Trump’s “Unleashing Atomic Power” is Unhinged

Without explanation, on June 16, 2025, President Trump unceremoniously fired Democrat Commissioner Christopher Hanson from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as the first senior manager causality initiating a slash and burn attack on commercial nuclear power regulatory oversight.  Hanson’s second term of office was to have expired in 2029. Hanson’s abrupt removal follows a barrage of White House Executive Orders by decree of the Trump Administration “to unleash nuclear power” from a federal regulator pilloried by industry and its bipartisan political allies as “risk-averse” and “safety zealots” preventing the rapid expansion of new reactor licensing and extending operating license renewals of deteriorating reactors to an extreme 80 years.

None of these industry lobbied accusations are true.  For years, the NRC has in fact been shifting away from prescriptive regulation to “risk-informed” regulation that Beyond Nuclear and other public interest organizations have criticized as “gambling” at the expense of public safety margins to protect  nuclear industry profit margins.  After all, what is gambling but considering risk to gain monetary reward which in this case is for an inherently dangerous and aging technology.

Following the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct2005), Congress and President G.W. Bush provided billions of US taxpayer dollars to incentivize a so-called “nuclear renaissance” of new “advanced” reactor construction with federal loan guarantees, new reactor production tax credits, and streamlined new reactor licensing to grease the skid. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) published its 2007 report to Congress “Nuclear Power: Outlook for New Reactors” assessing EPAct2005’s impact to prop up the federal revival and cited the industry pledge to cash in on taxpayer money for 34+ units in new reactor projects. The NRC staff and  Commissioners took full advantage of the politics.  NRC speeded up its license review process that now combined construction and operating applications (COL) into one convenient licensing hearing while cutting back on the public’s due process. Of those pledges, only two projects for four units [V.C. Summer 2 & 3 (SC) and Vogtle 3 & 4 (GA)] managed to muster the financing and only then by using electricity rate hikes paid by utility customers in advance for construction work in progress.

Here’s the reality check: of those 34+ units, only two units awarded COLs by NRC, Vogtle 3 & 4, that were originally estimated at total completion costs of $14 billion, managed to finish construction seven years behind schedule in 2023 and 2024 at a total construction cost well exceeding $35 billion.

Of the remaining 32 units identified in the CRS report, an additional 12 units were provided COLs by NRC licensing boards to start construction. Only V.C. Summer 2 & 3 started construction that was abandoned mid-construction with $10 billion in sunk cost, again, largely at the expense of its captured ratepayers.  The remainder were cancelled, withdrawn or terminated by construction cost-averse utilities. As of March 2025, the NRC reports that five US  nuclear power companies still hold NRC-approved COL applications for 8 “advanced” reactor units that have not been acted upon because of the projected uncontrollable construction costs.

The NRC did its part to fast track reactor licensing. It was the utilities that by and large financially chickened out.

Still, to some Commissioners’ credit,  it was NRC Democrat then Chairman Christopher Hanson and Democrat Commissioner Jeff Baran who on  February 24, 2022 astutely heeded Beyond Nuclear’s and other intervenors appeals filed in response to the dismissal of their request for relicensing hearings on a contention illuminating a glaring “error of law” that was being ignored  and ramrodded by the NRC. The NRC relicensing process was simply carrying over its environmental review completed for the “initial” or first 20 years of license renewal (40 to 60 years of operation) into the “subsequent” or second 20 year extension of operations (60 to 80 years)  without adequately upgrading its environmental review analysis, more specifically for  impacts of “climate change” projected into that future operating period.  The piling up a regulatory train wreck of  seriously flawed Subsequent License Renewal Applications and bungled regulatory decisions.

The agency and their licensees were repeatedly violating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by NRC staff, the Office of General Counsel, numerous Atomic Safety Licensing Boards and the previous Commission to ramrod operating licensing renewals for a second 20 year extension (60 to 80 years) without updating the letter of the law to require environmental reviews to take a “hard look” at the projected extension period and do the analysis on the potential impacts of climate change (sea level rise, increasing intense hurricanes and storms, floods, etc.) on increased severe nuclear accident risk and frequency of nuclear accidents as a result.

In the 2 to 1 vote the seated Commission vote (Hanson and Baran vs. Republican Commissioner David Wright) issued NRC  Orders to send the federal agency back to the drawing board to rewrite the Subsequent License Renewal Rule’s Generic Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS) to specifically make it relevant to the 60 to 80 year projected operating time frame. The NRC spent nearly two years in it rewrite of the license renewal rule to comply with NEPA only to remain a stubbornly captured federal agency by industry lobbyists funding and Congress. The rewrite of the GEIS came back without the agency addressing climate change and now claiming that climate change is “out of scope” of reactor operation environmental reviews. Beyond Nuclear and the Sierra Club are currently before the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in request of a judicial review of the NRC’s flagrant and continued violation of NEPA by ignoring climate change impacts on increasingly extreme relicensing periods.

Unfortunately for nuclear safety, Hanson and Baran’s attention to the letter of the law earned them both the enduring scorn and ultimately revenge of the nuclear industry and their devoted political champions.

The energy trade journal Nuclear Intelligence Weekly reported June 6, 2025 that, “[t]he White House campaign to erode the NRC’s independence comes alongside fresh fears that President Donald Trump might fire some or all of the five NRC commissioners.”  Meanwhile, Trump’s scandalous Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is now plotting to make deep cuts in NRC staffing levels and divert more attention from public safety margins and environment protection to focus a leaner agency work force on expanding the industry production agenda and gold plated science. Shortly after Hanson’s abrupt dismissal, Trump renominated NRC Chairman David Wright, a Republican whose current term of office as NRC Chairman expires on June 30, 2025, and renewed his post for another 5-year term as one of the Commissioners.

Which raises the question, will President Trump fill the NRC Chair seat once empty with his handpicked Republican nominee to swing the Commission vote back to a 3-2 Republican advantage? The goal being to  erase any notions of a “risk-averse” NRC, shutdown the agency’s public transparency and regulatory accountability and dangerously unhinging the national nuclear energy policy.