As the White House pursues a sweeping revision of nuclear safety standards to speed up new reactor approvals, one national laboratory is volunteering to help the Department of Energy do the job in place of the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The director of the Idaho National Laboratory and two high-level colleagues are asking for Energy Secretary Chris Wright and members of Congress to allow DOE, advised by the lab, to be the main safety regulator for advanced reactors, expanding DOE’s and INL’s longtime role in developing test reactors.
In an April paper, “Recommendations to Improve Nuclear Licensing,” the lab officials propose licensing that would allow nuclear companies to opt into a Department of Energy-led process that supplants the NRC.
The NRC and its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, have had sole authority to license commercial reactors since the start of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor business. Shifting some licensing authority to DOE and its labs hands top political appointees under President Donald Trump responsibility for ensuring safety.
Advanced reactors are a top Trump White House energy priority as a source of electricity for the rising artificial intelligence industry. In a series of executive orders on nuclear policy last month, Trump targeted NRC’s extensive safety licensing requirements as an obstacle to expanding nuclear power.
The INL authors, lab director John Wagner, senior counsel Stephen Burdick, and associate lab director Jess Gehin, said the perceived simplicity of a DOE authorization process — as opposed to going through the NRC — has attracted nuclear companies.
“This process is viewed as being much shorter and more straightforward than NRC’s licensing process,” the INL authors said.
In an interview with POLITICO’s E&E News, Burdick said the report was a response to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, not a request by the Trump administration (although some of the key INL recommendations appear in the Trump executive orders).
The goal is to retain the safety components or licensing process, he said, but “look for places where we could gain efficiencies.”
Advanced reactors by developers including TerraPower, X-energy, General Electric Hitachi Nuclear Energy, NuScale Power, and Kairos Power are to be much smaller than today’s nuclear reactors, creating hopes for factory construction of major components to lower nuclear energy’s daunting development costs. The small modular reactor (SMR) units can be linked on site to expand output.
Trump ordered a “wholesale revision” of the NRC’s new reactor licensing process by a 20-person special committee not yet appointed, including the agency’s structure, personnel, regulations, and basic operations. A draft of the new policy, due in nine months, requires an 18-month deadline for construction and operation of new reactors.
Trump’s direction that the revisions will involve the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has raised concern among several former NRC chairs that the White House will introduce its energy policy goals into the reactor safety standards process, undermining public confidence in future reactors.
One of the Trump orders from last month aligns with the INL plan, requiring an “expedited pathway” for NRC approval of new reactor designs that INL and other Energy and Defense Department agencies have tested and approved. NRC would not be authorized to “revisit” risks that DOE and DOD have considered.
The INL paper seeks to “clarify” policy in order to expand DOE approval of permitted activities “including activities not located on Government-owned and controlled sites, without any NRC approval.”
Burdick, the INL counsel, told E&E News, “I can see why companies would want to go to a DOE facility. … I think it’s a little easier for a first-of-a-kind project” to go through a DOE review rather than the NRC’s.
The INL proposal would allow DOE to authorize even commercial projects that are on federal lands, Burdick said. “That would be quite a change from the existing process, but it could drive more of those projects into the DOE authorization realm,” he said.
A reactor developed with an INL-DOE license could then go to the NRC and say, “’We’ve already been through this with DOE,’” he said. “The hope would be that the NRC would be able to rely on that more than it has in the past.”
The INL paper also broaches the possibility of DOE design approvals for commercial reactors outside of federal lands.
The INL leaders also propose enactment of new legislation that would allow SMRs to be regulated under the NRC’s existing “minimal” standards requirements that apply to small facilities such as university reactors. The shift would be justified by the “advanced safety features” of the SMRs and the “very safe track record of the nuclear industry over decades.”
Burdick’s interest in substituting DOE authorizations for NRC licensing is personal, he said. Before joining INL six years ago, Burdick worked for the Morgan Lewis law firm, representing reactor developers seeking licenses for new reactors. That gave him direct experience with the NRC’s processes, which he said involved far too many meetings, and too many opportunities for opponents to challenge design decisions and safeguards.
Nuclear’s ‘coalition of shared interests’
Trump and congressional Republicans have blamed the time and cost of the NRC licensing for causing developers to abandon projects or not even begin them, although the NRC received 17 applications for 26 new reactors during the 2000s decade.
The first mover NuScale Power faced years of NRC reviews. But the expected boom in nuclear power was chilled by the emergence of cheap, abundant natural gas from fracking operators, cost overruns at Georgia Power’s Vogtle reactor project, and the safety reviews that followed the Fukushima Daiichi emergency, NRC historian Thomas Wellock found.
The response to Trump’s executive orders have been mixed, often tracking familiar political and policy splits.
“Key constituencies have come together despite historically divergent views,” creating a coalition of shared interests, said former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and John Deutch, former undersecretary of Energy and CIA director, in a recent article in the National Interest newsletter. “The president’s executive orders, as written, risk the stability of that coalition.”
Trump’s executive orders “would reduce the independence of the NRC, which can ultimately impact the safety and security of operating reactors. Fixed deadlines are proposed for NRC decisions, and the use of federal sites is proposed, lowering compliance levels under the National Environmental Policy Act,” Moniz and Deutch wrote. “Crucially, not a word is said about the importance of assuring reactor safety, an issue that might reawaken public opposition to nuclear power.”
Judi Greenwald, president of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, told E&E News that DOE and INL should create closer collaboration with the NRC, not more competition.
“There is already some coordination between NRC and DOE. We would like to see NRC and DOE continue and further improve that coordination to observe each other’s processes as appropriate and leverage each other’s expertise and strengths as much as possible,” said Greenwald. “There should be a way for a reactor that has gone through DOE authorization for a testing phase to be able to leverage that authorization to have a smoother, accelerated commercial licensing process at NRC.”
But the evaluation of whether a reactor should operate commercially for 40 years is a different evaluation, she noted. “INL can help NRC implement the executive order by providing valuable expertise and input, but to ensure any regulations are valid and durable, NRC must be the one who makes rulemaking and regulatory decisions,” Greenwald said.
Clarification: Editing changes have been made to clarify that INL has proposed drafting safety rules for authorization by DOE.
