A High-Stakes Effort to Relax Radiation Limits and Restart Nuclear Growth

Oil Price, By Haley Zaremba – Jan 28, 2026

The Trump administration wants the NRC to reconsider core radiation safety models to accelerate nuclear development.
Critics warn that weakening safety standards may erode public trust without meaningfully speeding up new reactor construction………………………..

Next month, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is slated to overhaul the level of radiation that Americans can legally be exposed to in response to an executive order issued by Donald Trump in May of 2025. The Trump administration is seeking to loosen regulations related to the nuclear energy industry in the United States in order to jumpstart the struggling sector.

The United States generates more nuclear energy than any other country, but it won’t hold that distinction for long if current domestic and global trends hold true. The domestic nuclear energy sector has been in near-terminal decline for decades now, and the United States is now home to an aging fleet and very few plans for new and expanded nuclear energy projects.

In large part, this is due to the reality that building a new nuclear reactor is extremely expensive and logistically and bureaucratically nightmarish, leading to long and frequently delayed timelines. Plant Vogtle, the only new nuclear energy plant to be brought online in the United States in decades, was enormously over budget and years behind schedule. When its final reactor finally came online in Waynesboro, Georgia, in 2024, the plant had taken $35 billion and 14 years to reach completion.

In order to avoid such issues, the Trump administration is seeking to minimize the prodigious amount of red tape involved in developing a new nuclear power plant. And it’s targeting public safety measures to do so. The May 23 executive order mandates that the NRC “reconsider reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ standard,” among other requirements, in order to “reestablish the United States as the global leader in nuclear energy.”

However, experts contend that loosening or doing away with the NRC’s licensing and review process could have some major downsides for public health and for the Trump administration’s own aims. “The [Trump] administration may be working against its own long-term goals by short-circuiting the public arbitration process moderated by the NRC that is critical to building and maintaining public acceptance and confidence in nuclear energy,” warned a recent column from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Moreover, the executive order may not even result in an acceleration of nuclear production while unduly and unnecessarily increasing risk factors for Americans, argues a recent op-ed by Katy Huff for Scientific American. “As a nuclear energy advocate and former Department of Energy official,” Huff writes, “I want to see more nuclear energy on the grid soon. But loosening the protections of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model is not supported by current research.”

In the past, such suggestions to the NRC have been tabled because of insufficient evidence to support such a relaxation of radiation protections. Huff argued that, by ignoring these precedents based on rigorous research findings, the executive order is asking the NRC to act politically rather than scientifically. She called for more evidence-gathering on the topic, especially to validate or complicate early findings that raising radiation exposure could pose a particular risk to women and children. …………………………………………………………….https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/A-High-Stakes-Effort-to-Relax-Radiation-Limits-and-Restart-Nuclear-Growth.html