The three -thousand nuclear power plant on the island of three miles stands in the middle of the Susquehanna river on October 10, 2024. One of the two reactors of the factory melted in part in 1979, but the second worked for decades before its closure. It should now be restarted in 2028, pending approval by the nuclear regulatory committee.
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The Trump administration has tightened its control over the independent agency responsible for supervising the nuclear reactors of America, and it is considering an executive decree which could further erode its autonomy, said two US officials who refused to speak publicly because they feared that the retribution told NPR.
In the future, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (CNRC) must send new rules concerning the security of reactors to the White House, where they will be examined and possibly edited. It is a radical departure for the supervisory agency, which has historically been among the most independent of the government. The new procedures for the White House exam have been underway for months, but they have been recently finalized and are now.
NPR has also seen a project of a decree “ordering the reform of the nuclear regulatory committee”. The project calls for reducing the size of CNRC personnel, carrying out a “wholesale revision” of its regulations in coordination with the Elon Musk Government Department team and Elon Musk, shortening time to examine the conceptions of reactors and possibly loosen the current and strict strict standards for exposure to radiation.
“This is the end of the independence of the agency,” explains Allison MacFarlane, director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs of the University of British Columbia in Canada who was appointed by President Obama to be president of the CNRC from 2012 to 2014. Macfarlane thinks that changes will make the Americans less safe.
“If you are not independent of political influence and industry, then you risk an accident, frankly,” said Macfarlane.
The draft decree was marked pre-decision and deliberative. It was one of the many orders seen by NPR which seemed to aim to promote the nuclear industry. Other project orders have called for the construction of small modular nuclear reactors in military bases and the development of advanced nuclear fuels. Axios first reported on the existence of decrees.
We still do not know which, if necessary, will be signed by President Trump.
In a press release, the CNRC said that it was working with the White House “as part of our commitment to make CNRC regulatory processes more effective. We have no additional details at the moment.”
“The President of the United States is the chief of the executive branch,” a spokesman for the White House management and budget office wrote in NPR in an email. “The president has published an executive decree of the independent agencies which aligns with the power of the president which was given to him by the Constitution. This idea has been discussed for almost 40 years and should not be a surprise.”
Tuesday, February 19, 2019,
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Security first
The CNRC was created by Congress in 1974 with the explicit objective of strictly regulating nuclear reactors and protecting Americans from exposure to radiation. He intensified the application after a partial nuclear merger in Three Mile Island in 1979.
The CNRC is managed by five commissioners who are appointed by the president to five -year sentences and confirmed by the Senate. The Commission is a mixture of names and republicans who formulate policies, develop regulations for nuclear reactors and nuclear matters, issuing orders to licensees and deciding on legal issues.
The CNRC was considered a rigorous regulator. He has long scientific journals of new reactor conceptions and maintains internal resident inspectors in each of the American operational nuclear reactors.
Sometimes some say that the agency was too hidden. Historically, the CNRC “adopted an extremely conservative vision of its responsibility to safeguard public security”, explains Ted Nordhaus, executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, a reflection group in California which defends the development of new nuclear powers. Nordhaus testified before the congress in 2023 about the CNRC reform, and last year, the congress adopted a bipartite law designed to accelerate the development of new reactor conceptions. Part of the law specified several CNRC reforms.
Nuclear
The CNRC worked to respond to the new law, but it historically worked largely outside the competence of the White House. This started to change with an executive decree signed by the president in February which asked the independent agencies to start reporting directly to the office of the management and budget of the White House.
Russell Vought, head of the management and budget office, rejected the idea that any agency in the executive management should be authorized to operate outside the influence of the president.
“There are no independent agencies,” he told Tucker Carlson in an interview in November of last year. “The whole concept of an independent agency should be thrown away.”
President Donald Trump signed a decree in February which was designed to limit the power of independent agencies, including the CNRC.
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The new directive seems to be in accordance with this view. Previously, the five CNRC commissioners would vote on the rules of rules and the final rules for nuclear reactors. Their votes would be registered publicly, as is the reasoning of their decision. But now, the commissioners will carry out their votes during a session in camera and will adopt the rule at the Board of Information and Regulatory Affairs of the White House, which is located within the Management and Budget Office. The White House will have up to 90 days to review the proposed and finished rules, and will make changes, before putting them back to the CNRC.
It is only after the rule is finalized that the votes of the commissioners will be made public. It was not immediately clear how the public would know if the White House had changed a safety rule for a nuclear reactor.
Some questioned what the White House could win by examining the rules of abstrus for nuclear security.
“Who has technical knowledge to make a substantial exam?” Application Edwin Lyman, Union of CONSEIL OF CONSERVIED Scientists, a non -profit organization that criticized the nuclear industry. “Making the interference of people named politicians in these technical decisions is only a recipe for confusion and chaos.”
Additional examination also has the possibility of working against the White House’s goal of accelerating the reactor approval, adds Nordhaus. The Commission is already having trouble creating new rules quickly, he says. “I am not sure that sending them (send them) for a more in -depth examination to OMB will speed up the reactor license in timely and efficient time.”
A radioactive order
The new review is a major change, but it is the draft decree that promises a radical overhaul of the agency. According to order, the CNRC is planning to repeal the linear threshold standard without radiation for security. This standard supposes that exposure to radiation can harm, even at levels where the damage is not easily detectable by the scientific study. He also calls on the agency to examine its standard requiring that exposure to workers be kept “as low as reasonably achievable”.
Nordhaus, who pleaded to change the standards, says that reviewing them is not a bad idea. He says that the CNRC should set a minimum exposure to radiation which he considers “safe”. “As a public policy, you have to set a threshold,” he said.
The reactor operators work in the control room of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, in the United States, on April 11, 2018. A new executive decree could reduce the size of the CNRC while reducing its regulations.
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But MacFarlane says that current standards are “accepted science”. If they were removed, she said, there would probably be “political pressure to increase the limitations of exposure”.
The order would also call on the CNRC to undergo a restructuring to accelerate the licenses of new reactors. In addition to this reorganization, the CNRC “would undertake reductions of strength”.
He “also undertakes a wholesale revision of his regulations”, working with DOGE and the Bureau of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
Lyman and Nordhaus say that the shrinking of the CNRC would be counterproductive. “If you leave and dismiss half of the staff, you will dismiss a bunch of people you need to concede new reactors quickly,” said Nordhaus.
Spitting the book of rules that will also help, adds Lyman. “This will throw a monkey key in preparation and it will be completely contrary to all that this order tries to achieve.”
