By Andrew Follett
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Decades’ worth of red tape at the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission (NRC) will make it impossible to meet surging demand for nuclear
power plants unless President Trump acts to fill vacant board seats at the
agency.
Within five years, America should complete up to ten
large new nuclear power plants currently being built, according to a new study by nuclear engineering firm Bechtel. The problem is
the NRC cannot keep up with the regulatory kudzu needed to permit these
reactors.
The projected nuclear renaissance comes from soaring
demand for clean and reliable power for data centers, where any interruption in
energy flow can lead to disaster. These centers consume massive amounts of
electricity, often 100 megawatts or more, to power servers, cooling systems,
and networking equipment, a demand that only nuclear power can meet without
risking devastating fluctuations.
Congressional action isn’t necessary to address this; all
that is needed is for the president to fill vacant
NRC board seats to change its existing policies to comply with Congress’s 2018 Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA),
instructing the NRC to drastically simplify its licensing procedures for new
reactor designs. Unfortunately, today’s NRC is incapable of licensing these
necessary reactors.
Solving the red tape crisis is a necessary precondition for a nuclear renaissance. In 1975
alone, the year the NRC was founded, the country began construction on nine new
reactors. Since then, it has built only nine new commercial reactors, virtually
all of which were expansions of existing nuclear power plants and six of which
started construction in 1976, before the bureaucracy could become entrenched.
As a result of this regulatory disaster, the U.S. nuclear industry has been
devastated and talent has been lost.
Furthermore, each operating nuclear reactor spends more
than $20 million annually on government-mandated fees and
paperwork. The average nuclear power plant employs an estimated 86 full-time
employees just to do NRC-mandated paperwork, meaning that about 17 percent of the employees are just handling red tape.
That’s insanity.
Trump could jump-start the NRC with commonsense
regulatory reforms by filling the pair of vacancies on the five-member board
governing the organization who would join NRC Chairman David Wright, appointed
during Trump’s first term.
Under the Biden administration, the agency decisively
failed. It took the NRC three whole years just to develop a 1,200-page draft that
actually made the regulatory process more complicated, so much so that license
applicants elected to use an old system. In 2025, the NRC gets 90 percent of
its budget from fees on the nuclear industry and runs up the bill by charging
power plants $318 per hour for staff time. Thus, the agency has every
incentive to increase bureaucracy.
Filling commission vacancies could be used as leverage to
enact basic reforms to the nuclear plant licensing process that could save the
agency and make nuclear power great again. This could start with a single
performance-based license, replacing the current two-step licensing process by
which a plant must first obtain a construction permit and then an operating
license.
“Our current two-step licensing process was created in an
era when nuclear technology was nascent and public confidence uncertain. While
well-intentioned, this model now imposes long, uncertain review periods that
often exceed seven years and discourage private investment,” said Jeff Terry, a
physics and engineering professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology,
whose research focuses on energy and radiation risk. Speaking to National
Review, he said, “By 2025, it is fairly clear that the current nuclear fleet is
self-sufficient and even capable of restarting after prolonged shutdown. It is
beyond time to move to a performance-based licensing model.”
This alteration could reduce the current wait time for
licensing of up to seven years by focusing on what outcomes the agency wants achieved, rather than how the
desired results are obtained. Today’s regulatory delays caused by a cumbersome
licensing process are estimated to increase the cost of reactors by 30
percent per project.
Yet, the NRC bureaucracy’s current rules for approving
nuclear reactors are mathematically impossible to meet. Not nearly impossible.
Actually impossible, since they’re based on unrealistic
presumptions. For instance, the agency assumes that every new reactor will have
a major Three Mile Island–scale accident every single year of its 40-year
lifespan, despite only one comparable incident ever occurring in any U.S.
reactor.
“Moving to a performance approach would not diminish
safety, it allows for ingenuity in mitigating potential risks,” Terry said.
“Performance approaches strengthen safety by allowing for innovation. You are
not locked into a specific means for addressing a risk. Performance-based
models, though, are more difficult for a regulator, because they have to be
versed in more than one technology.”
Another positive reform for potential NRC commissioners
would be to allow parallel processing to permit simultaneous review of
design, site, and environmental assessments rather than consecutive reviews,
which did much to achieve a South Korean nuclear renaissance.
“Time is money,” Terry said. “Today, reviews proceed
sequentially, stretching project timelines and multiplying costs. South Korea’s
nuclear program, which achieved some of the world’s most rapid and
cost-effective deployment, did so in part by adopting parallel reviews.”
South Korea built the Shin Hanul 1 and 2 nuclear reactors
for the equivalent of only $2,070 per kilowatt of electrical power, under one-fifth
the cost of America’s newest nuclear reactors at Vogtle, at roughly $11,000 per kilowatt. America’s nuclear program is so
comparatively expensive because of the paperwork required for NRC’s licensing
timeline.
Vogtle took more than a decade to build, receiving NRC
approval for Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in 2012, and beginning commercial operations
in 2023 and 2024, respectively. It took an insane 43 years for the NRC to process the paperwork and allow
construction of the Watt Barr power plant in Tennessee, which began operating
in June 2016.
By comparison, America’s first nuclear power plant at
Shippingport (Pennsylvania) was built in three years starting in 1957. The problem isn’t that
nuclear reactors are inherently expensive; it’s that bureaucratic delays made
them expensive.
“We could reduce front-end licensing timelines by two to
three years, without changing a single safety requirement,” Terry said. “This
reform is largely procedural, but its impact would be profound. It would send a
clear message that the United States intends to compete on speed and
efficiency, especially when it is not clear that the USA still has a technical
edge on the competition.”
One final regulatory reform new commissioners could
include would be ordering the NRC to use to risk-informed, performance-based
regulation, as recommended in reports like the 2018 MIT study on nuclear power. This approach prioritizes safety
based on probabilistic risk assessments, rather than rigid compliance
checklists and is estimated to reduce costs by 10–20 percent without
compromising safety.
“Traditional oversight treats all requirements as equally
important, regardless of their actual contribution to safety,” Terry said.
“This approach misallocates regulatory effort and drives up costs without
commensurate safety gains. By focusing on real-world safety outcomes rather
than rigid design prescriptions, we can foster innovation while increasing the
level of public protection from a focus on protection of personnel and public
to increased levels of property protection.”
Notably, the NRC’s bureaucratic disaster continues even
when its funding is on the line.
As I’ve previously reported, it took the agency six months and three different
attempts to give former Senator Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.), then chairman of the
Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, a simple budget for its
programs. The agency only managed to deliver an incomplete budget the night
before the NRC was set to testify before its paymasters.
Much of Western nuclear red tape is the result of
environmentalists, who have quite openly stated they intend to use safety
bureaucracy to kill nuclear power. “It was clear to us that we couldn’t just
prevent nuclear power by protesting on the street,” Jürgen Trittin, a prominent
German Green Party member, told Welt News. “As a result, we in the governments tried
to make nuclear power plants unprofitable by increasing the safety
requirements.”
It is now essentially impossible, according to an R
Street Institute study,
to open a new profitable nuclear power plant because these heavy government
regulations are combined with policies directly favoring wind and solar energy.
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