FERC will continue operations using balances from prior years until exhausted.” The NRC says it is in much the same situation, noting that “carryover funding will be used to maintain critical health and safety activities and progress on other priorities, including activities outlined in Executive Order 14300.”
The Quad Report: to subscribe, for back issues, and a searchable archive.