When it comes to nuclear energy, President Trump is making the right moves. He began last month with executive orders targeting everything from supply chains to advanced nuclear reactor development to an overhaul of the bureaucratic culture inside the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and he continued with the firing of NRC’s commissioner Christopher Hanson.
But there’s one more step Trump should take: work with Congress to abolish the NRC and create a new regulator fit for a nuclear resurgence.
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This isn’t a new idea. In 1979, a dozen Americans—members of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, a.k.a. the Kemeny Commission—met with President Jimmy Carter. They had a stark message: the NRC had to go. The commission had concluded that the real danger wasn’t faulty equipment; it was a regulatory system that confused paperwork with protection.
“The NRC is a headless agency that lacks the direction and vitality needed to police the nuclear power industry on a day-to-day basis,” Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt, a member of the commission, said back then. “Safety decisions . . . are not appropriate to committees . . . running a debating society is not the way to run nuclear safety.”
The commission’s warning proved prophetic. Today, as a new generation of safer reactors struggles to gain approval, the NRC has fallen prey to the pathologies the commission warned against. The commission found an agency “beset by an overconcentration on regulations, an attitude that tends to equate the meeting of regulations with safety.” It noted, “Once regulations become as voluminous and complex as those regulations now in place, they can serve as a negative factor in nuclear safety.”
That’s exactly what’s happening today with small modular reactors. These reactor designs use passive safety systems—no moving parts, no operator error, no cascading failure. Some cannot physically melt down. Their safety isn’t just backed up; it’s baked in. Yet they still must navigate rules written for twentieth-century reactor models. The NRC demands meltdown plans from reactors that can’t melt down. It scrutinizes passive systems more heavily because they don’t include the active components the rules expect. The nuclear start-up NuScale, for example, spent nine years and more than $500 million to get its design certification approved. Just completing the first step took 2 million hours of labor and millions of pages of documentation.
This is ritualism, not sensible regulation. And it makes us less safe by delaying better technology. The Kemeny Commission saw this trap: “It is an absorbing concern with safety that will bring about safety—not just the meeting of narrowly prescribed and complex regulations.”
The problem with the NRC is its structure and the culture that that structure produces. Bureaucracies optimize for process, not outcomes. The NRC’s gridlock is the system working exactly as designed.
Every day we delay approvals, however, is another day Americans rely on plants designed before the Internet existed. Meantime, countries like Canada, the U.K., and China evaluate new designs on their actual merits. While U.S. startups drown in paperwork, international peers keep building.
What should be done? Replace the five-member commission with a single, accountable administrator, reporting directly to the Secretary of Energy. This administrator should be empowered to take decisive action and motivated to get us building again. This would streamline accountability, align nuclear oversight with national energy strategy, and allow for more decisive, mission-driven regulation.
It would also bring the NRC in line with the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration, which are led by administrators reporting directly to the secretaries of Health and Human Services and Transportation, respectively. Each administrator has a direct line of accountability to the president. While these two agencies have their flaws, they actually do things.
The Kemeny report has been used as evidence for tighter regulation. That misreads the commissioners’ intent. They didn’t want more rules, but smarter ones. They called for enforcement that focused on real risks, not the blind application of outdated standards to reactors engineered to eliminate those risks. They understood that benefiting the public means overhauling the system when necessary.
President Carter ignored the Kemeny Commission’s advice. President Trump has gotten a good start on following it. He should finish the job.
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images