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Title: "America Must Slash Red Tape to Make Nuclear Power Great Again!!"
Source:
National Review
URL Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2025 ... ake-nuclear-power-great-again/
Published: Oct 22, 2025
Author: Andrew Follett
Post Date: 2025-10-22 09:23:55 by Mudboy Slim
Keywords: None
Views: 12
"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission decisively failed under the Biden administration. Decades’ worth of red tape at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will make it impossible to meet surging demand for nuclear power plants unless President Trump acts to fill vacant board seats at the agency. Within five years, America should complete up to ten large new nuclear power plants currently being built, according to a new study by nuclear engineering firm Bechtel. The problem is the NRC cannot keep up with the regulatory kudzu needed to permit these reactors. The projected nuclear renaissance comes from soaring demand for clean and reliable power for data centers, where any interruption in energy flow can lead to disaster. These centers consume massive amounts of electricity, often 100 megawatts or more, to power servers, cooling systems, and networking equipment, a demand that only nuclear power can meet without risking devastating fluctuations. Congressional action isn’t necessary to address this; all that is needed is for the president to fill vacant NRC board seats to change its existing policies to comply with Congress’s 2018 Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA), instructing the NRC to drastically simplify its licensing procedures for new reactor designs. Unfortunately, today’s NRC is incapable of licensing these necessary reactors. Solving the red tape crisis is a necessary precondition for a nuclear renaissance. In 1975 alone, the year the NRC was founded, the country began construction on nine new reactors. Since then, it has built only nine new commercial reactors, virtually all of which were expansions of existing nuclear power plants and six of which started construction in 1976, before the bureaucracy could become entrenched. As a result of this regulatory disaster, the U.S. nuclear industry has been devastated and talent has been lost. Furthermore, each operating nuclear reactor spends more than $20 million annually on government-mandated fees and paperwork. The average nuclear power plant employs an estimated 86 full-time employees just to do NRC- mandated paperwork, meaning that about 17 percent of the employees are just handling red tape. That’s insanity. Trump could jump-start the NRC with commonsense regulatory reforms by filling the pair of vacancies on the five-member board governing the organization who would join NRC Chairman David Wright, appointed during Trump’s first term. Under the Biden administration, the agency decisively failed. It took the NRC three whole years just to develop a 1,200-page draft that actually made the regulatory process more complicated, so much so that license applicants elected to use an old system. In 2025, the NRC gets 90 percent of its budget from fees on the nuclear industry and runs up the bill by charging power plants $318 per hour for staff time. Thus, the agency has every incentive to increase bureaucracy. Filling commission vacancies could be used as leverage to enact basic reforms to the nuclear plant licensing process that could save the agency and make nuclear power great again. This could start with a single performance-based license, replacing the current two-step licensing process by which a plant must first obtain a construction permit and then an operating license. “Our current two-step licensing process was created in an era when nuclear technology was nascent and public confidence uncertain. While well-intentioned, this model now imposes long, uncertain review periods that often exceed seven years and discourage private investment,” said Jeff Terry, a physics and engineering professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, whose research focuses on energy and radiation risk. Speaking to National Review, he said, “By 2025, it is fairly clear that the current nuclear fleet is self-sufficient and even capable of restarting after prolonged shutdown. It is beyond time to move to a performance-based licensing model.” This alteration could reduce the current wait time for licensing of up to seven years by focusing on what outcomes the agency wants achieved, rather than how the desired results are obtained. Today’s regulatory delays caused by a cumbersome licensing process are estimated to increase the cost of reactors by 30 percent per project. Yet, the NRC bureaucracy’s current rules for approving nuclear reactors are mathematically impossible to meet. Not nearly impossible. Actually impossible, since they’re based on unrealistic presumptions. For instance, the agency assumes that every new reactor will have a major Three Mile Island–scale accident every single year of its 40-year lifespan, despite only one comparable incident ever occurring in any U.S. reactor. “Moving to a performance approach would not diminish safety, it allows for ingenuity in mitigating potential risks,” Terry said. “Performance approaches strengthen safety by allowing for innovation. You are not locked into a specific means for addressing a risk. Performance-based models, though, are more difficult for a regulator, because they have to be versed in more than one technology.” Another positive reform for potential NRC commissioners would be to allow parallel processing to permit simultaneous review of design, site, and environmental assessments rather than consecutive reviews, which did much to achieve a South Korean nuclear renaissance. “Time is money,” Terry said. “Today, reviews proceed sequentially, stretching project timelines and multiplying costs. South Korea’s nuclear program, which achieved some of the world’s most rapid and cost- effective deployment, did so in part by adopting parallel reviews.” South Korea built the Shin Hanul 1 and 2 nuclear reactors for the equivalent of only $2,070 per kilowatt of electrical power, under one- fifth the cost of America’s newest nuclear reactors at Vogtle, at roughly $11,000 per kilowatt. America’s nuclear program is so comparatively expensive because of the paperwork required for NRC’s licensing timeline. Vogtle took more than a decade to build, receiving NRC approval for Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in 2012, and beginning commercial operations in 2023 and 2024, respectively. It took an insane 43 years for the NRC to process the paperwork and allow construction of the Watt Barr power plant in Tennessee, which began operating in June 2016. By comparison, America’s first nuclear power plant at Shippingport (Pennsylvania) was built in three years starting in 1957. The problem isn’t that nuclear reactors are inherently expensive; it’s that bureaucratic delays made them expensive. “We could reduce front-end licensing timelines by two to three years, without changing a single safety requirement,” Terry said. “This reform is largely procedural, but its impact would be profound. It would send a clear message that the United States intends to compete on speed and efficiency, especially when it is not clear that the USA still has a technical edge on the competition.” One final regulatory reform new commissioners could include would be ordering the NRC to use to risk-informed, performance-based regulation, as recommended in reports like the 2018 MIT study on nuclear power. This approach prioritizes safety based on probabilistic risk assessments, rather than rigid compliance checklists and is estimated to reduce costs by 10–20 percent without compromising safety. “Traditional oversight treats all requirements as equally important, regardless of their actual contribution to safety,” Terry said. “This approach misallocates regulatory effort and drives up costs without commensurate safety gains. By focusing on real-world safety outcomes rather than rigid design prescriptions, we can foster innovation while increasing the level of public protection from a focus on protection of personnel and public to increased levels of property protection.” Notably, the NRC’s bureaucratic disaster continues even when its funding is on the line. As I’ve previously reported, it took the agency six months and three different attempts to give former Senator Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.), then chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, a simple budget for its programs. The agency only managed to deliver an incomplete budget the night before the NRC was set to testify before its paymasters. Much of Western nuclear red tape is the result of environmentalists, who have quite openly stated they intend to use safety bureaucracy to kill nuclear power. “It was clear to us that we couldn’t just prevent nuclear power by protesting on the street,” Jürgen Trittin, a prominent German Green Party member, told Welt News. “As a result, we in the governments tried to make nuclear power plants unprofitable by increasing the safety requirements.” It is now essentially impossible, according to an R Street Institute study, to open a new profitable nuclear power plant because these heavy government regulations are combined with policies directly favoring wind and solar energy."
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