Former NRC commissioners lend support to efforts to eliminate mandatory hearings

“We believe Congress can safely eliminate the mandatory hearing requirement without worrying that doing so will compromise safety or public involvement in the NRC process,” the letter reads. “In short, the statutory mandatory hearing serves only to cause delay and impose needless expense. It should be eliminated.”

The former commissioners who co-signed the letter are George Apostolakis, James K. Asselstine, Stephen G. Burns, James R. Curtiss, Nils J. Diaz, Dale E. Klein, Jeffrey S. Merrifield, Richard A. Meserve, and William C. Ostendorff.

A bit of history: Mandatory hearings were added in 1957 as an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, because Congress wanted to force better transparency from the Atomic Energy Commission—the agency that preceded the NRC. The open forum was intended to educate the public about nuclear reactor projects under consideration and debate the merits.

This explanation is included in one of the findings in the report Improving the Efficiency of NRC Power Reactor Licensing: The 1957 Mandatory Hearing Reconsidered,” published in November 2023 by Matt Bowen, Rama T. Ponangi, and former NRC commissioner Steven Burns (who served from 2014 to 2019, including two years as chair).

Almost 70 years later, the letter's authors point to several reasons that the mandatory hearing requirement is unnecessary, as the report spells out:

• Nuclear energy is no longer in a “developmental” period—one rationale of the mandatory hearing’s creation. At the time of the 1957 amendment there were zero commercial nuclear reactors operating; today there are 94.
• The NRC is not charged with promotional duties related to nuclear power, unlike its predecessor, the AEC, which was abolished in 1975. Also, the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards submits reviews on nuclear, which by law must be made available to the public.
• Public transparency of the licensing process at the time was nothing like it is today. People now have access to licensing information through public outreach, scoping meetings near the proposed plant sites, and web access to application documents and NRC staff evaluations. The former commissioners’ letter points to the Freedom of Information Act and Government in Sunshine Act, which were not around in the 1950s.
• Reactor licensing is now mature and technically rigorous, diluting the review value of NRC commissioners in the mandatory hearing to negligible, especially for subsequent deployments of the same reactor design.

More from the letter: “If Congress removed the mandatory hearing requirement, the commission’s obligation to protect the public health and safety and the common defense and security would remain unchanged,” it reads.

The former commissioners said they have “no doubt” that the NRC would still hold public meetings on first-of-a-kind license applications, evaluate staff licensing reviews, and even turn down license applications (or place conditions on them) when needed.

Another party heard from: In February 2024, then NRC chair Christopher Hanson sent a letter to the agency’s Office of General Counsel calling for “a fresh look at the mandatory hearing process is warranted.”

Hanson tasked the OGC with identifying ways for the NRC to improve efficiency while also meeting its statutory obligations, especially as it expects to see a surge in license applications as momentum builds for new nuclear.