“The time is now” to advance US nuclear—Part 1

As part of their preparation, NRC commissioners convened a hearing on March 4 to learn from industry stakeholders—both domestic and international—what the agency can do to improve its effectiveness and efficiency. The three-hour hearing focused on the ADVANCE Act, bipartisan legislation passed in 2024 that outlines a number of actions the NRC must take to accelerate licensing, lower its cost, and simplify permitting.

“The ADVANCE Act sends a clear message that the time to be a modern risk-informed regulator is now, and that a cultural shift is necessary and urgent to deploy clean, advanced nuclear energy,” said Nader Mamish, vice present of nuclear regulatory affairs at Westinghouse, during the hearing. Mamish added that he was optimistic about the NRC’s new mission statement, especially the goal of “enabling, rather than encumbering, the safe and secure” use of nuclear power.

For the past 50 years, the NRC has been overseeing “a pretty static industry,” Doug True, chief nuclear officer with the Nuclear Energy Institute, said at the hearing.

Not anymore.

A report published in February by the International Energy Agency forecasts that total SMR capacity will reach 40 GW by 2050. SMRs have the potential to provide twice that amount by 2050, but deployment hinges on the industry’s ability to lower SMR costs, the report adds.

“It’s not surprising that when we get to a moment like this, where all of a sudden everybody’s saying: ‘Let’s hit the gas and deploy all this extra stuff,’ that we’re not in a position with processes or even regulations to necessarily support that pace,” True said. “The industry is at an inflection point where there’s an opportunity ahead of us like we haven’t seen, maybe ever.”

On safety and the environment: Kathryn Huff, former secretary for nuclear energy at the U.S. Department of Energy and current professor at the University of Illinois, shared her thoughts on how the NRC can be more efficient across a range of activities. She pointed to several position statements published by the American Nuclear Society, whose membership includes many highly technical industry stakeholders and professional engineers, she noted.

“The most important [position statement] that I would like to call out is that no matter what is done to improve environmental efficiencies and environmental reviews . . . state-of-the-art safety requires well-staffed, well-funded safety regulatory authorities, which are responsible for independently assuring operational safety and protection of the environment,” she said.

The NRC needs to take a hard look at which environmental review instruments are needed in which types of nuclear licensing, Huff continued. Ultimately, the commission needs to pare down and accelerate these review processes.

On advanced reactors: For SMRs to be successful, “we have to build them in considerable numbers,” said William Magwood, director general of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, during the hearing. “The market for nuclear energy technologies is a global one.”

He added, “If these SMRs are going to be built in multiple countries, in a relatively short period of time, that’s going to require a coordination among regulators on licensing, unlike anything we’ve seen in the past.”

Magwood noted that the NRC has taken steps to cooperate “on a bilateral basis with close countries, but we have to go to the next step. We have to go multilateral. And that’s where an organization like the NEA can be helpful. But it can’t really happen unless there is a driving desire by the NRC and like-minded regulators to do so.”

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the NRC’s ADVANCE Act hearing. See Part 2 of the NRC hearing coverage later this week on Nuclear Newswire.