Policy

Pending, passed, and coveted legislation involving nuclear energy made their way across multiple state capitol buildings in the month of April. Here are a few notable updates from California, Iowa, Kentucky, and Missouri.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released a new licensing framework for microreactors and similar reactor designs that may provide a more suitable pathway for applicants with simpler technologies.

The proposed rule—known as Part 57—is the latest to come out of the NRC’s rules review and overhaul stemming from the ADVANCE Act and 2025 nuclear-related executive orders. It is also the latest framework developed for advanced reactor designs shifting away from light water reactor technology, such as the Part 53 rule finalized in March.

All five commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission provided insight into the agency’s priorities, activities, and its proposed $892.3 million budget for fiscal year 2027 when they testified before the U.S. House Committee on Energy & Commerce’s Energy subcommittee on Wednesday.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has spent the past week courting members of Congress to approve his agency’s $53.9 billion discretionary budget request for fiscal year 2027. On Tuesday, Wright spoke before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. On April 15, Wright testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy & Water Development and Related Agencies. And on April 16, he testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is moving forward with its plans to reorganize around three core business lines: new reactors, operating reactors, and nuclear materials and waste. In order to do that, the agency will establish two new offices: the Office of Advanced Reactors (OAR) and the Office of the Chief Nuclear Reactor Inspector (CNRI).

Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (ENR), has introduced a bill that would grant the Department of Energy greater authority over new nuclear projects under the federal agency’s oversight.

The Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) called for the deployment of six 77-MWe pressurized water reactors at Idaho National Laboratory that would provide power to INL and to Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) customers in Utah and surrounding states. But UAMPS and NuScale Power mutually agreed to end the project in late 2023, ending a first-of-a-kind SMR project that was years in the making.

Total project costs, had it been completed, were estimated at $8.03 billion, with $1.36 billion coming from the Department of Energy as part of a 10-year, noncompetitive, cost-share award.

The Board of Directors of the American Nuclear Society, along with the ANS Public Policy Committee (PPC), recently approved revisions to Position Statement #35: Advanced Reactors and Position Statement #47: Management of Surplus U.S. Nuclear Material.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed legislation that lifted the state’s de facto moratorium on new nuclear construction projects. (Photo: Office of Governor)

New Jersey has become the latest state to lift a moratorium on the construction of new nuclear power plants, with Gov. Mikie Sherrill signing new legislation Wednesday with the state’s two nuclear power plants serving as the backdrop.

The legislation, S. 3870/A. 4528, allows the commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to approve permits for the construction and operation of new nuclear facilities “based on safe, [Nuclear Regulatory Commission]–compliant waste storage.” Prior to this bill, New Jersey law practically banned such construction, because the state’s Coastal Area Facility Review Act required an approved method from the NRC for radioactive waste disposal that was outdated and could not be met.

The security drills held at commercial nuclear power plants as part of the Force-on-Force (FOF) inspection program will no longer be led by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The commissioners on Friday approved an overhaul of the security program, including phasing out NRC-led drills by 2028. Following the phaseout, drills will be led by the licensee, with the NRC observing.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has sunset its aircraft impact assessment rule for 2027, as NRC staff have addressed several of the public comments considered “significant and adverse” that prompted the agency this past winter to temporarily delay the sunsetting move.

The final rule, which was published in the Federal Register on Wednesday, addressed some of the more contentious concerns raised by the public. It sets a conditional sunset date of April 8, 2027, “unless the NRC determines that the cessation deadline should be extended to a date not more than 5 years in the future after offering the public an opportunity to provide input on the costs and benefits of this section and considering that input.”

Three years ago, the Texas Public Utility Commission launched the Advanced Nuclear Reactor Working Group at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott. One year later, that new group issued a report recommending several actions to the Texas legislature that could be taken to attract new nuclear projects to the state.

Included in those recommendations were the foundation of a nonregulatory entity to coordinate Texas’s “strategic nuclear vision” along with an advanced nuclear fund to help “overcome the funding valley project developers face” in the state.

The White House is requesting $1.5 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy in the fiscal year 2027 budget proposal, about 9 percent less than the previous year.

The request from the Trump administration is one of several associated with nuclear energy in the proposal, which was released Friday. Congress still must review and vote on the budget.

Nuclear reactor designs approved by the Department of Energy or Department of Defense could get streamlined pathways through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s commercial licensing process should applicants wish to push the technology into the civilian sector.

A proposed rule introduced April 2 by the NRC would “improve NRC licensing review efficiency, where applicable, by explicitly establishing by regulation an additional means for reactor applicants to demonstrate the safety functions of their reactor designs, and thus, would contribute to the safe and secure use and deployment of civilian nuclear energy technologies.”

Millstone’s two pressurized water reactors in Waterford, Conn., and Seabrook’s single PWR in Seabrook, N.H., are the only power reactors in operation in the New England region, with total capacities at Millstone and Seabrook of 2,122 and 1,248 Net MWe, respectively.

The region’s governors, though, may seek to expand these numbers. The governors of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont issued a joint statement in support of exploring next-generation nuclear energy technologies. The bipartisan announcement also urges continued support for local nuclear facilities like Millstone and Seabrook.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has identified five categories of action to add to its list of categorical exclusions to reduce its documentation work under National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures.

These revisions are included in the final rule, “Categorical exclusions from environmental review,” which was published in the Federal Register on March 30. The final rule will become effective on April 29.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has finalized its new regulatory framework for advanced reactors that officials believe will accelerate, simplify, and reduce burdens in the new reactor licensing process.

The final rule arrives more than a year ahead of an end-of-2027 deadline set in the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA), the 2019 law that formally directed the NRC to develop a new, technology-inclusive regulatory approach. The resulting rule—10 CFR Part 53, “Risk-Informed, Technology-Inclusive Regulatory Framework for Advanced Reactors”—is commonly referred to as Part 53.

During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.

In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s adjudicatory hearings have not received any significant reforms since 2004. In fact, according to NRC staff, these Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) hearings have only undergone major reform three times in the board’s history.

That would change under a proposed rule that was issued earlier this month. At a March 19 virtual meeting, NRC staff provided more details on the proposed changes.