Streamlining and focusing: Executive Order 14300, NEPA amendments, and recent court rulings have required the NRC to review and assess how they incorporate NEPA requirements in their decision-making processes. One of the rulings listed in the proposed rulemaking is Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, a 2025 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that said an agency doesn’t need to examine impacts outside its regulatory authority.
NRC Chairman Ho Nieh argued that these proposed changes will help narrow NEPA-related reviews to impacts within the agency’s authority, which is in radiological safety. For many years, the NRC has done much more than required under NEPA, he said.
“This really brings us back to what NEPA demands—nothing more, nothing less. Doing it this way, we’ll be able to issue our safety decisions faster without compromising safety at all,” Nieh said in a media call Wednesday.
For instance, the NRC can issue construction permit decisions without considering nonradiological issues like dust, noise, and nonradiological water. Nevertheless, NRC reviews have addressed those topics. Kimyata Savoy, NRC Chief Environmental Review and Permitting Officer, said the agency’s focus will now be on radiological safety issues; other federal agencies may still assess nonradiological impacts as part of their respective reviews.
According to the proposed rule’s regulatory analysis, the changes could save roughly $135 million over a 10-year period. Savoy said the proposed rule would allow one year for a review of an environmental assessment and two years for an EIS.
“We’re definitely going to become more efficient and more predictable in terms of the scheduling timeframe,” she said.
No draft EIS: One of the more significant changes in the proposed rule is that the agency’s environmental reviews will no longer require a draft EIS ahead of a final EIS. Nieh said a draft EIS was never required under NEPA, but had become an NRC requirement.
Currently, the draft EIS stage includes an opportunity for members of the public to comment. While the draft EIS may go away, Nieh said the public is still going to have an opportunity to comment during the initial scoping process. A notice of intent will still be issued when NRC staff prepares an EIS, added Savoy.
New categorical exclusions: The proposed rule also includes the addition of new categorical exclusions in areas including, but not limited to, “subsequent license renewals, power uprate license amendments, microreactor licensing, advanced demonstration projects, site envelopes for specific reactor technologies, and site decommissioning,” according to the proposed rule. These categorical exclusions are separate from other additions to the list, such as those added in the final rule “Categorical exclusions from environmental review,” which became effective on April 29. Savoy, though, said that rule “set a foundation” for the NRC to expand its list.
When asked why license renewals would fall under a categorical exclusion, Savoy said they looked at “previous environmental impact statements and looked at what was there and determined there was enough data to substantiate a categorical exclusion.”
Added Nieh: “If the proposal is within the scope of the previous categorical exclusion, we won’t [conduct an environmental review]. But we will be reviewing them as they come in to make sure they fit the categorical exclusion.”
