Several officials from environmental organizations held a meeting in Washington, D.C. Tuesday warning against reworking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and streamlining nuclear deployment amid the push of powering artificial intelligence (AI).
Over the past year, various environmentalist groups have opposed the United States’ renewed interest in nuclear power, spearheaded by President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump’s White House ordered several nuclear-related executive actions last year, including the reform of the NRC, and other federal nuclear initiatives.
Peter Bradford, a former NRC commissioner, said the Trump administration is under the impression that nuclear regulations are the reason why building new nuclear power is expensive, leading the administration to “recombine economic promotion with regulation.”
“As he [Trump] has done with other agencies whose mission is to protect the public with sound science, [provide] comprehensive oversight and firm enforcement, President Trump has undertaken to hollow out the NRC,” Bradford said.
Former DOE official Joe Romm said that the nuclear industry has undergone “multiple renaissances” but has failed to build a reactor in less than 10 years. He also said that nuclear power causes people’s electric rates to go up in price.
“It [nuclear energy] is not going to help you with the AI crisis and I believe the AI data center boom will bust before we actually complete a single nuclear plant,” Romm said.
Union of Concerned Scientists Physicist Edwin Lyman said over the last few years that the nuclear licensing process has been “corrupted to the point that we no longer have confidence that the federal regulators of nuclear power are going to be able to ensure public health, safety and security and protect the environment.”
Additionally, Lyman, along with Romm, said the notion that NRC can de-regulate because advanced reactor designs are inherently safer than the current operating reactors is “misleading or outright false.”
“Many of these designs can be even less safe based on their fundamental characteristics and, as a result, these unproven designs need to have more scrutiny before they’re deployed, not less,” Lyman said.