By Nick Touran, Ph.D., P.E., 2025-05-23 , Reading time: 8 minutes
Everyone says nuclear power is over-regulated. With word of the big nuclear Executive Orders looming, I spent a few weeks talking to people in the nuclear industry to find out which reforms they thought would be most helpful, and which they were nervous about. Here are the top 12.
1:š³ Keep fixing NEPA. We should default to Environmental Assessments instead of Environmental Impact Statements on sites with previous or generic EIS from within the last ~10 years, and for low-risk reactors. We should accelerate the ongoing implementation of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, and remove/reduce the need for power and alternates analyses sections for any reactor.
Specifically, someone could ask the NRC staff to proceed with rulemaking to update/modernize 10 CFR Part 51. Overlaps nicely with ongoing work to implement FRA. See SECY-24-0046. Remove the requirement in 10 CFR 51.20 to require an environmental impact statement for nuclear power plant applications and power uprates. Provide allowance for categorical exclusions for advanced reactors and power uprates in 10 CFR 51.22. In lieu of categorical exclusions, allow for environmental assessment for first-of-a-kind facilities in 10 CFR 51.21 and a categorical exclusion for nth-of-a-kind facilities and power uprates in 10 CFR 51.22.
2: šIncrease NRC staffing focused on new reactor licensing. The nuclear ecosystem is thriving, and dozens of new applicants are expected to hit the NRC soon. Staff has to be there in order to perform the reviews. Iād say this was the biggest and most common concern from across the nuclear industry.
While doing so, itās important to continue the positive implementation of cultural changes brought in by the ADVANCE act and related legislation. The NRC is there to ensure that the numerous benefits we can get from nuclear power are achieved safely.
3: šļøImprove dashboards, visibility, and timelines around Commission voting. The Commission often sits on votes for years, one example being NEPA Part 51 rulemaking.
Furthermore, after passing something to the NRC, licensees donāt have any idea what the status is of submittal; they have to call their PM, and they ask someone elseā¦ it should just be online.
Create public dashboards that show what the Commissioners are voting on (including how long somethingās been sitting in their queue) and what the status of review is during licensing.
The operating fleet side of the NRC website has excellent dashboards (e.g. how many White findings did plant x have last year?) so just do something like that for Commissioner votes and license submittals. Easy!
4: š§· Encourage use of commercial-grade Quality Assurance standards on safety-related design, procurement, maintenance, etc. instead of special nuclear-grade ones where extra quality from nuclear-grade QA does not have a major impact on public health.
Modern redundancy and passive safety design increases tolerances of failures. Certain structures (e.g. 50-ton concrete blocks) will protect against various internal and external events to a large degree with normal industrial QA standards. Special nuclear-grade standards increase costs, and prevent many vendors from selling to nuclear plants. There are even examples where going to specialized nuclear-grade standards requires a whole new one-off line, which can decrease overall quality and safety. Update guidance to endorse ISO-9001 QA programs to meet the requirements of 10 CFR 50 Appendix B. Applicants can and often do commit to commercial-grade standards for certain components.
5: š§āš¤āš§ Improve and encourage the NRCās ability to perform consultation for licensees and prospective licensees. Thereās a lingering tradition for the NRC staff to never directly answer questions, but rather to just always ask for more information, even if the NRC knows that something would be wrong if submitted as is. This leads to a legalistic and adversarial relationship and wastes time in communication cycles. There is no legal or regulatory basis for this behavior; itās a culture that arose from nothing at some point within the NRC. The culture has been improving dramatically in the last 10 years, which is great. Encourage and enable the NRC more collaborative in the safety mission by allowing them to āconsultā in this manner. Put out an official policy statement proclaiming that this kind of consultation and collaboration is allowed and encouraged. Allow fast non-public NRC/vendor communication, akin to group chats. Note that this may include additional fees, which could improve cost efficiency of NRC.
6: ā¢ļø Replace āAs low as reasonably attainableā (ALARA) with specific sub-background dose limit of, like, 0.1 mSv/yr/person. ALARA is ill-defined and vague, can be abused to cause far more time and money to be spent for in-the-noise health benefits, especially in operations, decommissioning, and waste design. By cutting it off well under natural background, safety is not compromised. Declare: āfor ALARA considerations, anything expected to give a best estimate dose of 0.1 mSv/person/year or less to any given person shall be considered ALARAā. This very low limit wonāt please the anti-LNT folks out there, but there is still plenty of scientific evidence supporting LNT, so any further declarations would require additional careful scientific analysis. Low-dose radiation effects are an extremely difficult problem to study, leaving Alvin Weinberg to once call it ātrans-scientificā, meaning a question that could be asked scientifically but were beyond the scientific method to answer.
7:š¤ Eliminate the mandatory uncontested hearing in section 189a of the Atomic Energy Act. The thoroughness of contemporary NRC technical review renders this unnecessary. Transparency is now handled by public outreach, scoping meetings at reactor sites, and global availability of application documents and staff evaluations on the NRCās website, and US government transparency laws. The hearing takes time and money (up to 10,000 staff hours), and slows the regulatory process down with very little, if any, benefit. See Bowen, 2023.
This is statutory, and needs Congressional work: pick up on progress from NRCās 2008 draft law proposal discussed in Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (April 21, 2016) and the House Energy and Commerce Committee (April 29, 2016) and push it through.
Have the Commissioners go to Congress and do this. Congress wouldnāt let it through in 2008 but things have changed and Congress is perfect for it now. Would be easy.
8:š¦ŗ The Commission should encourage more flexibility around the licensing of reactors under class-103 and 104 licenses. Allow any reactor that can meet certain off-site dose criteria to use class-104-like regulations by eliminating end-use, power, and revenue criteria. If a reactor can demonstrably retain radiation below a certain limit in all normal and credible accident scenarios even if all structures/systems/components (SSCs) fail, then the regulations imposed upon the SSCs should be reduced, regardless of power level, use case, and revenue. Push along the lines of 2024-30721 to further clarify and re-define ānon-power production or utilization facilityā into something like ālow dose risk facilityā.
9:š Officially endorse using existing NOAA or other agency weather data and models for site characterization rather than requiring that a meteorological tower be erected. The āmet towerā guidance in RG 1.23 calls for a 12 months of data for a construction permit and 24 months for an operating license, including the most recent 1 year period. This imposes a long period of time to the process of building any reactor at a new site. Adjust RG 1.23 to endorse use of results from weather modeling based on existing weather sensors, including satellite weather data. Weather monitoring and modeling has undergone untold advances since this type of guidance was made.
10:š Reduce Force-on-Force security drills at plants. More than are notionally required are being done to comply with a requirement that every single officer can perform in a drill. Plants do more than 10 per year to meet this even though only 4 are required.
11:š© Eliminate the possibility of getting a white violation during Emergency Preparedness drills. Green violations should be the max possible from drills. Whites should only be determined during an actual event.
12: š§āāļøProvide more Commission oversight and prioritization of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS). They are very useful for reviewing new and novel things, but the NRC staff technical capabilities have dramatically improved since the ACRSās founding in the early AEC days. Keep them focused on new and novel things and minimize redundancy with staff capabilities and work.
The nuclear industry does have a policy wing thatās heavily engaged in ongoing reforms, so I didnāt really expect to find anything too surprising. But with the big nuclear Executive Orders coming out (earlier today), talking to friends and their networks still seemed worthwhile to get the latest info.
A big thanks to all respondents to the survey. And a huge thanks to the policy professionals who guided and taught me much about this space, and who have worked tirelessly to actually implement these and other reforms. Iām humbled and thankful for their guidance and support. Brett Rampal was extremely helpful, as always.