ROCKVILLE, MD – With the influx of nuclear reactor designs coming down the pipe, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is “ready for the moment” to efficiently and safely license, commissioners David Wright and Bradley Crowell said Tuesday morning.
The two commissioners spoke in their respective plenaries during the NRC Regulatory Information Conference. Though a lot of work is to come for NRC, staffing still continues to be a point of focus, they discussed in their panels.
Crowell, while he said he is optimistic, said retaining and replenishing NRC staff will be important to maintain nuclear power’s growing momentum. Crowell said NRC is still recovering from staff over the past year. As a result, NRC will lean on NRC division managers to help navigate the recent reorganization.
The reorganization, scheduled to be complete by September, is meant to streamline decision-making and create more efficient licensing processes. This shift was called for by President Trump’s Executive Order 14300.
“But my gut instinct just from the stress level and talking to NRC employees is that we can use more capacity,” Crowell said during the question and answers portion of his plenary.
Crowell said he wants NRC to re-invest in universities to build up its workforce. He applauded the Department of Energy for continuing to put money towards university programs, referring to DOE recently awarding nearly $53 million to various universities and their nuclear research programs.
“The workload before us now and for the future is truly daunting, but we’re up for the task,” Crowell said in his opening statement.
Wright said during his plenary that the NRC workforce has leaned on modernizing its operations while keeping safety at the forefront, the agency’s “Northstar.”
“You [NRC staff] assessed whether systems from a different era are still serving today’s needs, and you did it with confidence and conviction,” Wright said in his opening statement. “You focused on modernizing licensing frameworks to better accommodate advanced technology…you [NRC staff] should take pride in what you accomplished because you energized an agency to achieve some remarkable accomplishments.”
With a critical moment for nuclear power at hand, Wright said NRC is “becoming the place for the cool kids to work at” in the nuclear industry and a place to work at to enable the nuclear future.
In 2025, NRC lost over 400 staff members including a number of key management and senior-level employees, such as commissioners Annie Caputo and Christopher Hanson.
According to an August 2025 Senate Environment and Public Works inquiry, NRC’s staff grew from 2686 staffers in January 2022 to 2885 staffers by Jan. 19, 2025, prior to the mass departure that came later that year at the agency.
In August 2025, Crowell, Wright and commissioner Matthew Marzano told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that despite the growing workload, the NRC workforce will continue to keep safety as its highest priority.