The Nuclear Reorganization Act, Section 2

The current draft of the Nuclear Reorganization Act is at the Flop book site. So far we've had a grand total of 20 downloads, and zero comments, suggestions, or gripes. The choir never fails to disappoint. To try and correct this, the Gordian Knot News is presenting a series of pieces on the NRA. We start with the NRA's preamble.

Preambles seems to be pretty meaningless as a matter of law. The Atomic Energy Act's preamble is quite good. It's all about promoting atomic energy. Here’s the entire “Section 1. Declaration”.

Atomic energy is capable of application for peaceful as well as military purposes. It is therefore declared to be the policy of the United States that—
a. the development, use, and control of atomic energy shall be directed so as to make the maximum contribution to the general welfare, subject at all times to the paramount objective of making the maximum contribution to the common defense and security; and
b. the development, use, and control of atomic energy shall be directed so as to promote world peace, improve the general welfare, increase the standard of living, and strengthen free competition in private enterprise.

Safety is not even mentioned. In the findings, Section 2, "public health and safety" is listed last in its priorities, almost as an after thought. Yet we ended up with a regulatory system that brags that "nuclear safety is our overriding priority" and ensures that nuclear electricity is prohibitively expensive. Nevertheless, the preamble does set the stage, and you would think that, by declaring the intent of Congress, the preamble could be used in court to defend against attempts to thwart that intent.

SHORT TITLE

SECTION 1.

This Act may be cited as the ``Nuclear Reorganization Act of 2025’’.

DECLARATION OF PURPOSE

SECTION 2.

(a) The Congress hereby declares

(1) The nation must have affordable, reliable, on demand, low pollution, and low CO2 emissions electricity.

(2) Thanks to its remarkable energy density, nuclear power should cost less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour, which in fact was what it did cost in the mid-late 1960's in today's money.

(3) A providential Nature has equipped us with DNA damage repair mechanisms that can cope with radiation dose rates 100's of times above normal background. She had to do this to allow us to have an oxygen based metabolism, which damages our DNA at a rate that is at least 25,000 times larger than average background radiation. The Linear No Threshold radiation harm model, which is the basis for current radiation protection regulation, denies the existence of this repair system.

(4) Dose rates that exceed the DNA repair capabilities of our bodies will almost never be encountered by the public in even a very large release of radiation from a nuclear plant casualty.

(5) A large release of radiation is not intolerable. The planet and humanity would be far better off with cheap nuclear electricity and an occasional release, than prohibitively expensive nuclear and no releases. The goal is not zero releases. The goal is the best balance between benefit and risk.

(6) Our current nuclear regulatory system, while well intentioned, has done a tragically poor job of balancing nuclear benefits and risks. One result has been thousands of premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of people being uprooted due to unnecessary evacuation and exile in large releases.

(7) The nation's goal should not be to just make nuclear power affordable. Our goal must be to keep pushing the cost of nuclear electricity down and down. This can only be done in a harshly competitive environment in which the vendors of nuclear power are forced to compete on an even playing field with minimal barriers to entry.

(8) Under the current nuclear regulatory system, no amount of radiation exposure is acceptable, if a plant can afford to reduce it further. Under this policy, known as ALARA, unless nuclear electricity is as expensive as the alternatives, the regulator is not doing his job. Under ALARA, if a new nuclear technology is inherently cheaper than current, that simply provides regulators with more room to push costs up, and ALARA mandates them to do so.

(9)The current regulatory system in which the cost of a large release is spread overall nuclear plants drastically decreases the incentive of an individual plant to invest in economically efficient safety measures, such as Open Racking of spent fuel pools.

(10) Our current nuclear regulatory system erects multiple layers of barrier to entry and stifles competition and technical progress resulting in the inability of nuclear to realize its promethean promise to solve both energy poverty and global warming.

(11) David Okrent, past Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, famously said " If you don't pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people". If the nation wants to be efficient in avoiding deaths, the amount of resources devoted to avoiding deaths in all hazardous activities must be the same. Our current regulatory system in which the cost of avoiding a single marginal death in nuclear power is over a billion dollars is killing people. By making nuclear power far more expensive than it should be, this system results in far more deaths from alternative sources of dispatchable electricity than it avoids.

(b) Therefore, the Congress finds the current regulatory system must be replaced with a system

(1) that is consistent with what we now know about DNA damage and repair,
(2) that properly compensates radiation exposure,
(3) that does not expend resources on nuclear safety when those resource would be better used elsewhere,
(4) that forces nuclear vendors to compete on an even playing field, risking their own money and not the taxpayers,
(5) that relies on a plant's insurers and the insurers' Certification Society to direct nuclear power toward a welfare maximizing balance between safety and economy,
(6) that forces each plant to bear the full cost of any harm caused by that plant.

(c) The Congress finds that it is in the public interest and the policy of Congress to replace the Linear No Threshold radiation harm model which does not recognize our bodies' ability to repair radiation damage with the Sigmoid No Threshold model, which does.

(d) It is the policy of Congress that there is no need for any nuclear plant to be safer than alternative sources of dispatchable electricity. It is the policy of Congress that no resources shall be required to be allocated to improving nuclear safety if the money would be better spent elsewhere.

(e) The Congress finds that it is in the public interest and the policy of Congress to specify firm boundary dose rate limits and the penalty/intervention for exceedance of each of those limits, which limits and penalties can only be changed by Congress.

(f) The Congress finds that it is in the public interest and the policy of Congress to implement a radiation exposure compensation plan which shall be based on the Lost Life Expectancy associated with the maximal dose rate profile which would be incurred by each person exposed in a release, as estimated by the Sigmoid No Threshold model. This is not just a matter of equity. Such compensation internalizes this harm, ensuring that the potential harm is part of the developers' design and operating calculus. Such a plan shall be automatic, no fault, not subject to dispute, and exclusive. There shall be no requirement to demonstrate any harm.

(g) In order to guarantee the payment of that compensation, each plant shall be required to carry insurance, acceptable to Congress. The amount of that insurance shall be based on the total compensation which would be required under a credible worst case release from that plant at that site, as specified in this Act.

(h) The Congress finds that protecting nuclear plants against national or sub-national terrorist organizations is a federal responsibility. Nuclear power plants shall be required to provide only normal industrial security similar to large chemical facilites and dams. If a release is caused by an act of war or terrorist attack, the radiation exposure compensation shall be paid out of the federal treasury rather than by the plant's insurers.