Sen. Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.) brought a list of old grievances to NRC Chair Christopher Hanson’s renomination hearing on Wednesday, setting the stage for a contentious process with time running short.
Hanson’s term runs through June 30, and his quickest road to renomination, unanimous consent on the Senate floor, might prove impassable if Capito and all her Republican colleagues in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee oppose Hanson.
In Wednesday’s hearing, Committee Chair Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) said that “Chair Hanson is the right person for the job at this time” and that “I hope to work with members of this Committee to expeditiously move his nomination through the confirmation process.”
But Capito showed no sign that she would be quickly won over.
Capito grilled Hanson about what she perceived to be his lack of support for more in-office work in the post-pandemic era and about a vote in which he sided with now-former-Commission Jeffrey Baran to require more thorough environmental reviews for relicensing nuclear power plants.
Baran, renominated last year but not reconfirmed, became a sort of notch in Senate Republicans’ belt after a sustained campaign of GOP resistance succeeded in painting him as an unrepentant obstructionist of nuclear progress unsuited to shepherding in a new nuclear renaissance.
In 2022, Hanson voted with Baran to revoke license renewals for two operating nuclear power plants and prevent the rapid relicensing of three others. That overturned a decision by the Donald Trump administration’s NRC that the renewals should proceed.
Two-and-a-half years later, the decision grates on Capito, who on Wednesday asked Hanson to explain himself.
Hanson said he was playing a long game with his vote, looking out for those five NRC licensees and others in the future who, he believed, could have had license renewal requests held up in court for violating the federal environmental and administrative law.
“[W]e were going to get sued and the people who sued us were going to win,” Hanson told Capito. “[I]t was better to fix that now than to get 10 or 12 or 15 licenses down the road and have a federal court overturn us.”
Hanson did acknowledge, however, that none of the five plants affected by the 2022 vote had had their licenses renewed as of Wednesday.
“This kind of gets to the point,” Capito said of the lack of renewal, to date, for the five licensees.
Also at the hearing, Capito hammered home her disagreement with Hanson’s vote last year to let the NRC’s senior most civil servant set telework policy for the agency. Hanson was the only member of the commission at the time who opposed allowing the commissioners themselves, at least in this instance, to dictate the policy.
As a result of that vote, most NRC employees with a two-week paycheck were allowed a maximum of three telework days weekly rather than the four they had been eligible for under another a telework policy approved by the commission’s executive director of operations, the top career official.
“This lack of in-person interaction in the workplace, obviously an outgrowth of COVID, has had impacts,” said Capito.
“Nobody’s coming back to work,” Capito said. “They’re not coming back to work full time.”
