nuclear-news

Natural Resources Defense Council supports restart of NextEra’s Duane Arnold nuclear station, a known danger.

March 5, 2026, https://beyondnuclear.org/nrdc-lends-support-to-restart-closed-reactor/

Natural Resources Defense Council supports the proposed restart of Iowa’s permanently closed Duane Arnold nuclear power station on assurances of adequate public safety upgrades to a Fukushima-style reactor from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission 

In a disappointing reversal of its previously critical stance toward nuclear power and especially the dangerously flawed 1960s vintage GE Mark I boiling water reactor, a major green group now appears to be supporting the restart of exactly that reactor model. The Natural Resources Defense Council’s stated in a blog “Rising Demand, Real Choices” that it had submitted comments to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission supporting the restart of the permanently closed and decommissioning GE Mark I Duane Arnold nuclear reactor in Iowa. NRDC “filed comments today at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission supporting an early step in the reactor’s restart: the transfer of the plant’s license to NextEra.” Duane Arnold is nearly identical to the three reactors that melted down in Japan in March 2011.

NRDC nuances its advocacy for the restart with, “To be clear, NRDC’s long-held concerns regarding nuclear energy—including issues related to siting, cost, safety risks, waste management, water use, mining supply chain issues, and community impacts—remain unchanged and must be addressed. The Duane Arnold plant will have to prove it can operate safely and responsibly.”

Let the record reflect, “easier said than done” as this nation’s nuclear regulatory agencies, from the beginning, with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) first licensing Duane Arnold on November 24, 1974, knowing full well in 1972 that the undersized design of the GE Mark I boiling water  reactor containment would very likely fail under the tremendous overpressurization and explosive hydrogen gas generated under severe nuclear accident conditions and their top safety official encouraged development to be halted. That scientifically confirmed warning was not only ignored but suppressed for years by AEC fears that the halt of construction and cancellations would derail the government plan for a massive nuclear power build up.  Duane Arnold was one of the those obfuscated start-ups.

Since then, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is identified as a captured regulator and an expert at stonewalling reactor safety concerns from  fire protection for safe reactor shutdown to ignoring currently projected climate change impacts on severe nuclear accident risks and frequency.

The NRC relicensed Duane Arnold on December 16, 2010, with an initial extension of 20 years to February 21, 2034 with the built-in containment vulnerability. Eighty-five days later, the Fukushima nuclear accident demonstrated a 100% containment failure rate under overpressurization from hydrogen gas detonations for the three units at that were at full power. NRC wrangled for years with the weak, undersized containment vulnerability only to allow the fundamental design flaw to remain unchecked to date.

Duane Arnold is presently utility certified to the NRC as “permanently” closed and defueled reactor for the purpose of decommissioning in SAFSTOR mode or “deferred dismantling”.  The 615 megawatts electric Mark I boiling water reactor is owned by three utility entities; the majority owner, NextEra Energy Resources (70% interest) and two minority owners, Central Iowa Power Cooperative (CIPCO with 20% interest) and Corn Belt Power Cooperative (10% interest). The utilities have submitted an application to the NRC to consolidate a 100% ownership transfer to NextEra as sole owner and a plan to reverse the decommissioning certification to instead seek NRC approval for a likely to exceed $1.6 billion rehabilitation, refueling and restart effort by 2029. Google has signed with NextEra for a Power Purchase Agreement as the primary electricity customer for an expanded AI infrastructure, cloud computing and energy guzzling data centers. Post-consolidation, CIPCO, at 0%, will purchase Duane Arnold surplus electricity and Corn Belt Power Cooperative, at 0%, will sell its share to NextEra.

In Beyond Nuclear’s view, as well as many public safety, environmental protection and safe energy advocates, the immediate, permanent closure, decommissioning and environmental cleanup of  Duane Arnold and all GE Mark I boiling water reactors are warranted in the ever extending aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi’s multiple hydrogen explosions. The subsequent reactor core meltdowns breached the universally flawed GE Mark I containment design and construction, releasing harmful radiation downwind into the atmosphere and recurring radioactive batch releases from the wreckage of the three melted reactor cores into the Pacific Ocean that persist today.

The uneconomical, aging and dangerously flawed Duane Arnold nuclear power station was first announced by NextEra Energy Resources in a Federal Register Notice of its intent to the NRC on March 2, 2020 to permanently close and defuel the reactor by October 30, 2020.

Then, on August 10, 2020, a fierce “derecho” with severe thunderstorms, a deluge of rain and straight line winds reaching up to 140 mph swept across the hundreds of miles of prairie knocking out vast stretches of the electric grid including all six offsite power lines to 100% of Duane Arnold’s safety systems causing the reactor to SCRAM. Onsite back up generators restored critical reactor cooling systems but the badly damaged site included the collapse of the reactor’s cooling towers. NextEra’s subsequent damage assessment concluded, “[O]ur evaluation found that replacing those towers before the site’s previously-scheduled decommissioning on Oct. 30, 2020, was not feasible.” NextEra elected to immediately set the date for permanent closure of Duane Arnold, a Fukushima-style reactor, a notorious General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor even in 1972 under warnings from the Atomic Energy Commission safety officials that it was not safe.

We are now coming up on the 15^th commemoration of the triple meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi reactors caused by a combination of natural disasters that overwhelmed the significantly flawed and identified vulnerable design problem built into every GE Mark I reactors containments. These containments are now demonstrated to have a 100% failure rate under severe accident conditions as were all three Fukushima reactors at full power on March 11, 2011 experiencing devastating hydrogen gas explosions and widespread radioactive releases. This widespread radioactive contamination of the biosphere (land and sea) from the fallout persists to date and indefinitely into the future.

Where Fukushima’s radioactive releases largely blew out over the Pacific Ocean, a radioactive breach from the volumetrically undersized  Mark I reactor containment system in the event of a severe over-pressurization accident, will instead spread out over US populations sickening those caught in the fallout, contaminating farms, pastures and agriculture, and similarly dislocating local, commercial and industrial economies.

If restarted, as NRDC supports,  Duane Arnold initial 20-year license renewal (40 to 60 years) will expire on February 21, 2034. And well before that date, NextEra will most assuredly file an application to extend the operating license of a still fundamentally flawed and vulnerable reactor  with an additional 20 year  subsequent license renewal application (60 to 80 years) out to February 21, 2054, presently without a hard look at  a changing climate that might already have been central to it closure.

Beyond Nuclear and the Sierra Club presently have a “petition for judicial review”  pending  ruling from an October 30, 2025 oral argument in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Beyond Nuclear and Sierra Club v. US NRC.  The petitioners through legal counsel have raised a purely legal issue of whether the US NRC, as a matter of law,  can refuse to evaluate climate change change impacts (derechos, increasingly severe hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise, etc.) on the risk and frequency of severe nuclear accidents. The  NRC is illegally entrenched in refusing to perform a lawfully required environment impact statement that fully evaluates the impact of climate change, saying only that such an evaluation is “out of scope” of reactor licensing.

March 9, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

NRC buckles to White House and licenses dangerous TerraPower reactor

5 Mar 2026, , https://beyondnuclear.org/nrc-buckles-to-white-house-and-licenses-dangerous-terrapower-react

Nuclear Regulatory Commission license of dangerous new reactor risks lives

Beyond Nuclear decries NRC decision to put public safety aside and buckle to Trump orders to license a Gates reactor known as “Cowboy Chernobyl”

Last September, the then three sitting commissioners at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission insisted during a Senate hearing they would put safety first when considering the approval of new reactor projects. 

Senators had raised fears that new executive orders issued by the White House last May that demanded fast-tracking new reactor projects, could jeopardize the commissioners’ judgement. The Senators also asked if the commissioners feared losing their jobs if they refused to license a reactor they viewed as dangerous. Two said they did.

“This week we learned that the now five members of the NRC commission are all too willing to capitulate to Trump’s rubber stamp orders, protect their jobs and sacrifice public safety in order to license a new reactor design that is known to be extremely dangerous,” said Paul Gunter, director of the reactor oversight project at Beyond Nuclear. The two new commissioners are nuclear industry insiders chosen by the White House.

Gunter’s remarks came after the NRC commissioners voted unanimously this week to grant a construction license to the Bill Gates company TerraPower’s 345-megawatt sodium-cooled small modular reactor, designated for a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

“It appears that the White House influence is working,” Gunter said. “But pressuring regulators to cut safety corners and fast-track a technology as inherently dangerous as nuclear power is gambling with the lives of thousands and possibly millions of people.”

Dr. Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, warned last December after NRC staff approved the TerraPower design, that the “fast” reactor, known as the Natrium, is deeply flawed and highly vulnerable to a serious accident.

“Make no mistake, this type of reactor has major safety flaws compared to conventional nuclear reactors.” Lyman said. “The potential for rapid power excursions and the lack of a real containment make the Kemmerer plant a true ‘Cowboy Chernobyl.’”

“The White House, through its executive orders and by exerting control over the NRC, has embarked on a dangerous dismantling of essential safety regulations,” Gunter said. 

The new reactor rush puts the US on a path to another nuclear disaster while wasting precious time and billions of taxpayer dollars better spent on implementing a rapid and widespread renewable energy program. This would  answer the country’s energy needs faster and without the extreme risks and ever soaring costs posed by nuclear power technology,” Gunter concluded.

March 9, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

‘Making America Unsafe Again’: Alarm Over Environmental Review Exemption for Nuclear Reactors

“I think the DOE’s attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment,” said one expert.

By Jessica Corbett, February 18, 2026, https://worth.com/trump-nuclear-safety-changes/

ess than a week after NPR revealed that “the Trump administration has overhauled a set of nuclear safety directives and shared them with the companies it is charged with regulating, without making the new rules available to the public,” the U.S. Department of Energy announced Monday that it is allowing firms building experimental nuclear reactors to seek exemptions from legally required environmental reviews.

Citing executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in May, a notice published in the Federal Register states that the DOE “is establishing a categorical exclusion for authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors for inclusion in its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing procedures.”

NEPA has long been a target of energy industries and Republican elected officials, including Trump. The exemption policy has been expected since Trump’s May orders—which also launched a DOE pilot program to rapidly build the experimental reactors—and the department said in a statement that even the exempted reactors will face some reviews.

“The U.S. Department of Energy is establishing the potential option to obtain a streamlined approach for advanced nuclear reactors as part of the environmental review performed under NEPA,” the DOE said. “The analysis on each reactor being considered will be informed by previously completed environmental reviews for similar advanced nuclear technologies.”

“The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents.”

However, the DOE announcement alarmed various experts, including Daniel P. Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University, who wrote on social media: “Making America unsafe again: Trump created an exclusion for new experimental reactors from disclosing how their construction and operation might harm the environment, and from a written, public assessment of the possible consequences of a nuclear accident.”

Foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen described the policy as “terrifying,” while Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group and a scholar at the University of Sussex’s Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration, called it “truly crazy.”

As NPR reported Monday:

Until now, the test reactor designs currently under construction have primarily existed on paper, according to Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. He believes the lack of real-world experience with the reactors means that they should be subject to more rigorous safety and environmental reviews before they’re built.

“The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents,” Lyman said.

“I think the DOE’s attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment here in the United States,” he added.

Lyman was also among the experts who criticized changes that NPR exposed last week, after senior editor and correspondent Geoff Brumfiel obtained documents detailing updates to “departmental orders, which dictate requirements for almost every aspect of the reactors’ operations—including safety systems, environmental protections, site security, and accident investigations.”

While the DOE said that it shared early versions of the rules with companies, “the reduction of unnecessary regulations will increase innovation in the industry without jeopardizing safety,” and “the department anticipates publicly posting the directives later this year,” Brumfiel noted that the orders he saw weren’t labeled as drafts and had the word “approved” on their cover pages.

In a lengthy statement about last week’s reporting, Lyman said on the Union of Concerned Scientists website that “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 (NRC) 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,” he continued. “These long-standing 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,” Lyman warned. “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.”

February 26, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment