Trump exempts new nuclear reactors from environmental review : NPR
The Idaho National Laboratory Advanced Test Reactor. The laboratory will soon be home to five new test reactors being built by private companies. Supporters hope the reactors will power the data centers needed for artificial intelligence.
Idaho National Laboratory
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Idaho National Laboratory
The Trump administration is excluding new experimental reactors under construction at sites in the United States from a major environmental law that would have required them to disclose how their construction and operation could harm the environment. The law also generally required a written and public assessment of the possible consequences of a nuclear accident.
The exclusion comes just days after NPR revealed that Energy Department officials secretly rewrote environmental, safety and security rules to make it easier to build the reactors.
The Department of Energy announced the change Monday in a notice published in the Federal Register. He said the department would begin excluding advanced nuclear reactors from the National Environmental Policy Act. The law requires federal agencies to consider the environment when undertaking new projects and programs.
The law also requires detailed reporting on how proposed programs could impact local ecosystems. This documentation, known as an environmental impact statement, and a second, lesser type of analysis, called an environmental assessment, provide the public with an opportunity to review and comment on potential projects in their community.
In its advisory, the Energy Department cited the inherent safety of advanced reactor designs as a reason they should be excluded from environmental assessments. “Advanced reactor projects in this category typically use inherent safety features and passive safety systems,” the statement said.
The exemption was expected, according to Adam Stein, director of nuclear energy innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank that studies nuclear energy and the technology sector. President Trump explicitly demanded this in an executive order on nuclear energy he signed last May.
Stein says he thinks the exclusion “is appropriate” for some reactors in the program, and notes that previous reactors built by the Department of Energy have not been found to have significant environmental impacts.
But critics of the proposed exemption question whether the new reactors, which differ in design from previous ones, are really as safe as claimed.
Until now, the test reactor designs currently under construction have existed primarily on paper, according to Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. He believes the lack of real-world experience with the reactors means they should be subject to more rigorous safety and environmental reviews before being built.
“The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to serious accidents,” Lyman said.
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The decision to exclude advanced reactors from environmental assessments comes as part of a desire to build several reactors of this type by the summer.
The Department of Energy’s reactor pilot program aims to begin operation of at least three advanced test reactors by July 4 of this year. The program was launched in response to the executive order signed by President Trump, which aimed to revive the nuclear industry.
The reactors are built by a dozen nuclear startups, financed by billions in private capital, much of which comes from Silicon Valley. The goal, advocates say, is to develop new sources of electricity for power-hungry AI data centers.
Last week, NPR revealed that officials at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory had completely rewritten the internal rules for the new test reactors. The new rules relaxed protections for groundwater and the environment. For example, rules that once said the environment “shall” be protected now say that “consideration may be given to avoiding or minimizing, where possible, potential negative impacts.”
Experts criticized the changes, which were shared with the companies but not disclosed to the public. The new rules are “very clearly a relaxation that I would have liked to see exposed for public debate,” Kathryn Huff, a professor of nuclear and plasma engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who led DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy from 2022 to 2024, told NPR after reviewing the documents.
In a statement to NPR, the Department of Energy said the new rules continue to “protect the public and the environment from undue risk.”
“DOE is following applicable U.S. EPA requirements in these areas,” he said.
Environmental review not necessary
The decision to exclude reactors from environmental assessments means the public will have less opportunity to comment. But the environmental assessment process may not be an appropriate forum for such a discussion anyway, Stein noted.
“I think there is a need for public participation, especially public acceptance,” he said. But he added: “The public just writes comments on a [Environmental Impact Statement] which would ultimately be rejected does not help the public have a voice that can influence the outcome. »
The Energy Department did not respond to NPR’s request for comment on the new exclusion, but in its Federal Register notice and an accompanying written filing of support, it said such reviews were unnecessary. New reactors have “key attributes such as safety features, fuel type, and fission product inventory that limit the adverse consequences of releases of radioactive or hazardous materials due to construction, operation, and decommissioning,” according to the notice.
Lyman said he vehemently disagreed with that assessment.
“I believe DOE’s attempts to cut corners on safety, security and environmental protection pose a serious risk to public health, security and our natural environment here in the United States,” he said.
