By Karl Grossman and Harvey Wasserman
Donald Trump has torched atomic power's last illusion of credible regulation. He's destroyed the last shreds of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, exponentially raising the likelihood of an apocalyptic radioactive disaster while escalating America's transition to energy fascism. His nuclear boosterism has been joined by the core of the Democratic Party, including California's Governor Gavin Newsom among many others.
But the low-cost zero-carbon tsunami of green Solartopian technology may yet prove unstoppable in the marketplace.
For the first time in U.S. history, a president has fired a sitting NRC commissioner. Another has resigned. A DOGE flunky with zero nuclear expertise has decimated the NRC's technical support staff.
The NRC has always acted, as the Boston Globe has put it, more like an industry booster than a watchdog. But a recent Washington Examiner headline may comprise the Commission's ultimate epitaph: Regulators fear dismissal if they slow Trump nuclear power plans.
The commissioners themselves have nearly all been absurdly industry-friendly. But the rank-and-file NRC staff offered significant expertise. Now even that is gone.
Trump now loudly demands the commissioners rubber stamp Small Modular Reactors that are untested, unproven, uninsured and hyper-expensive. Industry supporters worry that soaring delays and prices followed by underperformance, accidents and radiation releases due to unreliable, unregulated construction could doom the technology.
Safety concerns have been confirmed by the refusal of the insurance industry to cover damages from an accident. The refusal stretches back to 1957, when Congress approved the Price-Anderson Act, shielding the industry from a requirement to get private insurance. Thus the nuclear clause in every U.S. homeowner's policy says: This policy does not cover loss or damage caused by nuclear reaction or nuclear radiation or radioactive contamination.
The NRC has always been a nuclear lapdog, not a watchdog. But under the Trump administration's new executive orders expediting a drive for nuclear power in the U.S. the lapdog has had its teeth removed and its vocal cords cut. "It can't bite and it can't bark, even if it wanted to!" said Arnie Gundersen, a form top executive in the nuclear power industry and now as chief engineer of Fairewinds Associates, a leading challenger nuclear power.
As the orders, notes the U.S. Department of Energy, state: The executive orders instruct the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to create an expedited pathway to approve reactors and expand American nuclear energy capacity from around 100 GW [gigawatts] today to 400 GW by 2050.
Under Trump, "Nuclear safety is in complete free fall at NRC, and there is no parachute," said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist at the organization Beyond Nuclear. For example, the agency's staff and licensing board have already shockingly approved an unprecedented, extremely risky restart of the closed Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan. To restore the operating license, the NRC cobbled together an ad hocand convoluted regulatory pathway in close collusion with Palisades' owner, reckless Holtec International. Holtec has zero experience or competence with operating a reactor, repairing one, building or restarting one, let alone at a problem-plagued nuclear lemon like Palisades.
Palisades is a badly designed, poorly built, and now dangerously age-degraded 60-year-old reactor that cannot begin to meet modern day safety standards, which are themselves under serious attack by Trump, DOGE, and the industry, said Kamps. "If the NRC commissioners reject our appeals and rubberstamp Palisades' unneeded restart, it will risk a Chernobyl- or Fukushima-scale radioactive catastrophe, an existential threat to 21 percent of the entire planet's surface freshwater supply, the Great Lakes."
Further, by approving the Palisades' restart, the NRC appears to be getting ready to approve copycat closed-reactor restarts at Three Mile Island-1 nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, and the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant in Iowa, he said.
Said Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service: The atmosphere in the agency is clearly one where people who speak out will likely be first on the DOGE reduction-in-force list and everyone left is on notice that they could be next. As much as the chilling effect, my concern is also that inspections and enforcement could well be ending. Even if they keep resident inspectors at reactors to comply with the Atomic Energy Act, they may be taken off inspection duty and told to work on license applications and rewriting the regulations.
Said Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy: To truly understand the developing safety and security threat, you have to connect the dots.
First you have the series of Trump executive orders demanding a rushed buildout of the nuclear-military-industrial complex. These orders and other actions being undertaken by administration, especially DOGE, are effectively dismantling the nation's long-established nuclear regulatory scheme, said Lee, an attorney.
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