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As government agencies go, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has left a lot to be desired, often operating less like a government watchdog and more as an industry partner. There’s fee recovery, for example, which effectively mandates the industry pay its own regulators’ salary, as well as the NRC’s habit of trusting voluntary leak reports from reactor operators, not to mention its history of hiding internal safety data to protect its reputation.
As if those deficiencies weren’t bad enough, president Donald Trump is now stripping what’s left of the commission’s mandate down to the bone. Last week, the NRC proposed a bold amendment to its long-standing nuclear safety principles: deleting a line requiring nuclear plant operators to keep radiation exposure “as low as is reasonably achievable.”
According to the Hill, the NRC justifies the move by saying it will remove “unnecessary ambiguity.” But critics say this rule is the whole reason energy companies bother keeping radiation levels as low as possible in the first place.
“Facility owners felt like… ALARA [as low as reasonably achievable] was forcing them to go well below the allowable radiation limits and spend a lot of money to do that,” director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists Edwin Lyman told the Hill. “This is opening the door for sloppier practices,” Lyman continued, and “worse management.”
It gets worse. Also per the Hill, the NRC likewise announced plans to significantly weaken its approach to the National Environmental Policy Act, a foundational piece of legislation dating back to 1970. On Wednesday, the NRC said it wants to gut draft environmental reviews entirely — which, in practice, means kneecapping the public’s chance to weigh in before a reactor gets the green light.
If that weren’t enough, the commission also wants to wash its hands of its mandate to review basic environmental nuisances like noise, dust, and air pollution associated with nuclear facilities. That’s if they even do a review in the first place, as the proposed changes would exempt certain existing reactors, and even new reactors from regular inspection altogether, the Hill reports.
The proposed changes come just a few months after the US Department of Energy began stripping safety regulations that limited nuclear workers’ exposure to radiation. In effect, these changes allow energy companies to speed up productivity, unlocking higher profits at their workers’ expense.
The timing of it all is hard to overstate: with several new nuclear reactors gearing up for operations throughout the US, it’s clear the Trump administration is doing all it can to fast-track incoming nuclear facilities, consequences be damned.
More on nuclear energy: There’s a Glaring Safety Problem With Nuclear Energy Startups
