Unleash the power of bipartisan NRC reform. By Matthew Yglesias

Read time: 8 minutes

Unleash the power of bipartisan NRC reform

Two good bills that need to be reconciled

Every conversation about nuclear energy on the internet goes the same way. It starts with someone saying we need regulators to be friendlier to nuclear power plants, then someone else interjects that the real problem with nuclear is that it’s too expensive, to which the first person responds that the real reason nuclear is so expensive is that the regulatory burdens are too high.

Who’s right? I believe it’s the first person. But the only way to find out is to actually do the regulatory reforms.

While the environmental movement has, for the most part, set aside the irrational anti-nuclear worldview of the 1970s, it still fails to appreciate that a breakthrough in nuclear cost and technology would be really, really valuable. When discussing nuclear power, environmentalists tend to express incredible levels of optimism about the trajectory of renewable energy and batteries — such wild optimism that it renders the whole nuclear conversation irrelevant. But turn the conversation back to fossil fuels and suddenly it’s vitally important to block natural gas infrastructure or throw paint at the Mona Lisa. The impulse to do that kind of thing reflects, I think, a sound implicit recognition that it’s actually not true that we are on a glide-path to 100 percent renewables.

I’m just as annoyed by the people who are so certain that changing nuclear regulation is the answer that they ignore all the other levers. But we need to try every plausible lever, and nuclear definitely counts.

There’s been some good news on this front recently, though.

One is that Jeff Baran’s nomination for a slot on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was held up in the Senate and the Biden administration has agreed to withdraw it. The Biden administration says all the right things about nuclear and their signature legislation has lots of important provisions for the nuclear industry. But at the end of the day, the really boring, humdrum work of staffing the NRC is critical to resolving the regulatory bottlenecks, and this means they are hopefully getting pushed in a good direction.

There are also bipartisan NRC reform bills in both the House and Senate, and work is under way to try to reconcile them.

And I think this may be even more important than the administration withdrawing Baran’s nomination, because even a really great slate of commissioners will struggle to make positive change without a clear statement of support from congress.

The basic problem

Baran himself explained the problem well at an earlier confirmation hearing back in 2017, when he told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that “it is my job to focus on nuclear safety and security, it is not my job to weigh in on the pros and cons of the merits of nuclear power.”

To nuclear advocates, that line is part of the case against Baran. And as far as it goes, I agree with that case. But the fact is, he is offering a plausible read of the NRC’s statutory mandate. When the United States first built nuclear power plants, it did so under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was really a military-first Cold War institution. Then, in 1974, the military and civilian sides of nuclear policy were split, and the NRC was created with the deliberate mission of being a less industry-friendly regulatory body. This was perhaps a uniquely bad moment to be birthing a new nuclear regulatory framework — degrowth ideas were intellectually fashionable, modern cost-benefit analysis wasn’t really in use anywhere, and climate change wasn’t on the policy agenda at all. The Clean Air Act was also written without climate change in mind, but the EPA and the courts have developed doctrine whereby climate impacts can, and do, factor into EPA regulatory decisions.

That’s not the case with the NRC, which promulgates nuclear safety rules without regard for the consequences of those rules for greenhouse gas emissions.

After the Fukushima tsunami, for example, the NRC enacted a bunch of new safety rules. But at no stage in the process does the NRC consider the question “will these rules cause nuclear plants to become uneconomical and shut down prematurely, generating more air pollution and leading to worse health outcomes?”

Any industry regulated on that basis of safety and security with no balancing test would rapidly become unviable, especially if it had to compete with rival industries offering similar products. The government inspects meatpacking plants to try to minimize the risk of food-borne illness. But we do not have a zero-risk stance, because that would make meat incredibly expensive. And if we selectively adopted a zero-risk stance only for pork, there would be massive consumer shift toward chicken and beef.

The body responsible for the regulatory framework does, in fact, need to have an opinion on the overall merits of nuclear power, because it has significant pros:

Nuclear power generates dramatically less air pollution than burning fossil fuels.

Nuclear power generates a much more stable flow of electricity than solar or wind.

Nuclear power requires a smaller geographical footprint than solar and wind.

Access to cheap electricity has a wide range of economic and human health benefits.

Obviously, it’s crucial to avoid nuclear meltdowns. But it’s also important to remember that nobody died at Three Mile Island. More people died as a result of higher electricity costs post-Fukushima than died as a result of radiation. Five people died last fall in a gas explosion that, while tragic, did not lead the country to shut down gas connections to homes. With all forms of energy, we need a balanced approach.

Two good bills

That brings us to our two competing bills in congress.

One, the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, has been introduced in the Senate by Shelly Moore Capito, Tom Carper, and Sheldon Whitehouse. ADVANCE would reduce the fees the NRC charges, which would help new nuclear startups; promote nuclear diplomacy to encourage outreach and technology sharing with friendly foreign countries that are interested in nuclear; facilitate nuclear development on brownfield sites; and, maybe most important, would have the NRC award prizes for successful deployments of advanced nuclear reactors.

The money is important, but the prize is also a kind of mission statement: If the NRC is handing out prizes for deploying advanced reactors, then the NRC is, by definition, in the business of licensing advanced nuclear reactors.

There’s a lot of in-the-weeds aspects to the brownfield idea, but it’s relevant, I think, mostly as a reminder that while there are lots of people who don’t want nuclear power anywhere near them, there are also plenty of places that would welcome it. If you used to have a coal plant that generated a lot of pollution (bad) but also jobs and tax revenue (good), and now all you have is a former coal plant that generates no jobs or tax revenue and the land is unusable, you might be better off with a new nuclear facility. It can hook into existing transmission infrastructure, and then big city libs (or whoever) can reduce their carbon footprint without actually building anything new.

Over in the House, meanwhile, Jeff Duncan and Diana DeGette have an even more ambitious bill called the Atomic Energy Advancement Act.

Their bill contains similar provisions around licensing fees and brownfields, but also specifically directs the NRC to update its mission statement “to include that licensing and regulation of nuclear energy activities be conducted in a manner that is efficient and does not unnecessarily limit — (a) the potential of nuclear energy to improve the general welfare; and (b) the benefits of nuclear energy technology to society.” Several provisions ask that licensing procedures be made “efficient” and “timely.” As is generally the case in the American system, there is inherently a good deal of uncertainly as to what an agency would actually do with this kind of directives. But my general view is that good legislation plus good NRC appointments can drive change and create an agency that wants to say yes to making reactors cheaper to build.

All energy sources matter

My dream scenario would be to mash these bills up in a both/and way, with the House’s strong language on directives to the NRC and the Senate’s prizes. And then, of course, to fill the Baran slot on the NRC with someone great.

Because while it’s possible that nuclear won’t pan out even with favorable regulatory treatment, it might pan out and it would be really nice if it did.

I’m worried that, in the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act’s historic financial commitments to clean energy, we’re losing focus on the crucial need for deployment. It’s not even really that the green movement is excessively focused on a renewables-only vision. Even the bill written by House liberals to facilitate renewable permitting is full of provisions that do the opposite of facilitating renewable permitting:

The Democrats’ permitting-reform bill would fill the coffers of groups that tie up projects. It calls for $3 billion in federal spending for the sake of “increasing the capacity” of nonprofits and local governments to participate in the environmental-review process. And it requires the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to pay the expenses of parties that want to intervene in regulatory proceedings but cannot afford to. In effect, the bill would subsidize objections to the projects that it means to accelerate.

That bill has some good provisions, too, but one point here is that there’s no “perfect” energy source. To run nuclear plants, you need to mine radioactive material, and you need to store waste, and you do need to be willing to run some non-zero safety risk. To run hydroplants, you need to dam rivers. To build utility-scale wind and solar, you need big swathes of land and you need to run transmission lines. Burning fossil fuels puts pollution in the air. Batteries have their own set of mining concerns. It’s tradeoffs all the way down.

But if you want to rely on electricity to power cars and heat homes, and you want to reduce the amount of fossil fuels that are burned to generate electricity, then you need to build a lot of zero-carbon electricity. You need regulatory reform for geothermal drilling. You need all the things.

Nuclear, though, is particularly promising as a legislative matter at the moment, because splitting the atom unleashes incredible amounts of lib-owning power that gets Republicans wanting to vote for things in a way that renewable transmission does not. Biden and most Democrats say they want to advance nuclear, and these NRC reform bills are the way to do it. I’m not saying the White House needs to loudly endorse them — that might be wildly counterproductive — but encouraging congressional leadership to encourage work on reconciling the bills and getting something done would be really helpful.

Update your profile

Only paid subscribers can comment on this post