Opinion - Trump's executive orders could endanger America's nuclear renaissance

Yahoo

6 days ago

On May 23, President Trump signed four executive orders designed to dramatically expand and accelerate U.S. development and construction of nuclear power plants, with emphasis on advanced reactors.
The stated rationale for the administration's action is a combination of a domestic energy emergency and a desire to win the geopolitical competition against China and Russia. However, if implemented as written, these orders could undermine the very objective they intend to promote.
The new orders assert that the failure of the U.S. to develop the nuclear energy sector in recent decades is primarily attributable to a myopic and misguided approach to nuclear regulation by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Under the Atomic Energy Act, the commission licenses the design, construction and operation of domestic nuclear and radiological facilities, including commercial nuclear power plants.
The orders lay out a series of radical steps to scale back, reorient and even bypass the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by having the Departments of Energy or Defense license non-commercial reactors to be built on their federal sites. In total, they aim to achieve rapid development of new nuclear designs and expedited construction of advanced nuclear power plants.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is also ordered to effect a 'wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance' within nine months.
The desire to revamp the U.S. nuclear industrial base, encourage and support new nuclear power plant construction, and streamline Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing is welcome.
However, it is neither new nor specific to the Trump administration. Under the ADVANCE Act passed by Congress in 2024, the commission had already begun to adapt its licensing processes for new reactor designs and recruit staff to do this work.
Three flawed premises guide the new executive orders. First, they see the future of nuclear energy as fundamentally similar to that of other energy sources — whereby innovation in design and fast deployment are seen as inherent net positives, and bugs, if any, can be fixed later.
The orders downplay or ignore the special magnitude of nuclear risks, the series of traumatic accidents suffered by leading nuclear power nations and the unique environmental and multi-generational footprint of nuclear waste and spent fuel.
Second, nuclear regulation is mostly viewed as unduly burdensome, expensive, time-consuming and an outright drag on efficiency.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is explicitly blamed for 'throttling nuclear power development' in the U.S. In this regard, the orders fail to recognize a central purpose of regulation: to build and maintain trust in nuclear energy.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not presented the key obstacle to nuclear development in the U.S. And it is the key instrument to earn and keep trust in nuclear energy both nationally and internationally.
Third, the executive orders grossly exaggerate the delays to new deployment legitimately attributable to excessive nuclear regulation. They underestimate the addition of time to market due to limitations on workforce availability, supply chain, financing, specialty fuels and community buy-in.
What Americans need is confidence that any nuclear power plant built and operated in the U.S. is safe, secure and ultimately beneficial to American and host community prosperity.
However, the net result of these executive orders, coupled with the additional impact of other administration actions to reform governmental regulatory processes to align with White House policies, is to risk public trust in nuclear energy.
Downscaling the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's staff, curtailing its political independence, compromising its technical integrity, scaling back its community engagement role or avoiding the commission outright introduces more uncertainty than inspires confidence in a nuclear renaissance.
It would shatter the commission's credibility, nationwide and worldwide, to lower the risk standards it has been credibly using for years to minimize adverse radiation effects from nuclear power plants.
Furthermore, the orders are bound to expedite the brain drain from the agency, whose credibility, speed and efficiency are all dependent on a quality workforce that firmly believes in its mission and inspires all others with its professionalism.
They will reduce confidence in further extending the lives of aging nuclear power plants —many of which have been operating for 60 years or more — or in restarting mothballed plants.
And they could unnecessarily increase public wariness that new nuclear designs will not be subjected to a rigorous and transparent review before their performance can be fully demonstrated and tested.
The public reactions to the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima underscore how critical trust is to sustaining public support for nuclear power.
Here, the global setback to the credibility of the Federal Aviation Agency as a U.S. aerospace licensing authority is a poignant reminder, when it emerged after deadly crashes of Boeing's 737 Max, that the agency had delegated some of its licensing process to the company.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's credibility as a professional, independent regulator is also a major selling point for U.S. nuclear vendors seeking to win overseas contracts.
At a time when the U.S. nuclear industry is trying to achieve economies of scale to bolster its competitiveness against Russian and Chinese firms (who can offer better financing and other perks), the commission's reputation as the gold standard in nuclear regulation is one of the few comparative American advantages.
Yes, Nuclear Regulatory Commission operations should be more efficient. The effort to make them so is already well underway and could be further encouraged.
But now — just as nuclear power nears a new dawn — is the worst possible time to damage the commission's capacity to credibly assess and faithfully, independently and publicly report its evaluations and licensing considerations and decisions.
Toby Dalton is a senior fellow and co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Ariel (Eli) Levite is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment.
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