Ted Nordhaus and Adam Stein of The Breakthrough Institute explain the problems with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing process.
- Three years ago Congress directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to modernize regulations for nuclear power in order to bring more energy projects online faster.
- After three years and millions of dollars spent, the NRC has released its plan that largely follows the previous broken permitting system.
- The NRC’s proposed rule does not take a risk-informed, performance-based approach that is flexible enough to accommodate a broad range of future advanced reactor designs.
- Regulatory hurdles such as these will hurt our economic competitiveness, energy security, and ability to meaningfully reduce emissions.
“NRC staff claim they have met the mandate given to them by Congress. But the sheer length of the proposed regulations alone demonstrates this is not the case. The draft framework is twice as long as either of the legacy, prescriptive licensing frameworks, Part 50 and 52, that it is intended to supplant. That is because the staff largely cut and pasted the old rules into the new framework, then added further burdensome regulations, including qualitative health objectives that cannot be complied with and expanded requirements for the notorious ‘As Low As Reasonably Achievable’ radiation standard, a further invitation to endlessly ratchet regulatory requirements. These latter two standards have been added by NRC staff despite longstanding and clear direction from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission not to use either standard in the way that staff proposes to use them.”
Read the full article here.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.
