WASHINGTON—Geoff Brumfiel, a National Public Radio reporter, broke a bombshell story on Morning Edition today revealing that last year the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) secretly rewrote the entire body of safety and security directives it is using to authorize the construction of a fleet of experimental nuclear reactors across the country. The changes included slashing hundreds of pages of detailed requirements and replacing them with vague and difficult-to-enforce standards, leaving significant discretion to the private companies building these reactors, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
Below is a statement by Dr. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at UCS.
“This deeply troubling development confirms my worst fears about the dire state of nuclear power safety and security oversight under the Trump administration. Such a brazen rewriting of hundreds of crucial safeguards for the public underscores why preservation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an independent, transparent nuclear regulator is so critical.
“The Energy Department has not only taken a sledgehammer to the basic principles that underlie effective nuclear regulation, but it has also done so in the shadows, keeping the public in the dark. These longstanding principles were developed over the course of many decades and consider lessons learned from painful events such as the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. This is a massive experiment in the deregulation of novel, untested nuclear facilities that could pose grave threats to public health and safety.
“These drastic changes may extend beyond the Reactor Pilot Program, which was created by President Trump last year to circumvent the more rigorous licensing rules employed by the NRC. While the DOE created a legally dubious framework to designate these reactors as ‘test’ reactors to bypass the NRC’s statutory authority, these dramatic alterations may further weaken standards used in the broader DOE authorization process and propagate across the entire fleet of commercial nuclear facilities, severely degrading nuclear safety throughout the United States.”
If the pilot program reactors or subsequent designs are to be used to produce commercial power, they will still have to secure NRC licenses. However, the NRC has agreed with the DOE to greatly restrict the scope of its additional safety and security reviews of facilities that have received DOE authorizations. The push to rapidly license new nuclear plants is part of the Trump administration’s plan to provide massive amounts of power for the data centers that tech giants such as Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are pursuing to support artificial intelligence.