The Trump Administration has created an exclusion for new experimental reactors being built at sites around the U.S. from a major environmental law. The law would have required them to disclose how their construction and operation might harm the environment, and it also typically required a written, public assessment of the possible consequences of a nuclear accident.
The exclusion announcement comes just days after NPR revealed officials at the Department of Energy had secretly rewritten environmental, safety and security rules to make it easier for the reactors to be built.
The Department of Energy announced the change Monday in a notice in the Federal Register. It said the department would begin excluding advanced nuclear reactors from major requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The act calls on federal agencies to consider the environment when undertaking new projects and programs.
The law also requires extensive reporting on how proposed programs might impact local ecosystems. That documentation, known as an Environmental Impact Statement, and a second lesser type of analysis, known as an Environmental Assessment, provide an opportunity for the public to review and comment on potential projects in their community.
In its notice, the Energy Department cited the inherent safety of the advanced reactor designs as the reason they could be excluded from environmental reviews. "Advanced reactor projects in this category typically employ inherent safety features and passive safety systems," it said.
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The exemption had been expected, according to Adam Stein, the director of nuclear energy innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank that studies nuclear power and the tech sector. President Trump explicitly required it in an executive order on nuclear power he signed last May.
In a statement, the Department of Energy said that it reactors would still undergo environmental reviews.
"The U.S. Department of Energy is establishing the potential option to obtain a streamlined approach for advanced nuclear reactors as part of the environmental review performed under NEPA," it said. "The analysis on each reactor being considered will be informed by previously completed environmental reviews for similar advanced nuclear technologies."
Stein says he thinks the exclusion "is appropriate" for some reactors in the program, and agrees that previous reactors built by the Energy Department have not been found to have significant environmental impacts.
But critics of the possible exemption questioned whether the new reactors, whose designs' differ from earlier ones, really are as safe as claimed.
Until now, the test reactor designs currently under construction have primarily existed on paper, according to Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit environmental advocacy group. He believes the lack of real world experience with the reactors means that they should be subject to more rigorous safety and environmental reviews before they're built.
"The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents," Lyman said.
Seeking Swift Approval
The move to exclude advanced reactors from environmental reviews comes amid a push to build multiple such reactors by the summer.
The Energy Department's Reactor Pilot Program is seeking to begin operations of at least three advanced test reactors by July 4 of this year. The program was initiated in response to the executive order signed by President Trump, which was designed to help jump start the nuclear industry.
The reactors are being built by around ten nuclear startups, which are being financed with billions in private capital, much of it from Silicon Valley. The goal, supporters say, is to develop new sources of electricity for power-hungry AI data centers.
Last week, NPR disclosed that officials at the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory had extensively rewritten internal rules for the new test reactors. The new rules softened protections for groundwater and the environment. For example, rules that once said the environment "must" be protected, now say consideration "may be given to avoiding or minimizing, if practical, potential adverse impacts."
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Experts were critical of the changes, which were shared with the companies but not disclosed to the public. The new rules constitute "very clearly a loosening that I would have wanted to see exposed to public discussion," Kathryn Huff, a professor of plasma and nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who served as head of the DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy from 2022 to 2024, told NPR after reviewing the documents.
In a statement to NPR, the Energy Department said the new rules continue "to protect the public and the environment from any undue risks."
"DOE follows applicable U.S. EPA requirements in these areas," it said.
Environmental review not needed
The decision to allow the reactors to avoid conducting environmental reviews means there will be less of an opportunity for the public to comment. But the environmental review process may not be an appropriate forum for such discussion anyway, Stein noted.
"I think that there's a need for public participation, particularly for public acceptance," he said. But he added, "the public just writing comments on an [Environmental Impact Statement] that ultimately would get rejected doesn't help the public have a voice in any way that would shape any outcome."
The Energy Department said in its Federal Register notice and an accompanying written record of support that such reviews were unnecessary. The new reactors have "key attributes such as safety features, fuel type, and fission product inventory that limit adverse consequences from releases of radioactive or hazardous material from construction, operation, and decommissioning," according to the notice.
Lyman said that he vehemently disagreed with that assessment.
"I think the DOE's attempts to cut corners on safety, security and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety and our natural environment here in the United States," he said.
Clarification: The article has been updated to reflect the creation of a new exclusion category for the reactors. Individual reactor companies will still need to ask for the exclusion.
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