Since July 1, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced a series of proposals that officials say will advance the federal agency’s agenda to revamp requirements for permitting, authorizing, siting and building new nuclear power plants. as well as to modernize public health protections and reduce the scope of environmental reviews.
The three proposed rules announced between July 1 and 8 — if enacted — would allow plant construction to begin sooner and allow more flexibility in assessing the risks associated with nuclear facilities.
The proposals are part of the commission’s broader effort to modernize regulations, reduce burdens on industry and ensure that requirements remain aligned with current science and operational experience while maintaining public safety, the agency said in a news release. Many suggested approaches to designing and building nuclear power plants while still addressing public safety concerns and in step with the Trump administration’s priorities have been circulating for years.
One proposal would allow preliminary construction and facility site work to begin earlier, focusing oversight on components most likely to be associated with safety concerns. The proposed rule would also allow project applicants and licensees to base decisions using more flexible risk-based approaches compared to traditional requirements to conduct safety and risk analyses.
The 550-page proposed rule represents the most comprehensive update of the nuclear power licensing commission in decades, Chairman Ho K. Nieh said in a statement. “NRC regulations have not kept pace with new technologies and our energy needs,” he said, adding that the proposal “eliminates rigid frameworks … to accelerate the safe deployment of new reactors and expand existing capacity in America.”
A proposal announced July 8 would limit the scope of environmental reviews and include condensed timelines for completion and more latitude for categorical exclusions, as seen in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s changes to the review process under the National Environmental Policy Act announced in late June and by other federal agencies over the past year.
The commission’s third proposal would update radiation protection regulations to maintain existing limits on the amounts of “dose limits” — the amount of radiation safely absorbed by workers and the public — while reducing what the agency describes as “unnecessary regulatory burden” and “modernizing requirements to reflect current science and decades of operational experience.”
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Rule changes could backfire, says safety advocatee
Public safety advocate Ed Lyman, director of nuclear energy safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, warns that a shift toward more flexibility in basing design and other decisions could backfire.
“The general trend [at the NRC] is replacing … prescriptive requirements with what they call risk-based requirements, which generally means that they rely more on the outcome of probabilistic risk assessments and less on the kind of deterministic criteria that are clear and understandable, replacing them with much more uncertain numerical calculations of risk,” he told ENR.
Lyman added that the NRC has been allowing more construction work to be done before permits occur, and the construction-related proposal could “open the door to a lot more construction than what you would normally think is the actual reactor structure.”
Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Alliance for Nuclear Innovation, said the nonprofit is still reviewing the rules, including the more construction-related proposal. “The rule covers much more than we initially expected,” he said in an email. Areas of particular interest include the alternative approach to performance-based risk, as well as “more efficient construction, license renewal and early permitting.”
Greenwald points out that what the nuclear industry needs most is certainty. Different administrations with different priorities come and go, but nuclear plants can take years to build and are long-term assets.
“Regulatory whipsawing can hinder new investment and nuclear development by creating uncertainty,” he said in a blog post earlier this year. “Spending time repeatedly revising regulations is a distraction to licensing for early stage reactors, which can continue to be licensed under existing regulations as long as the rules are applied efficiently and flexibly.”
The current set of rules will be open for public comment for 45 days after publication in the Federal Register.
