The Nuclear Regulatory Commission unveiled new proposals Wednesday geared toward speeding up the construction of new reactors and overhauling the way the agency regulates radiation safety.
The regulator said it wants to give nuclear applicants the chance to use “modern, risk-informed approaches” for their safety analyses and model updates.
Further, the NRC said that it would allow “certain early site activities under a general license” after an applicant applies for a license to start construction on a new reactor.
“We are not going to force fit new technologies into licensing frameworks that are no longer fit for purpose,” NRC Chair Ho Nieh told reporters Wednesday. “Regulations are not wine. They don’t always get better with age.”
Fuel shortages remain a challenge for nuclear reactors in the U.S., and the commission proposed to address that by allowing the use of “higher-enriched and accident-tolerant designs,” it said in a release.
The changes are part of a broader overhaul of the agency’s regulations tied to an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last year and the bipartisan ADVANCE Act, which Congress passed in 2024.
“The proposed rule would update requirements across virtually every stage of a plant’s lifecycle — from initial design approvals and construction through operation, license renewal, and decommissioning — by introducing more flexible, risk-informed, and performance-based approaches tailored to both today’s technologies and the next generation of reactors,” the NRC said in a statement.
Nieh said the NRC is aiming to have the reactor licensing rule finalized by the end of the year but noted “there’s a significant amount of rules” that the commission has already proposed that will need to be considered.
Separately, the NRC has introduced proposed rules to speed up licensing for microreactors and allow companies that take their designs to DOE or DOD first to have a new path to a license from the regulator.
“This kind of first year, if you will, is all about developing the licensing frameworks,” Nieh said. “Moving into next year and beyond, it’s about execution.”
In a separate rulemaking announced Wednesday, the regulator is planning to get rid of a half-century-old standard that radiation exposure should be as low as possible to protect human health — a decision that applies to almost the entire U.S. nuclear industry.
Instead, the U.S. chief nuclear regulatory body will switch to a “graded approach to dose management” that is based on “risk and operational circumstances,” it said Wednesday.
“Nobody is going to receive more radiation from a dose-limit standpoint because of this rule change,” Nieh said.
He added, “We want to get away from driving our licensees and our applicants toward an expectation that’s open-ended.”
The agency’s changes to the standard known as ALARA (“as low as reasonably achievable”) would not just apply to the nation’s more than 50 commercially operated nuclear power plants and about 10 fuel cycle facilities. Other entities that use radioactive materials, such as medical facilities and universities, would also be impacted.
The NRC said in a news release that it had determined that “ALARA as a separate regulatory expectation can lead to additional costs and complexity without a measurable safety benefit.”
The shakeup to radiation standards comes as the Trump administration is pursuing an “American nuclear renaissance” that would involve the United States quadrupling its net nuclear capacity by 2050 despite the slow growth the industry has seen in recent decades.
Many in the nuclear industry have long argued that ALARA is overly prescriptive and makes it more expensive to build without meaningfully improving safety. But safety advocates say the jury’s still out on whether low-dose radiation can cause serious health harms to humans.
POLITICO’s E&E News reported earlier this year that the NRC was taking the first steps to end the standard and detailed specific changes the commission was pursuing. The NRC’s decision to eliminate the “ALARA” principle dovetails with actions taken by the Energy Department earlier this year to get rid of the standards in its directives and regulations.
Though the White House in a directive last year came short of ordering the NRC to remove the ALARA principle, it asked the agency to “reconsider reliance” on the standard, calling it “flawed.”
Emily Caffrey, director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Health Physics program, said ALARA “was not a tenable solution” as it was implemented.
“ALARA was well-intentioned but poorly implemented,” she said. “It was intended to ensure that people were protected. Instead, people have taken it to mean all doses must be zero.”
As part of its hoped-for broader nuclear build-out, the Trump administration has ordered a regulatory overhaul of the NRC to speed up reactor licensing and deployment. The commission has largely followed through, introducing regulatory frameworks to boost the deployment of small advanced nuclear reactors — which have drawn interest from Silicon Valley startups and the administration.
Asked separately whether the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this week to give the president more power to fire leaders of independent agencies could impact NRC business, Nieh responded: “There are no political pressures on this agency here.”
“The president chooses who he works with on the teams in the executive branch,” Nieh said. “The NRC is part of Team USA when it comes to meeting our national energy needs. There’s no political pressure on our safety decisions.”
