In his call Friday for a nationwide expansion of new nuclear power plants, President Donald Trump has set up a potentially historic showdown between his authority and the independence of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. standard-setter for nuclear safety for the past half-century.
Trump on Friday gave the NRC until February to prepare and publish “a wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance documents,” in consultation with White House budget officials and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The Department of Energy and the Defense Department were also given totally new nuclear missions that could support — or compete — with the NRC’s charter.
NRC was directed to review “unsound” and “myopic” rules that limit radiation exposure. And the new rules must include 18-month deadlines for approving new reactor designs.
Trump’s four executive orders signed Friday support the goal of a fourfold increase in U.S. nuclear output by 2050 to power data centers that can help fuel American leadership in artificial intelligence technology. Some clean energy groups shun nuclear power. But nuclear advocates inside the environmental community say it’s a vital source of carbon-free power after 2030. Other backers point to rising electricity demand and long-term energy reliability as reasons to advance nuclear technology and build more plants.
Responses to the orders have landed far apart.
Adam Stein, director of nuclear energy and innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, a supporter of expanded nuclear power, said the White House is requiring the NRC to reconsider radiation standards, but the executive orders don’t order the agency to change nuclear power’s safety threshold. Instead, Trump calls for adoption of “credible and data-backed” safety standards, he said. “The orders do not undermine safety.”
“The executive order is challenging the agency to reexamine its processes … to make sure they are appropriately balancing risks and benefits and are not imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens,” said Jeffrey Merrifield, a former NRC commissioner and an attorney with Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. “I believe at the end of the day, the agency still has the last word on what it needs to do to meet its safety mission.”
The orders offer no clarity on how differences would be resolved by the NRC commissioners and administration officials, even if much of NRC’s legal authority is still in place.
Allison Macfarlane, a former NRC chair, said Trump’s intervention in the NRC process smacks of political interference, which will “crater” essential public confidence in nuclear power. “I think it’s really going to damage public trust,” she said.
“I’m concerned about this intrusion on the historic independence of the agency,” said another former NRC chair, Stephen Burns. “You’re seeing this in how they’re acting with other independent agencies.”
A White House official confirmed that staff reductions are planned at the NRC. “There will be turnover and changes in roles,” a White House official said Friday, speaking on background. “Total reduction in staff is undetermined at this point, but the executive orders do call for a substantial reorganization.”
Ambition and resources
“It will be impossible for NRC to maintain a commitment to safety and oversight with staffing levels slashed and expertise gone,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a nuclear power critic, said Friday. (The Trump order said specialists could be added to NRC staff if necessary to evaluate certain reactor technology).
Trump’s orders called on the departments of Defense and Energy to vet new reactor designs in parallel if not in competition with the NRC. The U.S. Army is ordered to have a new reactor operating at a U.S. military installation within three years. Under the White House plan, DOE must coordinate construction of new reactors to power data centers within 30 months.
Reactor technologies approved by DOE and DOD should receive expedited approval at the NRC. The commission would have limited authority to reconsider the DOE and DOD decisions, the president directed.
“There’s a question about whether the resources are going to match the ambition,” said Judi Greenwald, CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, which supports zero-carbon advanced nuclear technology as a way to address emissions in the power sector.
The first few new reactor designs will take at least a couple of years to review, she said. “That’s a process that we think NRC is competent to do.”
Once nuclear builders get construction experience, she added, regulators can accelerate processing of standard designs. “You can just keep licensing the same thing repeatedly, and we should get pretty fast at that,” she said.
New, unproven technologies
The NRC’s yearslong process of creating a new regulatory review process for advanced reactors generated bipartisan frustration in Congress. That paved the road for enactment of last year’s ADVANCE Act to speed up reviews, passed with significant majorities from both parties.
Today, a dozen reactor builders are in preliminary discussions with the NRC about their designs. Four small modular reactor developers have applied for licenses. Most of the advanced reactors Trump is counting on to bring about a nuclear “renaissance” use fuel or heat management technologies that are far different from currently operating U.S. reactors.
New fuels and technology pose unique safety review challenges, according to a 2023 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
Much of the licensing of new reactors revolves around testing and licensing new cooling technology. Instead of the water-cooled systems, advanced reactors employ less familiar cooling systems such as liquid sodium, helium gas or molten salt. While the projects include some built-in safety improvements over existing reactors, “the designs will need to demonstrate that they can meet [NRC] standards through testing and safety analysis,” the National Academies report said.
Former NRC Chair Richard Meserve, who chaired the National Academies panel, said the NRC is deeply engaged with the new reactor vendors. “The NRC has been tackling the issues, but the hard decisions have not yet been completely confronted. There is no way to cut corners on ensuring that these new features are carefully analyzed,” he said.
“Sodium-cooled reactors face significant fire risk, as sodium ignites explosively on contact with air,” said Amir Afzali, a retired utility senior director with more than three decades experience in nuclear power.
One potential engineering solution, he noted, is to enclose sodium-carrying pipes within a secondary containment pipe. “While effective, this approach requires rigorous testing, inspection, and monitoring — raising construction and operating costs,” Afzali said.
History across industries — whether it’s nuclear, banking or aerospace — raises alarms about an approach that weakens oversight and blurs the lines between promotion and regulation. “Maintaining independent, effective regulation is essential to avoid serious consequences,” Afzali said.
In the preamble to his order for rule changes at NRC, Trump said the basis for his orders was an “overly risk-averse culture” at the NRC that imposed unnecessarily lengthy licensing timetables and high costs, thwarting the expansion of nuclear power in the United States.
“America’s great innovators and entrepreneurs have run into brick walls when it comes to nuclear technology,” Michael Kratsios, Trump’s science and technology adviser, said Friday.
The history is more complex.
Around 2000, the NRC licensed 14 new reactor applications from seven utilities, including 10 of Westinghouse’s AP1000 units — the large reactor designs used by Georgia Power to expand its Vogtle plant.
The Vogtle expansion ended up the only project completed. Costs ran up to $35 billion and the project was seven years late.
But the NRC can’t be blamed for the issues Vogtle faced, Afzali said. The high costs deterred utilities that had been considering a nuclear build-out.
“The NRC has plenty of areas where they need to improve,” Afzali said. “But undermining them as an effective regulator isn’t consistent with the facts.”
Francisco “A.J.” Camacho contributed to this report.
