During a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing today, Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as a commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was urged to maintain the agency’s independence regardless of political pressure from the Trump administration.

Nieh

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a nomination hearing Wednesday for Ho Nieh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as a commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Trump nominated Nieh on July 30 to serve as NRC commissioner the remainder of a term that will expire June 30, 2029, as Nuclear NewsWire previously reported.

Nieh has been vice president of regulatory affairs at Southern Nuclear since 2021, though since June 2024 he has been at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations as a loaned executive.

A return to the NRC: If confirmed by the Senate, Nieh would be returning to the NRC after three previous stints totaling nearly 20 years.

Global engineering company Amentum announced plans on Thursday to create 3,000 new jobs over the next four years on the back of growth in nuclear power and defense in the United Kingdom.

The announcement follows President Donald Trump’s state visit to the U.K., during which a number of deals between the two countries were announced.

The Trump administration has dismissed seven of the (formerly) eight board members of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, the independent federal agency tasked with evaluating the technical and scientific validity of Department of Energy activities related to managing and disposing of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

So, President Trump has just kicked the low-dose radiation hornets’ nest.

Specifically, his recently signed executive order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission” calls for the NRC to “reconsider reliance” on the linear no-threshold (LNT) theory and the ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) standard for radiation protection.

This directive will certainly reignite a vociferous debate within the radiation research community over the continued efficacy of using LNT as the basis for protecting the public and the environment, a community that has been wracked with controversy on this matter for the last few years.

I must admit that whenever the low-dose issue comes up, my first thoughts always go to Sayre’s Law.

Dewji

Bahadori

Caffrey

Three authorities on health physics have written a response to President Trump’s Executive Order 14300, “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

Published June 27 on Substack, “Radiation Protection Policy in a Nuclear Era: Recommendations from Health Physicists in Response to EO 14300” was written by Emily A. Caffrey, assistant professor and director of the Health Physics Program at the University of Alabama–Birmingham; Amir A. Bahadori, associate professor at Kansas State University; and Shaheen A. Dewji, assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Matt Bowen

With a new administration and Congress, it is time once again to ponder what will happen—if anything—on U.S. spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste management policy over the next few years. One element of the forthcoming discussion seems clear: The executive and legislative branches are eager to talk about recycling commercial SNF. Whatever the merits of doing so, it does not obviate the need for one or more facilities for disposal of remaining long-lived radionuclides. For that reason, making progress on U.S. disposal capabilities remains urgent, lest the associated radionuclide inventories simply be left for future generations to deal with.

In March, Rick Perry, who was secretary of energy during President Trump’s first administration, observed that during his tenure at the Department of Energy it became clear to him that any plan to move SNF “required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community.”¹

Details of the plan to test new reactor concepts under the Department of Energy’s authority but outside national laboratory boundaries—first outlined in one of the four executive orders on nuclear energy released on May 23—were just released in a request for applications issued by the DOE.

Hanson

Since the president's inauguration in January, the Trump administration has been on course to make big changes at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to realize its goals of deregulation, energy dominance, and deployment of advanced reactors. Given the executive orders (EOs) and the work that the Department of Government Efficiency has done in cutting the federal workforce, it was a surprise that NRC commissioner Christopher Hanson was dismissed on Friday, according to a statement Hanson posted on his LinkedIn profile early Monday.

Hanson said in the post that President Trump terminated his position “without cause, contrary to existing law and long-standing precedent regarding removal of independent agency appointments.”

Uranium futures rose to $71.90 per pound on June 2, according to online analysis firm Trading Economics. That price was near its highest level since early February—in contrast to an 18-month low in prices reached in mid-March.

NuScale earned approval for its “larger” US460 77-MWe small modular reactor plant design, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced last week.

The standard design approval (SDA) is a determination by NRC staff that a reactor design meets the agency’s applicable design requirements, and companies can reference it when applying for a license to build and operate the reactor—but it does not ensure license approval from the commission.

The Trump administration issued four executive orders on Friday aimed at boosting domestic nuclear deployment ahead of significant growth in projected energy demand in the coming decades. These orders aim to reclaim leadership in nuclear technology crucial for national security and competitive AI advancements.

President Donald Trump released his discretionary budget request Friday, stirring up questions from nuclear advocates about how the federal funding earmarked for domestic energy would fare.

The Defense Innovation Unit announced April 10 next steps in the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations (ANPI) program, launched in 2024 to deploy microreactor nuclear systems for increased power reliability at select military locations.

Craig Piercy
cpiercy@ans.org

I find myself saying the expression above a lot these days—to my kids, my wife, my friends, and colleagues. Most recently, I said it to the person sitting next to me after the pilot of our plane—bound for Reagan National Airport a day after the collision of AA flight 5342 and a military Blackhawk helicopter—aborted the landing at the last minute.

I am not sure where I picked up this pronouncement, but I find it to be apropos to the topsy-­turvy moment where we find ourselves in 2025. In addition to the first U.S. commercial airline crash in 15 years, we are witnessing a new presidential administration in its infancy playing by the Silicon Valley rules of “move fast, break things.” We’ve seen DeepSeek, the low-cost Chinese AI that reportedly uses 50–75 percent less energy than its NVIDIA-powered counterparts, tank Constellation’s market value by more than 20 percent in one late-January trading day.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with President Trump last week and agreed to a new initiative to drive “transformative change across key pillars of cooperation” between the two countries.

Nuclear Newswire has learned that the Trump administration last week requested that all members of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board resign, except for the board’s chair, Peter Swift.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is seeking public comment on a proposed rule that would amend the licensing, inspection, special projects, and annual fees charged to the agency’s applicants and licensees for fiscal year 2021.

Published in the February 22 Federal Register, the proposed fee rule reflects a total NRC budget authority of $844.4 million, a drop of $11.2 million from FY 2020.

The amendments are mandated by the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA), the nuclear industry–backed legislation signed into law by President Trump in January 2019 (NN, Feb. 2019, p. 17). NEIMA requires the NRC to recover approximately 100 percent of its total budget authority in FY 2021, except for specific excluded activities. (Previously, the requirement was approximately 90 percent.) In addition, NEIMA established a new cap for annual fees for operating reactors and included requirements to improve the accuracy of invoice for service fees.

A hot fire test of the core stage for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi was not completed as planned. The SLS is the vehicle meant to propel a crewed mission to the moon in 2024. Source: NASA Television

Among the executive orders President Trump issued during his last weeks in office was “Promoting Small Modular Reactors for National Defense and Space Exploration,” which builds on the Space Policy Directives published during his term. The order, issued on January 12, calls for actions within the next six months by NASA and the Department of Defense (DOD), together with the Department of Energy and other federal entities. Whether the Biden administration will retain some, all, or none of the specific goals of the Trump administration’s space nuclear policy remains to be seen, but one thing is very clear: If deep space exploration remains a priority, nuclear-powered and -propelled spacecraft will be needed.

The prospects for near-term deployment of nuclear propulsion and power systems in space improved during Trump’s presidency. However, Trump left office days after a hot fire test of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket did not go as planned. The SLS rocket is meant to propel crewed missions to the moon in 2024 and to enable a series of long-duration lunar missions that could be powered by small lunar reactor installations. The test on January 16 of four engines that were supposed to fire for over eight minutes was automatically aborted after one minute, casting some doubt that a planned November 2021 Artemis I mission can go ahead on schedule.