Many of the changes now underway at the NRC stem from the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2024 after the Senate, in a rare show of bipartisan zeal, almost unanimously approved the bill. The statute overhauled the NRC’s mission statement for the first time, directing the agency to consider the threat of holding back nuclear power in the U.S. in addition to the risks associated with radiation. Work on Part 57 began under the previous administration.
Last May, President Donald Trump supercharged those efforts with a series of executive orders designed to defibrillate the flatlining nuclear sector as China’s industry runs laps around the U.S., and Russia dominates exports to newcomer countries seeking to build their first atomic power stations.
Among those orders was one to restructure the NRC, requiring the agency to do more, faster, with fewer staff and more direct oversight from the president. Presidents have always been able to appoint commissioners but have historically had little influence over the agency’s day-to-day workings. The White House directive raised alarms, particularly as Trump sought to bring previously independent agencies like the NRC and Federal Communications Commission under direct control. His decision to fire a Democratic NRC commissioner a month later only deepened fears.
Career staffers at the NRC have blown the whistle over concerns that the Department of Government Efficiency, which billionaire Elon Musk established shortly after Trump’s inauguration, was wielding too much internal influence and slashing necessary parts of the regulatory apparatus.
“It’s hard to know if they are getting rid of unnecessary processes or if it’s actually reducing public safety,” one official working on reactor licensing told ProPublica last month. “And that’s just the problem with going so fast — everything just kind of gets lost in a mush.”
But Caroline DeWitte, the co-founder of Oklo, a nuclear developer favored by Silicon Valley, said skeptics of overhauling the NRC fail to recognize the extent to which the agency in its previous form was ill suited to oversee construction of new types of reactors.
The NRC official who rejected Oklo’s application in 2022 told Bloomberg last year that the company’s submission was one of the worst ever reviewed. But DeWitte, who leads the company as chief operating officer alongside her chief executive officer husband, Jake DeWitte, said the NRC couldn’t understand that Oklo’s reactor and similar designs have “inherent safety features.”
“Literally, the physics of the metal made it safe,” Caroline DeWitte told Canary Media. “So, how do you account for that? Even with passively safe features, the NRC forces you to assume that it can fail. But, like, is it reasonable to assume metal is not metal anymore? Those are the types of questions we were asking — how do we put that in a risk analysis?”
Among the more controversial regulatory changes proposed at the NRC is the move to overhaul the way radiation safety is measured altogether.
For years, the dominant rule has been for any radiation exposure to be kept as low as reasonably achievable, called ALARA. It’s based on the assumption that the more exposure someone faces, the higher the risk of cancer or other disease.
That assumption stems from the highly contested “linear no-threshold model” from the 1950s, which assumes that exposure to radiation at any level causes harm. Still, no one has yet determined a better alternative on which the country — and, more broadly, the world, which has long followed the U.S. lead on nuclear regulation — can agree.
The NRC has been treading lightly so far: Its proposed rule has been pushed back seven times already and is now due out on June 24.
Paul Dickman, who served as chief of staff to the NRC’s chair from 2006 to 2010, said he is not concerned that his former agency will approve anything that doesn’t stand up to rigorous testing.
“The NRC staff is being creative, and that’s a good thing,” he said. “Some people may worry. But I have high confidence in them. At the end of the day, you still have to prove your point on safety. That’s the bottom line.”
The strategy appears to be bearing fruit. In what NRC Chair Ho Nieh called a “milestone” that “proves we can deliver results quickly without compromising safety,” the agency just approved Duke Energy’s application to run its Robinson nuclear plant in South Carolina for 80 years. It was the fastest license renewal in the NRC’s history.
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