President Donald Trump on Friday directed his administration to launch fast-track development of new nuclear power plants, ordering the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to complete licensing of new reactor designs within 18 months and the Department of Energy to speed up reactor testing and start building on federally owned land over the next three years.
“President Trump is taking truly historic action to usher in the American nuclear renaissance,” White House science adviser Michael Kratsios said Friday in a briefing for reporters.
One of four executive orders signed by Trump assigns DOE and the Defense Department to oversee construction of new reactors “to power and operate critical defense facilities” and to power data centers and artificial intelligence programs.
According to a White House official who briefed reporters, the two departments apparently would oversee development of these projects without reliance on regulatory reviews by the NRC, previously known as the Atomic Energy Commission, which has overseen nuclear reactor development since just after World War II.
“The NRC will not have a … direct role in that,” the official said.
Texts of the executive orders were not immediately available Friday. Drafts that circulated recently indicated that important NRC regulatory decisions on design safety would likely be reviewed by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The administration’s assertion of policy oversight of nuclear power is part of the upheaval in the federal bureaucracy Trump has launched.
The administration will undertake a “substantial reorganization” of the NRC, according to the official, who could not be identified by name. “There will be turnover and changes in roles. Total reduction in staff is undetermined at this point,” the official said.
The demotion of the NRC has alarmed some former commissioners and energy experts.
“This is the detailed, agency-specific effort to override the historic independent agency construct,” Stephen Burns, who was chair of the NRC during the Obama administration, said in an interview with E&E News earlier this month, based on review of the draft orders.
Many of the actions to speed up reactor licensing in the draft orders are already underway, following congressional enactment of the ADVANCE Act last year, he said. Burns questioned the necessity and justification of what he called White House micromanagement.
“Everybody should be worried about that, especially because we depend on nuclear power plants for about 20 percent of our electricity across this country,” Emily Hammond, a former DOE deputy general counsel and current George Washington University law professor, said in response to the draft orders viewed by E&E News.
“That’s an important segment of low-carbon electricity, and if it’s not safe, that’s a huge gap to fill,” Hammond said.
Kratsios, in remarks Friday, placed the blame for the decline of nuclear power development on regulatory and political roadblocks. “America’s great innovators and entrepreneurs have run into brick walls when it comes to nuclear technology,” he said.
But the two full-sized Vogtle nuclear reactors now operated by Georgia Power, the only new plants completed in a generation, suffered enormous construction costs overruns and ran years behind schedule.
However, a cluster of energy and technology companies have been developing designs for small modular reactors (SMRs) with strong bipartisan congressional support and financial backing from the Biden administration’s DOE.
The SMR developers hope that their plants, once established commercially, could be built in factories and at a lower construction cost. The modular strategy permits multiple smaller reactors to be linked together to deliver tailored power levels to utilities or data centers.
