The Hansen Firing

The Trump administration is going down the wrong route.

Everybody except me agrees we need to "reform" the NRC. The lefties idea of reforming the NRC is pious pleas, begging the NRC bureaucrats to go against their rational self-interest and think in terms of the "general welfare". Trump prefers the bludgeon. I'll just keep firing guys until I get people in there who will do my bidding.¹ Neither approach will work.

Even if Trump appointed five Steven Millers and somehow got them confirmed by the Senate nothing much would happen. The staff would deflect and slow walk any real changes, which would open up nuclear to real competition. In that process, they would be abetted by the incumbents. The last thing they want is competition. The American Nuclear Society was among the first to jump to the defense of Hansen and the NRC. They were joined by the Orwellianly named Nuclear Innovation Alliance.

Any substantive change would also face court challenge after court challenge, most of which the Trump administration would lose since any real change would require rewriting the AEA which Trump has no legal right to do. By the time, the Millers managed to make a few superficial changes, a new administration would come in and the pendulum would swing back. The most probable result will be paralysis while all this plays out.

The Gordian Knot Group has already laid out what Trump should have done.

1) Replace LNT with SNT. LNT was never mandated by Congress. It was adopted administratively by the AEC and then the EPA. So this can be done by an Executive Order. The EO will be challenged in court, but the worst that can happen is we run into a string of pro-bureaucrat judges until we get to the Supreme Court.

2) Recompute all the dose rate limits based on the existing EPA Maximum Individual Risk (MIR) and SNT. This will transform the existing regs. For example, under SNT, the EPA MIR of a 100 in a million lifetime risk of cancer translates to a dose rate of 0.11 mSv/d (40 mSv/y), which will kill all the current radiation clean up programs. We may need another EO to mandate this recomputation.

3) Then lay low until after the 2026 mid-terms. If the elections go Trump's way, he may have enough votes to rewrite the Atomic Energy Act, transferring nuclear plant regulation to the EPA.² This will replace proactive regulation with reactive. Nuclear pollution would be regulated like other forms of pollution. ALARA and the whole federal licensing apparat would disappear. Competition would open up. And when EPA is forced to adopt SNT and recompute all the limits and triggers based on the existing MIR's, we would see entirely different numbers. The real regulatory burden would shift from the Feds to the underwriters. Underwriters do a pretty decent job of balancing benefit and harm. If they don't, they go broke. INPO and the insurers will keep the plants honest.

A big missed opportunity.

1. I'm not competent to comment on the legality of the firing. The Energy Reorganization Act does say "Any member of the Commission may be removed by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office". The inefficiency part would seem to apply to just about every aspect of the NRC.

2. Trump does not currently have the votes to make any substantive changes to the AEA, To many red districts, including Hanford, benefit from the nuclear taxpayer ripoff.