The so-called “rubber stamp rule,” an attempt by the Trump administration to “make America nuclear again,” violates key components of the Atomic Energy Act (AEA) and the Energy Reregulation Act, according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail.” For comments submitted This week by 13 organizations including the Nuclear Information and Resources Service (NIRS) and Beyond Nuclear. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed rule would allow reactor designs approved by the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DOD) to bypass safety reviews required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
In a separate comment issued in March, 11 state attorneys general agreed with the organizations’ findings that the DOE’s new policy of excluding “experimental reactors” from NRC licensing and environmental reviews violates existing law. In that case, the Department of Energy announced, in violation of federal law, that it would exempt previously untested reactors it agreed to build and operate from any review of their environmental impacts.
“Combined with DOE’s environmental ‘free pass’ policy, the entire ‘accelerated permit’ system the administration is trying to create appears to be illegal,” said Tim Goodson, executive director of NIRS and co-author of the comments submitted to the NRC. “The White House is trying to create a ‘regulatory tunnel’ around NRC safety regulations. This means that DOE’s biases and clearly false assumptions about the safety of nuclear power plants have become the new normal, exposing the public to unacceptable risks to our health and safety.”
The NRC’s proposed regulation would allow companies that want to build a nuclear reactor of the same design that was previously approved by an Energy Department to simply submit documentation of that approval and claim that the previously built reactor is “safe.” Such companies will likely never have to undergo a detailed safety review by the NRC to build and operate such reactors. In 1974, Congress amended the Atomic Energy Act to prohibit such a scheme.
“Fifty years ago, the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished because it had become too much of a promoter and had lost the confidence of Congress and the public regarding safety,” said Paul Guenther, director of the reactor monitoring project at Beyond Nuclear. “The NRC was created to provide a regulatory body that prioritizes safety and is committed to not taking shortcuts to the production agenda. Instead, half a century later, we are on the same dangerous collision course, casting the NRC aside in favor of the Department of Energy, which does not have the experience or staff to bring the industry into line with safety and security. This capitulation to the Trump agenda could lead to the NRC being abolished altogether, because no one will trust them.”
The groups also told the NRC that they cannot simply “rubber stamp” reactors that the military is building either. “Although the law allows the Department of Defense to build its own nuclear reactors, it does not allow the NRC to skip safety reviews of civilian nuclear plants simply because they use the same designs,” said Tim Goodson of the National Institute for Nuclear Research. “The military routinely exposes its personnel to risks from which it is supposed to protect civilians.”
“In its concern for short-circuit reactor safeguards, the Trump administration is once again doing what it does best – demonstrating a complete disregard for the law,” said Linda Bentz Gunther, executive director of Beyond Nuclear. “But nuclear technology is inherently too dangerous to be considered lawless. Ignoring these risks will put millions of Americans at risk of another catastrophic nuclear accident.”
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