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A superhighway to nuclear hell

 June 2, 2025 by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/06/02/a-superhighway-to-nuclear-hell/

Trump’s reckless and accelerated nuclear orders would destroy safety oversight and endanger the public, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

On May 23rd, with several strokes of his pen, President Trump issued orders that would roll back US energy policy about 50 years.

On that day, Trump signed five Executive Orders (EOs): Restoring Gold Standard Science; Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base; Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy; and Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security. (This page keeps a running tally of all the White House executive orders.

All of this madness was announced in a press release headlined “President Trump Signs Executive Orders to Usher in a Nuclear Renaissance, Restore Gold Standard Science.” Just in case there was any confusion about what this meant, the press release included an explanation that read: “Gold Standard Science is just that—science that meets the Gold Standard.” 

Collectively, the four orders that focused on the nuclear sector would: reduce and undermine the already inadequate safety oversight authority of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC); fast-track unproven new reactor projects without regard for safety, health or environmental impacts; curtail or possibly even end public intervention; weaken already insufficient radiation exposure standards; and reopen the pathway between the civil and military sectors, all while “unleashing” (Trump’s favorite verb) nuclear power expansion on a dangerous and utterly unrealistic accelerated timeline.

The precursive warning shot to all this had been fired on February 5th with Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s own Executive Order:  Unleashing the Golden Era of American Energy Dominance, ‘dominance’ being another of Trump’s favorite big beautiful words, along with ‘big’ and ‘beautiful’ (—see his One Big Beautiful Bill Act.) “It’s time for nuclear, and we’re going to do it very big,” Trump told industry executives when he signed the orders.

Perhaps it’s no surprise to find that ‘dominance’ appears 35 times in the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 handbook, Authoritarianism for Dummies, officially known as Project 2025. Variations on the word ‘unleash’ appear 19 times. ‘Tremendous’ shows up 11 times. So does ‘gold standard’.

Which brings us to the fifth executive order of May 23, Restoring Gold Standard Science. While it does not specifically reference nuclear power, the order determines a hierarchy that will put political appointees in charge of specialized federal agencies, including the NRC.  The order also itemizes a set of requirements on how scientific research and activities must be conducted, including “without conflicts of interest.”

But guess whose stocks soared after the release of Trump’s nuclear Executive Orders? Answer: Oklo, the company attempting to deliver the first US micro-reactors. Guess who was on the board of Oklo before his appointment as Trump’s Energy Secretary? Yes, Chris Wright.

Uranium mining company Centrus Energy and the U.S. Navy’s main nuclear reactor supplier, BWX Technologies, also saw their stock prices soar after Trump’s executive orders were released.

An Oklo executive, Jacob DeWitte, who was present at the signing, brought along a golf ball to help Trump understand just how little uranium is needed for the lifetime needs of a single human being (an entirely irrelevant statistic given the lethality contained in that glowing little golf ball.) Trump called the golf ball show-and-tell “very exciting” before teeing up another order that will not only muzzle but actually persecute scientists for any findings with which the Trump hive don’t agree.

The definition of ‘sound science’, under Trump’s ‘gold standard’, is simply anything happening now or under the previous Trump administration. Anything that happened under the Biden administration is “politicized science”. 

Among the enforcers who will police and punish the NRC, along with other federal agencies who stray from Trump’s “science” script, is the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, one Michael Kratsios.

Kratsios is the former chief of staff to AI entrepreneur, venture capitalist and nuclear promoter, Peter Thiel. Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund,  supported nuclear fuel start-up General Matter, in contention to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for advanced nuclear reactors. One of the executive orders will “seek voluntary agreements pursuant to section 708 of the DPA with domestic nuclear energy companies that could deliver HALEU fuel.”

Kratsios is already sharpening his knives to go after the NRC, viewed as an obstacle to fast-tracking the new nuclear projects that Kratisios’s former boss, among others, will be pushing.

“Today’s executive orders are the most significant nuclear regulatory reform actions taken in decades,” said Kratsios on May 23. “We are restoring a strong American nuclear industrial base, rebuilding a secure and sovereign domestic nuclear fuel supply chain, and leading the world towards a future fueled by American nuclear energy. These actions are critical to American energy independence and continued dominance in AI and other emerging technologies.”

There has already been some pushback against allowing a political appointee to be the arbiter of scientific integrity. “Putting that power in the hands of a political appointee who doesn’t need to consult with scientific experts before making a decision is very troubling,” Kris West of COGR, an association of research universities, affiliated medical centers, and independent research institutes, told Science.

A group of scientists has written an open letter, retitling the order “Fool’s Gold Standard Science,” declaring that it “would not strengthen science, but instead would introduce stifling limits on intellectual freedom in our Nation’s laboratories and federal funding agencies”.

Part of the “regulatory reform” outlined as “gold standard science” and that Kratsios will oversee, is gutting the NRC, which, complains the White House, “charges applicants by the hour to process license applications with prolonged timelines that maximize fees while throttling nuclear power development.”

Somehow, “throttling nuclear power development” is not what springs to mind when reviewing the record of an agency that consistently favors the financial needs of the nuclear industry over the interests of public safety and the environment.

Furthermore, charges the White House, the NRC “has failed to license new reactors even as technological advances promise to make nuclear power safer, cheaper, more adaptable, and more abundant than ever.”

Trump, who seems to treat executive orders like a Nike slogan (“just do it”), has commanded that the US quadruple its nuclear energy capacity by 2050. This will be achieved not only by stripping the NRC of its power to scrutinize the safety assurances for new, primarily small modular reactors, but by expediting their licensing while keeping current reactors running longer and hotter and even reopening permanently closed ones.

Licensing timeframes will be slashed to “a deadline of no more than 18 months” for final decisions on construction and operating license applications for new reactors, and to just one year “for final decision in an application to continue operating an existing reactor of any type.”

The Trump order will also require “the reactivation of prematurely shuttered to partially completed nuclear facilities.” The former refers to Palisades, Three Mile Island and Duane Arnold so far. The latter is about the abandoned two-reactor Westinghouse AP 1000 project at V.C. Summer in South Carolina.

Currently operating reactors will be expected to add “5 gigawatts of power uprates”, which comes with its own set of safety concerns given the age of the US nuclear reactor fleet.

Everything has been put on a superhighway to nuclear hell, unhinged from the very real obstacles to fast-tracking nuclear expansion, most notably the cost and risks.

“A pilot program for reactor construction and operation outside the National Laboratories,” will require the Energy Secretary to “approve at least three reactors pursuant to this pilot program with the goal of achieving criticality in each of the three reactors by July 4, 2026,” one order said.

An astonishing “10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030,” is another aspirational command.

The Secretary of Energy must also designate at least one site for advanced reactor technologies within three months of the order, and ensure that it will host a fully operational reactor there “no later than 30 months from the date of this order.”

None of these timelines share any precedent with the track record of nuclear power plant construction, and bullying or handcuffing the NRC won’t change that.

That’s because, as Toby Dalton and Ariel Levite of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace point out in their recent column in The Hill: “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not presented the key obstacle to nuclear development in the U.S.” The orders, they said “underestimate the addition of time to market due to limitations on workforce availability, supply chain, financing, specialty fuels and community buy-in.”

The Carnegie authors also criticized the way the orders treat nuclear power as if it is similar to any other form of energy. “The orders downplay or ignore the special magnitude of nuclear risks, the series of traumatic accidents suffered by leading nuclear power nations and the unique environmental and multi-generational footprint of nuclear waste and spent fuel,” they wrote.

What reining in the NRC will achieve is an even greater reduction in confidence over the safe operation of current and future nuclear reactors.

“This push by the Trump administration to usurp much of the agency’s autonomy as they seek to fast-track the construction of nuclear plants will weaken critical, independent oversight of the U.S. nuclear industry and poses significant safety and security risks to the public,” said Ed Lyman, a physicist and Director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

To set all this right, the DOGE kids will soon be paying a visit to the NRC to fire people. DOGE, says the Reform the NRC order, will “reorganize the NRC to promote the expeditious processing of licensing applications and the adoption of innovative technology. The NRC shall undertake reductions in force in conjunction with this reorganization, though certain functions may increase in size consistent with the policies in this order, including those devoted to new reactor licensing.”

But “reorganizing” the NRC will have the reverse effect, argues Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) a longtime nuclear watchdog on Capitol Hill, including during his earlier years in the US House of Representatives. “It will be impossible for NRC to maintain a commitment to safety and oversight with staffing levels slashed and expertise gone,”Markey said.

“Allowing DOGE to blindly fire staff at the NRC does nothing to make it easier to permit or regulate nuclear power plants, but it will increase the risk of an accident,” said ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Frank Pallone (D-NJ), who called the orders “dangerous.”

But then the Trump administration doesn’t actually consider nuclear power itself to be dangerous, and instead accuses the NRC of being overly cautious, saying: “Instead of efficiently promoting safe, abundant nuclear energy, the NRC has instead tried to insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion.”

Consequently, it’s no surprise to find a clause in the order that reads: “The personnel and functions of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) shall be reduced to the minimum necessary”. The ACRS panel is composed of cream-of-the-crop scientists from the national laboratories, universities and other areas of academia. Its mandate, ironically and in place for decades, has been precisely to uphold “Gold Standard Science” in the nuclear power sector.

Like everything else Trump does, all of this constitutes another accident waiting to happen. “If you aren’t independent of political and industry influence, then you are at risk of an accident,” confirmed former NRC chair Allison Macfarlane of efforts to undermine her former agency.

The orders are a “guillotine to the nation’s nuclear safety system”, another former NRC chair Greg Jaczko told the Los Angeles Times.

Also guillotined is any pretense about protecting the public from the harm caused by exposure to the ionizing radiation released by the nuclear power sector. 

No longer must we adhere to the standard, endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, that exposure to any amount of radiation, no matter how small, could be harmful to human health. (This is especially true if it involves consistent and chronic longterm exposure even to what might be considered “low” doses.) 

Instead, say Trump’s orders, “the NRC shall reconsider reliance on the linear-no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ standard, which is predicated on LNT.” Those models, says the White House, are “flawed.”

This will of course open the door to the hormesis advocates who, without any firm basis in actual science, insist that a little radiation is good for all of us.

It’s time to set the record straight on radiation and the damage it causes, particularly to pregnancy, children and women,” responded Cindy Folkers, radiation and health hazard specialist at Beyond Nuclear. “Contrary to what Trump’s recent EO claims, abundant and largely officially ignored scientific evidence demonstrates that childhood cancers increase around normally operating nuclear facilities, with indications that these cancers begin during pregnancy. The uranium mining needed to produce fuel for reactors, is associated with a number of health impacts. Even already existing background radiation is associated with childhood cancers.” 

The already flimsy separation between the civil and military nuclear sectors is all but erased in the new EOs, most notably in the emphasis on a return to the reprocessing of irradiated reactor fuel. This operation separates out the uranium and plutonium while producing a vast amount of so-called low- and intermediate-level liquid and gaseous wastes that are routinely released into the air and sea.

Reprocessing was rejected in the US by the Ford and Carter administrations as too proliferation risky, given that plutonium is the trigger component of a nuclear weapon. It is still carried out in France — and until recently in the UK — where radioactive isotopes released by these operations have been found as far away as the Arctic Circle. The UK reprocessing activities at Sellafield rendered the Irish Sea the most radioactively contaminated sea in the world.

But, wrote the White House in the Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies EO: “Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy shall identify all useful uranium and plutonium material within the Department of Energy’s inventories that may be recycled or processed into nuclear fuel for reactors in the United States.” That sounds like a return to mixed oxide fuel, or MOX, another program that was abandoned, but not until after a protracted opposition campaign launched by our movement — Nix MOX — finally prevailed.

Another order directs “The Secretary of Defense, through the Secretary of the Army” to “commence the operation of a nuclear reactor, regulated by the United States Army, at a domestic military base or installation no later than September 30, 2028.”

Some of those closed civil nuclear power plants could find themselves repurposed by the Department of Defense, serving as “energy hubs for military microgrid support.” Advanced nuclear reactor technologies will also be expected to power AI datacenters “within the 48 contiguous States and the District of Columbia, in whole or in part, that are located at or operated in coordination with Department of Energy facilities, including as support for national security missions, as critical defense facilities, where appropriate.”

Pronounced Kratsios in the May 23 press release: “We are recommitting ourselves to scientific best practices and empowering America’s researchers to achieve groundbreaking discoveries.”

Until they come and arrest you for telling the truth.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. 

June 4, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

The NRC’s new Mission Impossible: Making Atoms Great Again

If the NRC complies with them and reduces itself to a rubber-stamp, the public will be increasingly at risk.

Perhaps recognizing that this NRC “reform” will likely render the agency non-functional for the foreseeable future, the administration hedged its bets by issuing two other orders that would bypass NRC licensing altogether.

The NRC has been given a new mission to facilitate nuclear power at the expense of public health and environmental protection.

By Edwin S. Lyman | May 29, 2025

In early May, drafts of presidential executive orders surfaced that would “reform” (e.g., dismantle) the long-established independent safety and security framework under which the United States regulates commercial nuclear power. For those who held out hope that the leaked orders were trial balloons and would be shot down by stakeholders who value regulatory stability and clarity—such as nuclear power plant operators—disappointment loomed. On May 23, President Donald Trump signed the orders, which in some respects had gotten even more extreme than originally advertised.

One order mandates that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) fundamentally change its mission to support the absurd and reckless goal of quadrupling of US nuclear energy capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050—which would, if achieved, add the equivalent of 300 large nuclear plants to the US fleet—by prioritizing speedy licensing over protecting public health and safety from radiation exposure. This would effectively make the NRC a promotional agency not unlike its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, thereby undoing the NRC’s 51-year history as the independent safety regulator established by the 1974 Energy Reorganization Act. Congress considered but ultimately watered down a legislative provision to do just that last year. Now President Trump wants to finish the job by requiring the NRC to “facilitate nuclear power” in addition to “ensuring nuclear safety.”

The order requires that the agency undertake “a wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance documents” and produce draft and final versions of the new rules within nine and 18 months, respectively. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with this massive body of regulatory detail—refined over decades of increasing technical knowledge, facility operating experience (including the 1979 Three Mile Island and 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accidents), and often impassioned debate about “how safe is safe”—surely knows this is a nigh impossible task. The challenge is compounded by the vague criteria provided to guide the revision, which invoke subjective terms that are the bane of regulators, such as “reduce unnecessary burdens” and “focus on credible, realistic risks.”

This exercise in busywork on a massive scale will only serve as a disruptive distraction from the NRC’s important work overseeing the operating fleet of US nuclear reactors, likely leading to regulatory paralysis and delays.

Specifically, even though the NRC has already been working to shorten approval timelines under pressure from Congress, the order directs the commission to establish fixed, 18-month deadlines for approving applications for new reactors of any type, providing no leeway except for “instances of applicant failure.” Imposing such a rigid schedule may appease arrogant vendors of new nuclear designs who resent the scrutiny of regulators, but such a dictat is terrible for nuclear safety. New nuclear reactors in the licensing pipeline are mostly experimental in design; they have had little to no operating experience and introduce novel safety concerns that require painstaking and time-consuming experiments and analyses to resolve. Forcing technical reviewers to paper over such gaps in knowledge to meet arbitrary deadlines may lead to faster approvals, but it is sure to create implementation headaches and serious safety problems for anyone who tries to build and operate these first-of-a-kind reactors. And dedicated safety professionals at the NRC are not likely to remain in an environment where they are compelled to compromise their integrity, depleting the workforce needed to process a growing number of applications.

NRC reviews often uncover safety issues that reactor applicants miss. A case in point is the NuScale small modular reactor. During the review of the original NuScale design, NRC staff identified a mechanism that could cause the reactor to become critical and melt down following an emergency shutdown, leading the company to make last-minute design changes.

In the anti-science push that we have come to expect from the Trump administration, the order also deems well-established models of the risks of low-level radiation exposure to “lack sound scientific basis.” It directs the agency to “specifically consider adopting determinate radiation limits”—that is, to accept the view of a small minority that there is a “safe” level of radiation and incorporate it into its regulations—despite an actual lack of sound scientific basis supporting such a claim. The NRC recently affirmed in a unanimous vote that the “linear no-threshold model” (the principle that any level of radiation is harmful, but the cancer risk is proportional to the dose), which is the foundation of international radiation protection standards, remains an effective basis for the NRC’s regulatory framework. Compelling the NRC to rewrite its regulations based not on the current state of scientific knowledge but on pseudoscience will only create chaos and ultimately put the public at unnecessary risk.

Perhaps recognizing that this NRC “reform” will likely render the agency non-functional for the foreseeable future, the administration hedged its bets by issuing two other orders that would bypass NRC licensing altogether. Those orders encourage approval of reactors within the purview of the Defense Department and the Energy Department. This would have a detrimental impact on nuclear safety in both cases: Defense lacks the expertise to conduct such reviews (as it hasn’t approved its own nuclear reactors in decades); and Energy’s self-regulation of nuclear plants would be tainted by conflicts of interest, as the agency would directly benefit from approval of these projects. One order calls for deploying reactors to power artificial intelligence data centers at Energy Department sites, even if they are privately owned and operated. Whether this order actually expands Energy Department authority to approve reactors for commercial purposes is a complicated question best left for the lawyers. But there is clear intent to sideline the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the relatively high level of public engagement and transparency that the agency offers compared to the Defense and Energy departments.

Another goal of the orders is to “promote American nuclear exports.” But what the administration doesn’t realize is that the NRC’s image (deserved or not) as the world’s “gold standard” nuclear safety regulator is a critical selling point for the US brand and US nuclear vendors. This is especially true for countries new to nuclear power that lack their own regulatory expertise and put their faith in NRC licensing. Yet nearly every action in the orders will undermine global confidence that the NRC is continuing to make independent safety judgments about new reactor designs and isn’t merely doling out seals of approval to Trump’s preferred cronies of the moment. Also, adopting radiation protection standards that violate international norms is not likely to bolster confidence in US designs around the world.

The NRC has been given a new mission to facilitate nuclear power at the expense of public health and environmental protection. But it doesn’t have to choose to accept it. It’s no surprise that an administration that embraces conflicts of interest would not care about preserving NRC’s non-promotional status. But unless the Supreme Court says otherwise, it is far from clear that independent agencies are obligated to follow executive orders—and as an independent agency, the NRC would be well justified in rejecting any attempt to negate Congress’ chief rationale for creating it in 1974. Chairman David Wright often says that safety is the NRC’s “North Star.” Now he can show that he means what he says by rebuffing President Trump’s crude and possibly illegal attempt to effectively destroy the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and undermine its authority to protect the public from potentially disastrous corner-cutting by the nuclear industry.

For decades, the nuclear industry has blamed overregulation for the cost overruns and delays that have plagued new projects and caused it to lose the confidence of investors. Now, these dangerous executive orders call the bluff. If the NRC complies with them and reduces itself to a rubber-stamp, the public will be increasingly at risk. Only time will tell if the industry, even without needed oversight and reasonable regulation, can build nuclear plants on schedule and on budget, or if it will finally have to grapple with the real root causes of its failure to thrive.

June 4, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment