For newly minted Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Christopher Hanson, it’s good to be back in the office.
“I’m here a couple of days, mostly because I just have to get out of my house,” Hanson told RadWaste Monitor this week from NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md. “I’ve got a dog and two teenagers at home and I need to leave them all to do their thing.”
Though he says he is “not a tech person,” Hanson has seen nuclear energy from almost every angle the federal government looks at it. When President Joe Biden (D) appointed him commissioner only days after the inauguration, Hanson was about six months into his first five-year term on the NRC.
By the time he was sworn in as a commissioner in June 2020, Hanson had done a five-year stint as Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) energy and water staffer on the Senate Appropriations Committee, spent six years working nuclear issues in the Department of Energy, and the better part of seven years before that with Booz Allen Hamilton, starting in the early 2000s.
Back then, people talked — with no hint of irony — about a nuclear renaissance.
Now, plants are “coming down faster than they’re going up,” Hanson said.
Coincidently, Yucca Mountain’s a dead duck in the Biden administration. Biden’s Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, has made that clear on more than one occasion.
Yet on Hanson’s watch, the U.S. may finally take a baby step toward storing spent nuclear fuel somewhere other than the next lilypad over from the plant that generated it: commercial facilities in a pair of southwestern states whose owners applied for NRC licenses before Hanson got his turn in the big chair.
Those licenses were only some of the balls Hanson had in the air last week when he broke away briefly from NRC’s annual Regulatory Information Conference (all online this year) for a 30-minute video call with the Monitor.
RWM: Has the Biden administration tipped their hand to you about conducting some kind of broad nuclear policy review?
I don’t know what the administration has in mind [but] if there’s an effort to develop geologic disposal or if there’s an effort to, say, develop a federal interim storage facility in addition to whatever is going on down the Southwest, they should be clear with everybody that this stuff has to come through [NRC]. We’re the safety regulator.
Has anybody in the Biden administration directed the NRC to change its approach to the environmental review or licensing of the commercial interim spent fuel facilities proposed by Holtec International and [Orano-Waste Control Specialists joint venture] Interim Storage Partners?
Not that I’m aware of. But, you know, I want to make an important point about that: the NRC is an independent agency. We’re in the executive branch, sure, but we don’t take policy direction from the administration.
The exception to that for us is foreign policy — you leave the shores of the United States, and we’re all in it together. But, in terms of the executive branch itself, it would be very unusual for somebody to call us up from any other part of the government and say ‘we want you to do X.’
At NRC we take our independence really seriously, in part because in some cases we regulate other parts of the government. We regulate the Department of Commerce up at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, we regulate medical users at the National Institutes of Health and some activities at DOE too. So it’s really important that we have that independence.
Right now, plant decommissioning is the fastest growing part of the nuclear power industry. How has that changed NRC’s daily operations, its long-term outlook and its recruiting tactics?
Hanson: The NRC had two main jobs: ensuring the safety of the existing fleet, and ensuring the safe and secure use of nuclear materials. And now on the reactor side it’s kind of doing three things. That has some complexity.
We’ve still got the existing fleet, but that fleet’s aging, and we need to be careful and deliberate about the way we regulate that. And we are, but [now] we’ve got this growing cohort of decommissioned reactors.
And then we’ve got a lot of enthusiasm for advanced reactors on the new-build side [and] we have to be ready [with] frameworks for safely regulating [them]. And in a lot of cases, their technology is much different than technologies that we’ve regulated before.
[As for recruiting], because we have a lot of things going on, and because it’s a really dynamic time, [I hope] that people will look at the NRC and go, ‘hey, that’s a pretty neat place. That’s a pretty interesting place to work these days, because I’m going to get to touch a lot of different points in the fuel cycle and get exposed to a lot of different things.’
I hope that’s our value proposition to new engineers, and maybe even some mid-career folks as we go forward because we are going to need a lot of smart folks who can do a lot of different things.
Full-spectrum nuclear-services companies, or teams that include them, are doing big business by swooping in to take over plant licenses for decommissioning. Does that seem like a radical development to you, or does it strike you as a natural evolution for the industry?
It does seem kind of like a natural change. Certainly, there’s innovation there in the business models. And there’s still there’s diversity in the business models out there.
Look at San Onofre, where they’ve maintained ownership of the site, and they’ve contracted for the decommissioning with [EnergySolutions and AECOM].
I think a lot of utilities expected to hang onto their sites when they first got into this, and that they’d shut them down and go into SAFSTOR, where you cocoon facilities let it sit for 60-plus years and then you come back to it and you take it down at a date far into the future.
There’s a refrain among environmental groups and citizen watchdogs that the NRC has been completely captured by the nuclear industry. How do you answer that charge?
I don’t think we’re victims, or culprits, of regulatory capture.
First of all, I work with NRC staff every day. I talk to them throughout the agency, and I think they take everyone’s input seriously.
It’s not just industry all the time, but community groups and activist groups, ordinary citizens, members of other parts of the administration. We’re going to take the information that [they’ve] given us, thank you very much, and we’re going to do our own thing with it. We’re going to reach our own conclusions.
One of the real privileges of being chairman is getting to see that on a regular basis, because I have a lot of interest in this area, as you might imagine. I love the technical details around some of the stuff. I’m not a tech person, so I like to interact with staff on stuff that they’re really passionate about, whether it’s risk models or whether it’s performance margins.
In listening to all of that, I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that we’ve been captured by industry. I’m just not there.
When you spoke at this year’s NRC Regulatory Information Conference, you talked about the importance of innovation. What kind of innovation do you foresee in waste management and the back end of the fuel cycle?
In the back end area, one of the places where I’ve seen some real innovation is on sensing technology. We had a commission meeting last month about storage technology. And I was fascinated by the discussion among some of the cask vendors about how they have sensitive technology for cracks and other kinds of flaws in the casks themselves. That information in many cases comes to us.
So, how do we learn about that technology, such that we have the confidence that we can look at our vendors’ or licensees’ activities and say ‘that’s an NRC-approved inspection program.’
[Also], robots aren’t flawless, but I think robots could have a strong future role to play in spent fuel storage [and] in autopsies of existing plants as they come down. That’s where I think there’s a real opportunity to learn about the aging of nuclear power plants as we take them apart, to harvest that learning, and apply that to the safety of the existing fleet.
Overall, have you enjoyed your time as NRC chair, so far?
I love it. I’m so lucky to get to do this, and so honored to have been designated by the president to do this job. Really, though, it’s about the staff here. I’ll be here for a few years, but the staff who have dedicated their careers to the mission, and to this agency, are the ones who really deserve all the credit and all the applause.