U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order in the Oval Office of the White House on May 23. President Trump signed executive orders related to the nuclear power industry.Win McNamee/Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump signed executive orders on Friday intended to dramatically accelerate regulatory approvals for new nuclear power plants and experimental reactors.
One order said the Trump administration will reform the “structure, personnel, regulations and basic operations” of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. safety regulator, with the objective of lowering regulatory and cost barriers to deploying new reactor technologies.
Mr. Trump instructed the NRC to set deadlines for issuing licences “and any other activity requested by a licensee,” adding that processing applications to construct new reactors must take no longer than 18 months.
Another order instructed the Energy Secretary to revise regulations to “significantly expedite the review, approval and deployment” of what it described as “advanced” reactors, including test reactors.
“This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of overregulation of the industry,” Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, told reporters at a news conference in the Oval Office. That period includes the partial meltdown of a reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979. The worst accident in the U.S. nuclear industry’s history, it led to significant regulatory reforms.
Mr. Trump’s 18-month deadline for licence application reviews represents a significant acceleration. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, it can take up to five years for the NRC to complete a review.
In April, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission granted Ontario Power Generation a licence to construct a BWRX-300 reactor 30 months after the utility submitted its application. OPG recently pushed back its expected completion date by one year, saying it had expected the CNSC to issue the licence in 2024.
Allison Macfarlane, a professor at the University of British Columbia who specializes in energy policy (and who served as the NRC’s chair between 2012 and 2014) said Mr. Trump’s orders eliminated the NRC’s independence.
By dictating timelines, she added, the orders could “force through” substandard applications without adequate scrutiny, “so you’re going to have a much less-safe product.”
Several executives from prominent U.S. nuclear companies joined Mr. Trump at the signing event and praised him for the regulatory rollbacks.
“The problem in the industry has historically been regulatory delay,” said Constellation Energy Corp. chief executive officer Joseph Dominguez.
“Delay in regulations and permitting will absolutely kill you, because if you can’t get the plant on, you can’t get revenue and the interest costs are horrible. We’re wasting too much time on permitting and we’re answering silly questions, not the important ones.”
Prof. Macfarlane said the length of time the NRC takes to consider an application is dictated primarily by its quality. Reactor developer Kairos Power recently obtained a construction licence in less than two years, she said, because “they submitted a high-quality application” and answered questions promptly.
“If, on the other hand, you submit a crappy application and are slow to answer questions, then the licensing process will take a long time.”
Some of Mr. Trump’s directives could be applied promptly. This week, the Tennessee Valley Authority submitted an application to the NRC for a permit to construct a BWRX-300 reactor at its Clinch River site near Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The United States has the world’s largest reactor fleet. According to Mycle Schneider Consulting, it has 94 operating reactors, which collectively produce nearly 19 per cent of the nation’s electricity.
But the U.S. has lost considerable ground to the world’s new leaders in reactor construction, Russia and China, the latter of which has started up dozens of reactors in the past two decades. The American fleet is now among the world’s oldest, the mean age of reactors surpassing 43 years. Only three power reactors have been built in the U.S. since the turn of the century.
The administration said Friday it wants to quadruple the U.S.’s installed nuclear capacity by 2050 to 400 gigawatts.
In February, Mr. Trump signed another executive order taking aim at the NRC and other regulatory agencies, which he claimed had operated “without sufficient accountability to the President.”
That order declared that henceforth, “all proposed and final significant regulatory actions” must be submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an arm of the President’s office, for review. Moreover, the director of the Office of Management and Budget will set management objectives for the NRC’s head, and review its “obligations for consistency with the President’s policies and priorities.”
In yet another wide-ranging order on Friday, Mr. Trump moved to shore up the supply chain for nuclear fuel, which included directing the Energy Secretary to prioritize contracting for developing nuclear fuel fabrication facilities to supply fuel to test reactors.
Shares of uranium mining companies surged Friday, with Canada’s Cameco Corp. gaining more than 10 per cent on the Toronto Stock Exchange.