A ‘wholesale revision’ of US nuclear rules is on the table

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been busy responding to Trump’s executive order. But will the many siting and permitting changes accelerate nuclear deployment?

Canary Media By Brian Martucci, 30 September 2026

The top U.S. nuclear regulator wants to make it easier to build and operate nuclear power plants in this country — without compromising public health or safety.

That’s the TL;DR of a proposed rule that would reduce reporting requirements for nonemergency events, eliminate the expiration date for standard design approvals for reactors, increase staffing flexibility in reactor control rooms, and modify seismic risk requirements, among other changes to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s voluminous regulatory code.

The 339-page tome is the newest of several dozen NRC rulemakings initiated since last May, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the commission to implement sweeping regulatory reforms by the end of 2026. The order, which also made it official U.S. government policy to quadruple the country’s commercial nuclear reactor fleet by 2050, kicked off what one expert told Canary Media is likely the busiest period for the NRC since the early days of the nuclear power industry.

“This is a wholesale revision of NRC rules and guidance,” said Patrick White, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology–trained nuclear scientist who is group lead in the Clean Air Task Force’s nuclear energy practice.

The NRC is “trying to look top to bottom and say, ‘What changes do we need to make to the regulatory system if we want to accelerate deployment of nuclear?’ You’re seeing everything done at once,” White added.

The Trump administration’s push for NRC reforms comes amid broad agreement that the U.S. needs more electricity generation, and as the administration continues to throw up obstacles to renewables and batteries, which are the cheapest, fastest, and cleanest resources available to deploy right now. Though only a handful of nuclear reactors are under construction in the U.S. today, and experts expect few if any to come online before 2030, Trump’s support for nuclear marks a rare point of alignment with decarbonization advocates — and a potential lifeline for the country’s [?] clean energy transition…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

One particularly controversial change would replace the NRC’s long-standing “as low as reasonably achievable” standards for radiation protection with “clearer, more objective requirements” that the agency says would be “set well below levels associated with known health effects.”

The incumbent standard, known as ALARA, has been an enduring target for industry groups like the Nuclear Energy Institute. It asks license holders to make “every reasonable effort” to keep public and employee exposure to X-rays and other forms of high-energy radiation as far below its annual dose limits as practically possible…………….. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/wholesale-revision-us-nuclear-rules