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Trump slashing nuclear reactor safety and security rules

January 29, 2026, https://beyondnuclear.org/trump-slashing-reactor-safety-and-security-rule

Department of Energy executes White House Executive Order

 Radical changes to nuclear safety and security at new reactors withheld from public review

In response to White House Executive Order 14301 issued on May 23, 2025, the US Department of Energy (DOE) is deregulating federal reactor safety /security standards and rules in order to expedite at least three experimental designs of eleven new advanced reactors. The DOE cuts are intended to speed up  licensing, construction and operational testing phase  so as to achieve reactor criticality by July 4, 2026.  The expedited approval process will be used to demonstrate proof-of-product for full commercial operation of these designs  as ready for mass assembly line production.

National Public Radio (NPR) reported on January 28, 2026, that it had obtained copies of the DOE documents as the basis for their news story headlined “The Trump administration has secretly rewritten nuclear safety rules.” The new rules and standards for reactor safety and security of unproven experimental reactor designs have not yet been publicly released. As NPR reports, the new rules are being rewritten to alter 5o years of duly promulgated  regulatory law by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) not to bolster public safety, national security and environmental protection but to hasten the deployment of unproven, untested and  still dangerous nuclear power technology.

In an earlier NRC interview on December 17, 2025. Dr. Allison Macfarlane, a former NRC Chairwoman, warned that the federal government cannot both commercially promote nuclear power and independently regulate nuclear safety and security with reasonable assure a very low probability of the next severe nuclear accident or by deliberate malice. On numerous occasions, Dr. Macfarlane, other NRC Commissioners and independent scientists point to an established historical conflict of interest  created by federal government and nuclear industry’s simultaneous collaborative promotion and regulatory expansion of nuclear power and nuclear arms race.

That proved to be the downfall of the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) principally established for the development of atomic bombs and cogenerate electricity from the waste heat from the weaponization of the atom. The AEC  was subsequently abolished by Congress with the passage of the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 (ERDA) because of gross neglience of nuclear safety.  On January 19, 1975, the AEC responsibilities were divided up creating the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to take over the safety licensing and  regulation of commercial nuclear power and the Energy Research and Development Agency (ERDA) to handle energy research, development, and the functions of nuclear weapons production. ERDA was later incorporated into the US Department of Energy in 1977.

The United States has now come full circle with the Trump Administration’s executive orders dismantling 50 years of promulgation of nuclear power safety regulation and regulatory law to return safety to the back seat and nuclear energy promotion as the priority. It is further alarming and no secret that several of the new commercial reactor designs under licensing review by the DOE are in fact “dual purpose” reactors that once operational will have the capability to produce both electrical energy and the basic building blocks for nuclear weapon enhancement and expansion.

The January 28th NPR analysis finds that DOE’s nuclear rules “slash hundreds of pages of requirements for security at the reactors. They also loosen protections for groundwater and the environment and eliminate at least one key safety role. The new orders cut back on requirements for keeping records, and they raise the amount of radiation a worker can be exposed to before an official accident investigation is triggered.”

Where the protection of groundwater from radioactive contamination once was required as a “must,” the new DOE rules and standards need only provide “‘consideration’ to ‘avoiding or minimizing’ radioactive contamination. Radioactive monitoring and documentation are also softened,” NPR observed.

An independent scientist is quoted in the NPR story, “They’re taking a wrecking ball to the system of nuclear safety and security regulation oversight that has kept the U.S. from having another Three Mile Island accident,’ said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.  ‘I am absolutely worried about the safety of these reactors.’”

Now here we are, during the 50^th anniversary of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Trump Administration, the DOE and the nuclear industry are poised for  “Unleashing American Energy” by deregulatory Executive Orders.

The DOE announced the “Reactor Pilot Program” in June 2025, following the release of Executive Order 14301, which accelerates and expands the federal experimental reactor testing program to streamline commercial reactor licensing and oversight. At the same time, the Trump Administration is deregulating the NRC by slashing its  safety and security standards and regulatory law.

The DOE “Pilot Reactor Program” is comprised of eleven projects. The DOE will choose at least three units to be licensed for operational criticality by July 4, 2026:

• Aalo Atomics Inc.—The Austin, Texas-based startup nuclear company has broken ground for its experimental 10 MWe sodium cooled reactor  under development at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls, Idaho. Five units are intended to make up a 50 MWe “pod” for electrical power production.
• Antares Nuclear Inc.— Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Antares Nuclear  has submitted a construction permit application filed for a four-unit, non-power, light-water-cooled, pool-type Versatile Isotope Production Reactor facility to be located at the Idaho National Laboratory desert site, in Bingham County, Idaho.
• Atomic Alchemy Inc.—Atomic Alchemy Inc. is headquartered in Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, Idaho. The company operates in the nuclear technology sector, specifically focused on non-power radioisotope production reactors for the defense, industrial and medical sectors using the 15-MWtVersatile Isotope Production Reactor (VIPR). 
• Deep Fission, Inc.— The start-up company is headquartered in Berkeley, CA for the development of a 15 MWe pressurized water microreactor that first broke ground in Parsons, Kansas on December 9, 2025. It is proposed as a first-of-a-kind deep geological reactor at the Great Plains Industrial Park in Labette County on the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Deep Fission signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with its “sister” company Deep Isolation to collocate the power generation facility in a mile deep 30 inch wide borehole in the bedrock. The natural bedrock body and a mile deep column of water overhead are credited for the reactor containment system. The same borehole and bedrock body are credited as a permanent, deep geological high-level radioactive waste disposal facility. After seven years of operation, the reactor vessel is disconnected from the surface turbogenerator and control room and abandoned, capped and sealed in place in-place at the bottom of the borehole. The next fresh fuel loaded reactor unit is lowered down the borehole and connected to the surface to resume operation stacked on top of the now sealed unit nuclear waste unit. And so on.
• Last Energy Inc.—Last Energy Inc. corporate headquarters are in Austin, Texas. The start-up company is proposing to build a fleet of 20-MWe micro-modular reactors near Abilene, Texas targeting data center power needs (specifically the PWR-20, a downsized  model of the currently operational commercially sized Point Beach reactor Unit 1 rated at 625 MWe in Wisconsin).
• Oklo Inc. (two projects)— Oklo Inc. is  headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Its Aurora Powerhouse is a 75 MWe small modular liquid sodium-cooled fast reactor under development at the Idaho National Laboratory. Oklo is additional developing  an estimated $1.7 billion project to build the nation’s first privately funded nuclear fuel recycling facility at the Oak Ridge Heritage Center in Tennessee. This project aims to recycle used nuclear fuel from existing reactors into fuel for fast reactors, with operations targeted for 2030. The proposed fast reactors are identified as a global nuclear weapons proliferation risk to be exported around the world. 
• Natura Resources LLC— Natura Resources is headquartered in Abilene, Texas.  The company is developing a Generation IV liquid-fueled molten salt reactor (MSR).   They are proposing to site their first reactor at the Science and Engineering Research Center (SERC) on the campus of Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas.
• Radiant Industries Inc.— Radiant Industries is headquartered in El Segundo, California for modular microreactors. Radiant has announced that it will build its first microreactor factory on a decommissioned Manhattan Project site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. World Nuclear News reports, “Radiant is developing the 1 MWe Kaleidos high-temperature gas-cooled portable microreactor, which will use a graphite core and TRISO (tri-structural isotropic) fuel. The electric power generator, cooling system, reactor, and shielding are all packaged in a single shipping container, facilitating rapid deployment.”
• Terrestrial Energy Inc.— Terrestrial Energy, Inc. is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina.  They are developing the Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) which is a Generation IV small modular reactor (SMR) designed to produce both high-grade industrial heat and electricity. Their pilot project is planned for the Texas A&M University RELLIS Campus  in Bryan, Texas.
• Valar Atomics Inc.— Valar Atomics Inc. is headquartered in El Segundo, California. The company is developing the Ward 250, a 100-kWt, helium-cooled, TRISO-fueled high-temperature gas reactor (HTGR) designed for modular, behind-the-meter, or microgrid use. The pilot project is located at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab (USREL) in Emery County, Utah.

February 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

Trump’s rush to build nuclear reactors across the U.S. raises safety worries

NPR, December 17, 2025

In May, President Trump sat in the Oval Office flanked by executives from America’s nuclear power industry.

“It’s a hot industry. It’s a brilliant industry,” the president said from behind the Resolute desk.

It’s also an industry that’s having a moment. Billions of dollars in capital are currently flowing into dozens of companies chasing new kinds of nuclear technologies. These are small modular designs that can potentially be mass produced in the hundreds or even thousands. Their proponents say these advanced designs promise to deliver megawatts of power safely and cheaply.

But there’s a problem, Joseph Dominguez, the CEO of Constellation Energy, told the president.

New nuclear plants keep getting caught up in safety regulations.

“Mr. President, you know this because you’re the best at building things,” Dominguez, whose company runs about a quarter of America’s existing nuclear reactors, said. “Delay in regulations and permitting will absolutely kill you. Because if you can’t get the plant on, you can’t get the revenue.”

Now, a new Trump administration program is sidestepping the regulatory system that’s overseen the nuclear industry for half a century. The program will fast-track construction of new and untested reactor designs built by private firms, with an explicit goal of having at least three nuclear test reactors up and running by the United States’ 250th birthday, July 4, 2026.

If that goal is met, it will be without the direct oversight of America’s primary nuclear regulator. Since the 1970s, safety for commercial reactors has been the purview of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But the NRC is only consulting on the new Reactor Pilot Program, which is being run by the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy……………………………………………………………………………………………………

Sites across the country will host new reactor designs

The new pilot program may be an unproven regulatory path run by an agency with limited experience in the commercial sector, but supporters say it’s energizing an industry that’s been moribund for decades.

“This is exactly what we need to do,” said Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, a small nuclear startup headquartered in Hawthorne, Calif. “We need to make nuclear great again.”

Valar and other companies plan to build smaller reactors than those currently used in the nuclear industry, and that makes a Chernobyl or Fukushima-type accident impossible, noted Nick Touran, an independent nuclear consultant. “The overall worst-case scenario is definitely less when you’re a smaller reactor,” he said.

Critics, however, worry that the tight July 4 deadline, political pressure and a lack of transparency are all compromising safety. Even a “small” release of radioactive material could cause damage to people and the environment around the test sites.

“This is not normal, and this is not OK, and this is not going to lead to success,” warned Allison Macfarlane, a professor at the University of British Columbia who served as chairman of the NRC under President Barack Obama. “This is how to have an accident.”

AI’s need for speed

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Right from the start it was clear that, unlike the slow and deliberate safety culture that has dominated nuclear power for decades, this new program would be all about speed.

…………officials responsible for overseeing safety would do “whatever we need to ensure that the government is not stopping you from reaching [nuclear] criticality on or before July 4, 2026.”

A new regulator

Before the executive order, the Energy Department did not regulate the safety of commercial nuclear reactors. That job fell to another body: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The commission was set up in 1975 by Congress as an independent safety watchdog, said Allison Macfarlane, the former NRC chair. Part of the reason the NRC was formed was because the predecessor to the DOE, known as the Atomic Energy Commission, oversaw both safety and promotion of nuclear power at the same time.

“This was a very strong conflict of interest,” Macfarlane said.

But in recent years, companies, particularly those trying to build new kinds of reactors, had become frustrated with the NRC, Macfarlane said. “The promoters of these small modular reactors were becoming very vociferous about the NRC being the problem,” she said.

In 2022, the NRC rejected a combined license application for Oklo, a new nuclear startup. Oklo had submitted an application to build and operate its small reactor, called the Aurora powerhouse. But the NRC denied the application because it contained “significant information gaps in its description of Aurora’s potential accidents as well as its classification of safety systems and components.”

Oklo was told it could resubmit its application to the NRC, but it never did.

Then at the May signing of the executive order, Oklo’s CEO Jacob DeWitte appeared behind President Trump applauding the new reactor program at DOE.

“Changing the permitting dynamics is going to help things move faster,” DeWitte said to the president. “It’s never been more exciting.”

Oklo had another connection to the Energy Department — the secretary of energy, Chris Wright, was a member of Oklo’s board of directors until he took the helm at the DOE. Wright stepped down following his confirmation in February.

In August, a little over a month after that initial meeting between industry executives and the DOE, the Office of Nuclear Energy announced the 11 advanced reactor projects had been selected for the Reactor Pilot Program. Three of Oklo’s reactors were part of the new pilot program, including a test version of the reactor design rejected by the NRC…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Valar’s design looks far different from the reactors that are running today. It will use a special type of fuel together with a high-temperature gas to generate heat and electricity. Taylor said gathering real data will speed development and increase safety over the long-term….

(Valar is also party to a lawsuit against the NRC arguing the commission does not have the authority to regulate small reactors. In his interview, Taylor told NPR the company intends to file for an NRC license “when we’re ready.”)

…………………………………………………..  critics question whether the pilot program will really produce safe nuclear reactors.

The July 4, 2026, deadline puts enormous pressure on the program, said Heidy Khlaaf, the chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, which recently published a report warning that AI development could undermine nuclear safety.

“I think these manufactured timelines are actually incredibly concerning,” Khlaaf said. “There’s no timeline for assessing a new design and making sure it’s safe, especially something we haven’t seen before.”

Then there’s the question of public transparency. The NRC makes many of the documents around its decisions available publicly. It also frequently allows the public to comment as well, added Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. The new pilot program is far more opaque and “is really an attempt to subvert the laws and regulations that go around commercial nuclear power,” he said.

While many of the test reactors are small and tout themselves as inherently safer than existing nuclear power plants, they are still capable of leaking radiation in an accident, Lyman noted. “If they are located closer to populated areas, if there aren’t any provisions for offsite radiological emergency planning … then you are potentially putting the public at greater risk, even if the reactors are small,” he said.

Perhaps most worrying, said former NRC Chair Macfarlane, is how the DOE’s safety assessment might be used to build more small reactors across the country, once the pilot reactors are built.

………………………………………..Macfarlane is unconvinced. She said relying on the hasty DOE analysis for the construction of potentially dozens or even hundreds of small reactors around the U.S. is the real risk.

“They can look at what the DOE did, they can take it as a piece of input, but they have to do their own separate analysis,” she warned. “Otherwise, none of us are safe.” https://www.npr.org/2025/12/17/nx-s1-5608371/trump-executive-order-new-nuclear-reactors-safety-concerns

December 21, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

$400 Million DOE Bailout for “SMRs” at Palisades

Multiple reactors on the tiny 432-acre site also introduce the risk of domino-effect multiple meltdowns

Holtec’s inexperience exacerbates these synergistic old and new reactor risks. Holtec still has no NRC-approved SMR-300 design certification, has never built a reactor, nor operated one, nor repaired and restarted one, let alone a reactor as perpetually problem-plagued as the 60-year old Palisades zombie. 

DECEMBER 3, 2025, by Kevin Kamps

regarding the announcement by the U.S. Department of Energy, Holtec International, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer of a $400 million federal bailout for “Small Modular Reactor” deployments at the Palisades nuclear power plant in Covert Township, Van Buren County, southwest Michigan.

Holtec’s uncertified and untested so-called ‘Small Modular Reactor’ design, the SMR-300, is not small. At 300 megawatts-electric (MW-e) each, the additional 600 MW-e would nearly double the nuclear megawattage at Palisades, given the unprecedented zombie restart of the 800 MW-e, six decade old reactor there. The zombie reactor was designed in the mid-1960s, and ground was broken on construction in 1967, with the learn-as-we-go dangerous design and fabrication flaws at the nuclear lemon baked in, still putting us in peril to the present day.

Just look at the harm smaller infamous 67 MW-e Michigan reactors have caused in the past. At Fermi Unit 1 on the Lake Erie shore in Monroe County, “we almost lost Detroit” when the plutonium breeder reactor had a partial core meltdown on October 5, 1966. John G. Fuller wrote an iconic book about it by that title in 1975. And Gil Scott-Heron wrote a haunting song about it in 1977, two years before he joined Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) in response to the 1979 Three Mile Island Unit 2 meltdown, the worst reactor disaster in U.S. history — thus far anyway.

And at Big Rock Point — Palisades’ sibling reactor — near Charlevoix on the northwest Lower Peninsula’s Lake Michigan shore, the 67 MW-e experimental reactor shockingly released more than 3 million Curies of hazardous ionizing radioactivity into the environment, from supposedly ‘routine operations’ from 1962 to 1997. In the 1970s, local family practitioner, medical doctor Gerald Drake, and University of Michigan trained statistician Martha Drake, documented statistically significant spina bifida in the immediate area downwind. There is also anecdotal evidence of widespread thyroid pathology as well. This is similar to Palisades, where 50 cases of diagnosed thyroid cancer have been alleged by part-time residents of the small, 120-year old Palisades Park Country Club resort community, where there should not be a single such case of this exceedingly rare disease made infamous by Chornobyl and Fukushima.

Given the damage done by 67 MW-e reactors in Michigan in the past, just imagine what havoc could be wreaked by two 300 MW-e reactors — each 4.5 times larger — at Palisades going forward.

Increased breakdown phase risks at the 60-year old zombie reactor, and break-in phase risks at the two SMR-300 new builds, are a recipe for disaster at Palisades.

Palisades has a long list of breakdown phase risks. From the worst neutron-embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the country or perhaps even the entire world, to severely degraded steam generator tubes, a reactor lid that needed replacement two decades ago, lack of fire protection, calcium silicate containment insulation that would dissolve into sludge with the viscosity of Elmer’s Glue blocking emergency core cooling water flow, the worst operating experience in industry with control rod drive mechanism seal leaks from 1972 to 2022, etc., the Palisades zombie reactor has multiple pathways to reactor core meltdown, which would unleash catastrophic amounts of hazardous ionizing radioactivity into the environment, on the beach of Lake Michigan, drinking water supply for 16 million people along its shores, and more than 40 million people downstream and downwind, up the food chain, and down the generations throughout the Great Lakes region.

Chornobyl in Ukraine in 1986, and Three Mile Island-2 in Pennsylvania in 1979, are examples of brand new reactors causing catastrophes. Through design and construction flaws, and operator inexperience, Holtec’s SMR-300s will introduce increased break-in phase risks at the Palisades nuclear power plant, located on the Great Lakes shoreline. The Great Lakes comprise 21% of the planet’s, 84% of North America’s, and 95% of the United States’ surface fresh water.

Multiple reactors on the tiny 432-acre site also introduce the risk of domino-effect multiple meltdowns, as happened at Fukushima Daiichi, Japan in March 2011.

A 1982 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) study the agency unsuccessfully tried to suppress reported that a Palisades meltdown would cause a thousand acute radiation poisoning deaths, 7,000 radiation injuries, 10,000 latent cancer fatalities, and $52 billion in property damage. Adjusting for inflation alone, property damage would now exceed $168 billion. And since populations have increased around Palisades in the past 43 years, casualty figures would be significantly worse, as more people now live in harm’s way.

Holtec’s inexperience exacerbates these synergistic old and new reactor risks. Holtec still has no NRC-approved SMR-300 design certification, has never built a reactor, nor operated one, nor repaired and restarted one, let alone a reactor as perpetually problem-plagued as the 60-year old Palisades zombie. Holtec’s incompetence and corruption has been on full display in just the past several weeks, including a leak of large amounts of ultra-toxic hydrazine into Lake Michigan, the unprecedented fall by a worker into the radioactive reactor cavity, and evidence of potential alcohol consumption and/or drug impairment, including in the protected area, and by a supervisor. Despite all this, NRC has rubber stamped weakened work hour limitations, meaning overworked employees will be more fatigued, as Holtec races to restart the zombie reactor, in order to hold its announced Initial Public Offering, hoping to raise another $10 billion in private investment, for SMR-300 deployment across the country and around the world, with Palisades as the dangerously dubious prototype to be followed.

Speaking of money, Holtec has, thus far, been awarded $3.52 billion (with a B!) in public funding at Palisades alone. But it has requested another $12 billion (with a B!) more. These bailouts significantly impact the pocketbooks of hard working Americans — state and federal taxpayers, as well as electric ratepayers. Palisades represents a wealth redistribution scheme, from the American people to Holtec, compliments of Governor Whitmer, the Michigan state legislature, Congress, President Biden, and now President Trump. Abe Lincoln described the ideal of government as “of, by, and for the people.” At Palisades, government seems to be of, by, and for an inexperienced, incompetent, careless, corrupt and greed-driven corporation, playing radioactive Russian roulette, carrying out a large-scale nuclear experiment, with Great Lakes residents as the unwitting Guinea pigs.”

December 6, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment