The Department of Energy (DOE) has overhauled and hollowed out much of its nuclear safety regulations, according to a recent National Public Radio report.
According to the Jan. 28 NPR article, over the course of fall and winter, DOE has slashed hundreds of pages of requirements for security at the reactors, loosened protections for groundwater and the environment and raised the amount of radiation a worker can be exposed to prior to an official investigation being initiated.
NPR said that over 750 pages were cut from the earlier versions of the same orders, leaving about a third of the number of pages in the original documents. DOE said these changes will reduce the unnecessary regulations and will allow for increased nuclear innovation without affecting safety, according to the report.
As of Friday morning, DOE had not responded to Exchange Monitor’s inquiries about the NPR report.
Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said this recent development under DOE has confirmed his fears “about the dire state of nuclear power safety and security oversight under the Trump administration,” he said in a Jan. 28 statement.
“The Energy Department has not only taken a sledgehammer to the basic principles that underlie effective nuclear regulation, but it has also done so in the shadows, keeping the public in the dark,” Lyman said. “These dramatic alterations may further weaken standards used in the broader DOE authorization process and propagate across the entire fleet of commercial nuclear facilities, severely degrading nuclear safety throughout the United States.
As DOE has pushed for more streamlined processes for its test reactors, Lyman said that this level of rewriting of nuclear safety directives “underscores why preservation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an independent, transparent nuclear regulator is so critical.”
The DOE regulatory changes come as the department oversees its advanced reactor pilot program, which was announced last summer. The pilot program has set out the goal of at least three reactors to reach criticality by July 4. DOE has already selected 10 companies to produce 11 projects under the program.
The program was also ordered by President Donald Trump’s White House in its May 23 executive order “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy.” Through the executive action, DOE was directed to streamline environmental reviews for the pilot reactor.
Just this week, the agency followed through with the directive and announced a categorical exclusion from certain National Environmental Policy Act procedures. The exclusion would exempt certain advanced reactors from having to prepare an environmental assessment or environmental impact statements.