In the high-stakes world of energy production, nuclear power remains one of the most promising technologies for meeting global demand while minimizing emissions. Yet, as Christopher Koopman and Eli Dourado explain in their Wall Street Journal piece, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has become a regulatory quagmire stifling innovation. The recent lawsuit from Texas, Utah, and Last Energy, aimed at curbing the NRC’s overreach, could mark a turning point for the future of small modular reactors (SMRs)—an innovation too vital to be obstructed by bureaucratic inertia.
A Regulatory Regime Frozen in the Cold War Era
The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 was crafted with the foresight to distinguish between different types of nuclear reactors based on their risk profiles. Reactors that could pose significant national security or public health risks would require federal oversight. Yet, this sensible framework was gutted in 1956 when the Atomic Energy Commission, the NRC’s predecessor, decided that all nuclear reactors, regardless of their size or risk, must undergo the same suffocating regulatory process.
This one-size-fits-all approach persists today, resulting in absurdities like the regulation of the teaching reactor at Texas A&M University—a reactor so small it couldn’t even power a single LED bulb. As Koopman and Dourado point out, even the NRC itself concedes that research reactors like these pose no meaningful safety risk. Nevertheless, they are subjected to the same licensing gauntlet as gigawatt-scale power plants.
The Small Modular Reactor Revolution
Small modular reactors are a game-changer for nuclear power. Unlike the sprawling nuclear plants of the mid-20th century, SMRs are compact, produce a fraction of the energy of traditional plants (around 20 megawatts or less), and are equipped with modern safety features. For instance, Last Energy’s reactor design operates within a 12-inch steel-walled container, making a radioactive release virtually impossible—even in the worst imaginable scenario.
Last Energy’s design operates entirely inside a container with 12-inch steel walls that has no credible mode of radioactive release even in the worst reasonable scenario.
Even in such a scenario, according to the plaintiffs, radiation exposure would be less than a tenth what the NRC has deemed too safe to require regulation in other contexts—and less than 1/800th of a routine abdominal CT scan.
Yet, these remarkable advancements are stymied by the NRC’s outdated and burdensome licensing process. NuScale, another SMR innovator, spent over $500 million and more than two million hours of labor just to get its design certified. That’s before applying for an operational license, which will only multiply the costs.
The Stakes for States Like Texas and Utah
The timing of this challenge is crucial. Texas and Utah face energy crises as their populations grow. Texas operates its own electrical grid, serving more than 27 million customers. With its rapid population growth and booming economy, the Lone Star State faces an unprecedented need for reliable power. Utah’s “Operation Gigawatt” aims to double its power production over the next decade. Nuclear power could play a crucial role in both states’ energy futures, to say nothing of America’s, if regulatory barriers don’t stand in the way.
Why the NRC’s Overreach Must End
At the heart of this lawsuit lies a simple yet transformative demand: the NRC must adhere to the law. The Atomic Energy Act did not mandate federal oversight for reactors that pose negligible risks. State regulatory authorities are fully capable of ensuring the safe operation of SMRs, freeing federal regulators to focus on reactors with actual public health and security implications.
Washington’s heavy-handed involvement is not just unnecessary—it’s counterproductive. The NRC’s licensing regime is not a regulatory framework; it is a de facto moratorium on nuclear innovation. By requiring exhaustive and often irrelevant documentation, the NRC has turned what should be a decade of progress into a decade of paperwork.
Unleashing America’s Nuclear Potential
The NRC’s bureaucratic stranglehold on nuclear energy is not merely a hindrance to innovation; it is a threat to the nation’s energy security and economic competitiveness. As the world increasingly turns to renewable and low-carbon energy sources, the U.S. risks falling behind by hamstringing one of its most promising technologies.
Koopman and Dourado’s call to action is clear:
Federal courts should simply require the NRC to follow federal law. Reactors that could affect the nation’s public health and safety should be subject to rigorous federal oversight. But state regulatory authorities are more than sufficient to ensure that small modular reactors operate safely. Washington doesn’t need to be involved.
This lawsuit is more than a legal battle; it is a pivotal moment for reclaiming the promise of nuclear energy. If successful, it could pave the way for states to harness SMRs to meet growing energy demands sustainably and safely, while liberating innovators to do what they do best—innovate.
In short, this is not just a fight against overregulation—it is a fight for the future of energy itself.
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China now have a commercial working modular pebble-bed nuclear design..
… with attached large capacity fuel processing plant.
Expect to see these proliferate throughout China.
The USA needs to try to keep up.
Hoping Dutton in Australia can also push the nuclear option.
Please do not fall into the alarmists’ Newspeak trap. They are not “emissions”, they are CO2 emissions.
“…SMRs are compact, produce a fraction of the energy of traditional plants (around 20 megawatts or less)…”
NuScale’s SMR (single module) is rated at 77 MWe.
https://www.nuscalepower.com/-/media/nuscale/pdf/fact-sheets/about-nuscale-fact-sheet.pdf
The Rolls-Royce SMR is rated at 470 MWe. One might say this stretches the idea of the “small” part of “SMR”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_SMR
Correct.
The main purpose of SMRs is to allow type approval, of a factory built standard unit that can be factory assembled and shipped to the final site as a unit, complete and in no need of further regulatory approval.
Like an aircraft jet engine.
Rolls Royce are pushing the limits of transportability, but they know what they are doing.
The market for smaller units under 50MW is there for marine propulsion and possibly emergency generators in the military and disaster response arena.
Somehow the industry has to escape the clutches of deliberate stranglehold over regulation.
If not western civilization is going down the toilet
“Rolls Royce are pushing the limits of transportability, but they know what they are doing.”
Agreed.
And it is indeed the “type approval” concept “like an aircraft jet engine” that makes the SMR idea work.
The “smallness” is not defined so much by MWe output but rather that multiple modular reactors are manufactured offsite and brought to the plant site and assembled in groups depending upon the total MWe needed. SMRs can be a few MWe to hundreds of MWe.
The NRC and EPA regulations were/are designed to limit anything produced in the USA.
Just look at the results and know the truth.
We had high hopes that Brexit from the EU would allow reform in the UK’s nuclear regulator and freedom from Euratom.
But the EU pressurised stupid politicians into maintaining the alignment.
No one builds a new fiefdom when they can expand what has already been successful in limiting progress as it is.
Each reactor should be required to get its own private insurance rather than the industry engaging in all-reactor socialism under the Price Anderson Act of 1957. Also, no federal grants or special preferences. A real free market, in other words.
Currently there is no way we can build a reactor using the free market. Regulations make it a very costly proposition then you have to add in the cost of environmental law fare adds in. Combine the two and the odds of actually getting to start a new build is small which leads to problem #3 for a free market. Banks don’t want to lend on projects because they’ll be left holding the bag when the whole thing collapses to do extremely high cost before building can even start.
Keep in mind, folks, that many people are afraid of nuclear anything. To the point of irrationality. These fears are unfounded in my opinion. Proceed with caution, though, because one screw-up will kill a nascent industry.
I remember when the Casini mission to Saturn was launched. It was powered by a nuclear power plant, using heat directly to generate power. The nut jobs were lining up to protest claiming that if the rocket were to crash, millions would die from nuclear contamination.
I don’t know if the novelty has worn off, or if the nut jobs are just less intense, but I don’t remember any protests when the most recent Mars rover was launched, it is also nuclear powered.
Finally, some common sense on nuclear. The Breakthrough Institute champions nuclear as well.
“The Breakthrough Institute is a global research center that identifies and promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges.”
The web banner “About” tab looked to me like a trust fund beneficiary club hosted a party with DEI invite list. All too young to have money they made themselves.
As one of those people who actually had to review and approve advanced reactor designs, I take issue with this post. The NRC DOES “follow the law”. The problem with the law is that it uses words that are not specific. “reasonable assurance of adequate protection of public health and safety.”
What is “reasonable assurance”? What is an “adequate protection”? What level of harm to health and safety is acceptable? These terms are not defined, and are subject to all sorts of interpretation.
Accidents at nuclear plants are extremely unlikely to actually kill anyone. No one was harmed, in any way, from the TMI meltdown. About 35 people, mostly firefighters, were killed fighting the fires at Chernobyl. No one was killed as a results of the Fukushima events. What happened, in all three cases was that a giant mess was created that will take a very long time and a lot of money to clean up. A lot of the cost will be to deal with “risks” associated with the release of miniscule amounts of radioactive material that will be released, or might be released.
Airplanes crash all the time, killing hundreds of people (sometimes, maybe even thousands), but no one worries that they crash. Cars have accidents that kill tens of thousands in the USA, alone, but very few people want to make them absolutely safe. Just about every home in the world has a kitchen with sharp knives that can be used by bad people to do harm to others, but no one advocates to do away with that risk.
Without a political definition of these terms, it is very difficult to decide whether a new reactor design that has never been built, cannot create some sort of mess that will be expensive to clean up. I don’t believe ANY of the claims that this new design, or that new design, which have never been built, is failsafe. Without looking at the details of the design, including the I&C systems, the experience of the people who are going to build and operate it, and the QA of the suppliers of the components, no one can make that claim. There will always be some way for operators or maintenance men to do something that will create an interesting event. I guarantee it.
The last thing we need in this country is to turn loose the people who want to “move fast and break things”, to build nuclear power plants.
Ever hear of the TRIGA reactor? Designed and built as a research and training reactor by General Atomics circa 1959, 66 of them have been in operation, 33 in the United States. If you’ve ever seen the blue glow of a nuclear reactor core, it was a TRIGA reactor. I stood on the grating over the pool of the TRIGA at University Park, MD, while students started it up, and got to see that blue glow first hand.
It’s an inherently safe reactor, its safety assured by its uranium zirconium hydride fuel. If the reactor temperature increases, the hydrogen transfers its thermal lattice energy to the neutron environment, heating it up and thus reducing the reaction rate instantly. TRIGAs run at power levels between 20 kW and 16 MW thermal. But they’ve been pulsed up to 22,000 MW, nearly the prompt critical output of Chernobyl.during its accident. But the TRIGA shuts down faster, and in fact can’t be made to “melt down”, or do any other nefarious nuclear nuttery.
Despite all of that, the University of Maryland TRIGA has been under license renewal review by the NRC for more than two decades. Why? What are they protecting, when the whole point of TRIGA was “idiot proof”, which the reactor has demonstrated in spades for all these years.
I disagree that there will always be some unseen path to catastrophe. The RBMK reactor has been criticized (post-Chernobyl) for its design “flaws,” which are legion – and breathtaking. Who would approve a reactor design capable of prompt criticality? Yet it has an excellent safety record. The operators who were trying out the post-SCRAM backup power bridging experiment (which had failed every time it had ever been tried) had to really work hard to defeat all of the safety systems of the Chernobyl reactor. Even they, however, couldn’t figure out a way to make a TRIGA go high order, because it can’t. Yet the NRC treats the UofM reactor like an unexploded (nuclear) bomb. There is ample room for improvement in this process, and I personally think that the people who want to move fast and break things should be free to operate that way. The best thing the NRC and DoE can do is provide those entrepreneurs with safety data, and any best and worst practices data they have. And the USG has HUGE amounts of nuclear safety/hazards.
Story Tip, probably not totally out of place on this, a litigation thread:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/exxon-mobil-sues-california-attorney-general-environmental-groups-2025-01-06/
The energy industry and obviously the nuclear power industry have been talking for years about streamlining the licensing process in the US, but NRC is not the place to start. Congress is going to have to act on this, like so many other regulatory reforms that are sorely needed. There is no public health and safety benefit in needlessly adding horrendous amounts of time and cost for a technology that is extremely well proven over more than half a century of operations.
Regulators and bureaucrats never reform themselves – it has to come from elected government, as in Congress, with Presidential cooperation rather than resistance and opposition as has been the case with the Biden mal-administration.
I wonder if it would be possible for states on the Mexican border, to put a plant just over the border. Close enough so that any skilled workers that aren’t available in the Mexican work pool, can commute there from the US.
We know how to generate electricity using nuclear power. It is safe, clean, dispatchable, reliable and economical. As usual what is holding us back is government. Whether they are corrupt or stupid or both is of no concern, they must be made to get out of the way.
“Small modular reactors are a game-changer for nuclear power. Unlike the sprawling nuclear plants of the mid-20th century,….”
The problem with SMR is that they are small and on paper.
I have been to many GenII LWR. The nuclear island and main turbine/generator is about the size of a Walmart.
What we learned from small not modular reactors is that LWR scale up very well. In one case, one new LWR replaced two old LWR on the same site.
Except it did not. While building the new reactor, they learned to make the two old ones run 80 years. So now there are 3 reactors producing lots of power.
My first reactor was a small output prototype used for training after it had demonstrated performance.
Here is the deal. It is the US NRC not the world NRC. If some other country needs SMR they can do it. In fact I think it would be refreshing if China did it first and we copied it.