Christopher Hanson, the newly minted chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has seen nuclear energy from just about every angle the federal government looks at it.
By the time he was sworn in as an NRC 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.
Since then, from a front-row seat in official Washington, Hanson has watched as successive presidential administrations tried and failed to close the nuclear fuel cycle while the U.S. fleet aged and new domestic builds slowed to a trickle.
Less than a year into his five-year term, Hanson is clear-eyed about reality, but it hasn’t crimped his enthusiasm for the future.
“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 that we have to have frameworks for safely regulating,” Hanson said.
In a 30-minute interview with the ExchangeMonitor editorial staff this week, Hanson talked about upcoming radioactive waste rulemakings, defended the NRC’s autonomy and confronted accusations of regulatory capture. Subscribers to the weekly RadWaste Monitor can read the entire interview in the next issue of the long-running newsletter, which drops tomorrow, Friday, March. 12, 2021.
