The Nuclear Regulatory Commission Is Rewriting the Rules That Are Supposed to Keep Nuclear Safe
Nuclear can help power a future with a livable climate but only if the safeguards that sustain public trust remain strong.
NRC chairman Ho K. Nieh speaking at the Regulatory Information Conference, March 2026
This fall, the United Nations confirmed what many had feared: The goal of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is now out of reach, and the world will likely cross that threshold within the decade. Every fraction of a degree beyond it means more damage, which makes the pace of decarbonizing our electricity system more urgent, not less. Nuclear power has a real role to play in that effort. NRDC recognizes that nuclear provides valuable carbon-free electricity as the country works to cut the emissions driving climate change.
But like any form of energy generation, nuclear carries risks, and the way we manage those risks is through rigorous, independent regulation. That regulation is not an obstacle to nuclear energy. It is the foundation of public confidence that the industry needs to build and operate plants at all. A commission with strong environmental review and strong safety standards is a precondition for nuclear’s continued role in the U.S. electricity mix, not a drag on it.
That principle is being tested right now. Electricity demand is climbing at a pace not seen in decades, driven in large part by the explosive growth of data centers built for AI and cloud computing, which are facilities that can each draw as much power as a small city and run around the clock. That demand is reviving interest in nuclear energy, including the planned restart of Iowa’s Duane Arnold plant to help power Google’s operations. NRDC has been clear that new demand of this kind should be met with new, largely private-funded, carbon-free power so that data center developers pay their fair share rather than pushing costs and pollution onto everyone else. If nuclear is going to be part of how the country meets this moment, the safety and environmental framework around it has to be strong enough to earn the public’s trust. This summer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) moved in the opposite direction.
In a matter of weeks, the NRC put forward three major proposals that would each weaken a different pillar of that framework, on compressed comment schedules that made it hard for the public to keep up. They are part of a broader pattern: Since January 2025, the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive deregulatory agenda across environmental and public health law, and NRDC has pushed back at every turn, in the comment process and, where necessary, in court. Here is what these three nuclear proposals would do and why it matters.
Writing the environment out of environmental review
The first proposal rewrites how the NRC carries out the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the 1970 law that requires federal agencies to study the environmental consequences of what they approve and to let the public weigh in before they decide. For more than 50 years, the commission’s review of a proposed reactor has looked at the full picture: water withdrawals and thermal discharges, effects on fish and habitat, land and historic resources, and the cumulative burden on surrounding communities.
The proposed rule would end much of that practice. It redefines the word effects so narrowly that the commission could ignore the non-radiological consequences of the very project it is licensing—the dust, noise, and water and air quality impacts of building and running a reactor. It would shrink the range of alternatives the agency must weigh, wave through the largest licensing actions with categorical exclusions built on a circular record, and remove the public from scoping, draft review, hearings, and environmental justice analysis. The commission gave the public 45 days to digest a rule that republishes its entire body of NEPA regulations and posted the redline showing what was changing only two weeks before comments were due.
The commission framed this as a choice between environmental review and the efficient deployment of nuclear energy. We do not accept that framing, and we told the commission it should not either. Environmental review is one of the few moments when a community can learn what a plant will mean for the water it drinks and the land around it, and one of the few moments when the agency can be held to its answer. That is not a faster process the commission is building; it is a more fragile one.
Salem Nuclear Power Plant, a two-unit pressurized water reactor plant located along the Delaware River in Salem County, New Jersey
An unchanged limit is not an unchanged level of protection
The second proposal is the most substantial revision of the NRC’s radiation protection standards since 1991. It reassures the public that the core dose limits are not changing, which are 5 rem per year for workers and 100 millirem per year for the public. That is literally true of the numbers. But a dose limit is only a ceiling. The rules that have held real-world exposures far below those ceilings are being loosened or removed at the same time.
Chief among them is ALARA, the long-standing requirement to keep exposures “as low as is reasonably achievable.” By the commission’s own admission, ALARA is what has kept doses low. The proposal would eliminate it as an enforceable duty and replace it with a “graded approach” whose substance has not yet been written and won’t exist when the rule is finalized. Alongside that, the rule drops the numerical ceiling on how high a licensee can ask to raise public dose limits; deletes a separate limit on short, intense bursts of exposure; and would let workers absorb up to twice the annual limit in a single year through multiyear averaging, which is an approach the NRC considered and rejected in 1991 and one that depends on dose records the country has no reliable system to track.
Our central request is simple: The commission should look at the combined effects of all these changes on the exposure that workers and the public will receive rather than pointing to a single unchanged number and calling the protection unchanged.
Moving the safety rules to where they don’t bind
The third proposal overhauls how reactors are licensed, sited, and overseen. Some of it is sensible, and we said so by name, like modernized quality assurance, accident-tolerant fuel, and graded site characterization among them. Our concern is a defect that runs through the package: Operative safety criteria are being moved out of binding regulation and into guidance documents that the agency can revise or withdraw without public notice. In fact, the commission withdrew one such document 12 days into the comment period as “outdated and incorrect.”
The specifics compound the problem. The numerical thresholds that define which events a reactor must be designed to withstand would live only in guidance. A general license would let construction begin based on another project’s environmental review, before the NRC confirms the new site is suitable. Emergency planning zones could shrink to the site boundary based on a plant’s power rating rather than any site-specific analysis. And the commission proposes to double the license renewal term, authorizing operation out to 100 or even 120 years—a range with no operating experience anywhere in the world—while conceding its aging-management analysis only reaches 80 years. Underlying it all is an environmental assessment that never seriously examines what the rule changes.
Measured against the rule’s own goal of adding zero-carbon generation, this is the wrong trade. Safeguards that can be rewritten midstream are not regulatory certainty, whatever the section headings say.
Rigorous review is the foundation for nuclear progress, not the obstacle
More than 50 years ago, the courts instructed the NRC that it could not write the environment out of environmental review. The same is true today. The decades since have shown that rigorous, independent oversight is not what stands in the way of nuclear deployment; instead, it is what makes durable, responsible deployment possible.
It is also worth being honest about what paces that deployment of new nuclear reactors. Regulation is only one factor, and in our view, it is not the dominant one. Capital cost, the availability of specialized fuel, construction and engineering capacity, firm demand contracts, and skilled labor all do far more to determine whether a reactor gets built and on what timeline. Weakening safety and environmental safeguards spends the public’s trust on the constraint that binds the least. One serious accident, or one rule vacated in court because the record could not support it, would set the whole enterprise back further than any comment period ever could.
NRDC supports modernizing these nuclear regulatory frameworks on an honest, evidentiary basis. We do not support modernization that quietly becomes a net reduction in worker and public health protections. The best way to build a lasting future for nuclear energy is to make it as safe as possible, from cradle to grave, and to keep the public’s trust while doing it. We are asking the commission to take another look and get these rules right. Nuclear power will play a more durable role in the U.S. electricity mix and will scale more quickly if the public has confidence that rigorous but achievable public health standards will be met.
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