President Donald Trump’s abrupt firing Friday of Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Christopher Hanson marks another move by the White House to gain control of the independent agency as it heads into a critical review of safety regulations governing a lineup of new reactors.
Hanson was appointed to the NRC by Trump in 2020 and named chair by then-President Joe Biden in 2021. His renomination by Biden was approved by the Senate in 2024 with a large bipartisan majority. Hanson, however, was notified of his dismissal in a terse, two-sentence email from the White House that concluded, “Thank you for your service.”
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told POLITICO on Monday that “all organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction,” adding that Trump “reserves the right to remove employees within his own Executive Branch who exert his executive authority.” Hanson’s firing follows Trump’s removal of other leaders at independent agencies across the government, actions that are caught up in complex court actions.
Democrats in the House and Senate condemned Trump’s action, saying it violated the specific terms of the 1946 Atomic Energy Act that established the nation’s civilian nuclear energy program. The legislation, reaffirmed in 1954, says that a commissioner may be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Natural Resources, said Hanson’s removal was illegal. “Congress explicitly created the NRC as an independent agency, insulated from the whims of any president, knowing that was the only way to ensure the health, safety and welfare of the American people,” Pallone said in a statement.
Sen. Shelley Capito, (R-W.Va.), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, did not respond to a request Monday for comment about Hanson’s firing.
“A competent, effective, and fully staffed U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is essential to the rapid deployment of new reactors and advanced technologies,” the American Nuclear Society said in a statement. “The arbitrary removal of commissioners without due cause creates regulatory uncertainty that threatens to delay America’s nuclear energy expansion.”
Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said his main concern is the quality of the staff’s ongoing technical safety reviews for the advanced small modular reactors now under development.
The NRC has been “racing through applications. They have an obligation to do a thorough review,” Lyman said. “If there are uncertainties that could potentially be safety issues, they can’t just drop the ball. I’m afraid the outcome of this is [going to be] a rubber stamp process.”
Trump, in a series of executive orders and statements last month, said the NRC has thrown roadblocks in front of the development of new reactor technologies with unnecessarily restrictive safety regulations and indefensibly slow processing of permits. But Hanson, in his term as chair, had led the commission staff in accelerating action on licensing issues, many observers conclude.
Former NRC Chair Stephen Burns, in an interview, said Hanson was in step with the directions enacted by Congress last year to streamline regulatory reviews. “He was undertaking those changes,” Burns said.
“It is unclear what the strategy here is in the long term,” Burns said, adding that the common speculation around the NRC now is that the commission’s remaining Democrats will soon follow Hanson.
Another former NRC chair, Richard Meserve, said in a statement, Trump’s action “reflects his intent to abolish the NRC as an independent agency,” he said. “Making the NRC subject to control by the White House means that questions will and should be raised as to whether its decisions on safety matters have been infected by political considerations.”
Meserve noted that Trump’s action comes after Trump’s executive order imposes new obligations on the NRC even as it’s reducing staffing. “Meeting the tight deadlines of the executive order was already going to be very challenging and is not facilitated by the needless disruption of the agency’s management,” Meserve said.
Adam Stein, director of nuclear energy and innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, a supporter of expanded nuclear power, had seen Trump’s executive orders as a positive accelerator of action on new reactor technologies. “The orders do not undermine safety,” he said then.
But on Monday, he expressed concern over the NRC’s ability to carry out the policy review if its leadership is uprooted. David Wright, the current NRC chair named by Trump, has not been renominated for a new term after his current one ends June 30, Stein noted. With Hanson gone, the commission membership will be reduced to three at the end of the month — two Democrats and one Republican.
Even if Wright is renominated, it is “virtually impossible” for him to receive quick Senate confirmation in the current political climate, Stein said.
His organization’s research reveals that the commission’s regulatory pace slows down when the membership drops to three representing different political parties, because a single commissioner can block a creation of a voting quorum, Stein said.
“The NRC remains critically in need of reform and modernization,” Stein said. “But those efforts will almost certainly fail if the result is to return to the partisan polarization around nuclear energy that crippled the industry over the last generation.”
