According to National Public Radio, the department of energy is looking to build at least three new experimental commercial reactors in Utah by the Fourth of July. Due to the deadline, the Department Of Energy has quietly rewritten safety directives, discarding over 750 pages of regulations.
NPR gathered dozens of the new orders, none of which are publicly available; Geoff Brumfiel from NPR wrote that, “The orders slash hundreds of pages of requirements for security at the reactors. They also loosen protections for groundwater and the environment and eliminate at least one key safety role. The new orders cut back on requirements for keeping records, and they raise the amount of radiation a worker can be exposed to before an official accident investigation is triggered.”
To make it easier for private companies to save money while building these reactors, new changes to the regulations include vague standards. If these reactors are to be used for commercial power, it will have to be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. NRC has agreed to work with the Department of Energy if they repair their safety and security regulations. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2530/ML25303A288.pdf
Lyman from ABC said that, “The push to rapidly license new nuclear plants is part of the Trump administration’s plan to provide massive amounts of power for the data centers that tech giants such as Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are pursuing to support artificial intelligence.” The regulations that have been removed were developed over the many decades following the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. They have been warned that this is a bad idea.
