The U.S. Department of Energy has selected 11 projects for a nuclear reactor pilot program, with hopes of fully developing three of the projects by July 2026.
Under the program, the department will expedite these projects through its authorization procedure for nuclear reactors, and assign teams to work with the companies to help them through the development process, but the government will not provide any funds to the participating companies.
According to the language of the initial announcement in June, the program will “help unlock private funding and provide a fast-tracked approach to enable future commercial licensing activities for potential applicants.”
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in May instructing the Department of Energy to create the program to “foster nuclear innovation and bring advanced nuclear technologies into domestic production as soon as possible.” The order also calls for the department to revise its procedures and regulations for developing advanced nuclear reactors.
The pilot program has sparked concern among experts who fear that the rapid development of nuclear power projects, combined with revisions of current regulations, could lead to some safety issues. The fact that the program does not require the projects to obtain licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency established by Congress to regulate the use of radioactive materials, is a particular cause for concern, the experts say.
“The [Department of Energy] is a self-regulated body,” said Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists who has testified numerous times before Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “There’s no transparency, and there’s no real public input into the safety decisions that [it] makes.”
According to some experts, such as Lyman, the new program stretches historical regulatory boundaries for the development of nuclear reactors for commercial use. The Atomic Energy Act, passed in 1954, authorized the Nuclear Regulatory Commission “to license the distribution of special nuclear material, source material, and byproduct material by the Department of Energy.” According to the Commission, it licenses all commercially owned nuclear power plants that produce electricity in the United States.
Typically, the Department of Energy can develop nuclear reactors for research on federal land without a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but the projects must go through the commission for commercial use.
“This program specifies deploying a test reactor on federal lands and going through the Department of Energy regulatory approval process,” said Kathleen Nelson Romans, the head of commercial development at Aalo Atomics, one of the companies in the pilot program. “The benefits of this program is that there’s now an extreme focus on fast tracking that approval process… helping processes go from weeks to days.”
Aalo Atomics, a company based in Austin, Texas, will site their project on Department of Energy land adjacent to the Idaho National Laboratory, which is also under the department’s purview and researches nuclear energy. Regardless of the changes to federal regulation, Aalo plans to eventually move forward with a license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Nelson Romans.
The company plans to meet the year-long timeline for developing these projects to “criticality,” which, as defined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is “when each fission event releases a sufficient number of neutrons to sustain an ongoing series of reactions.” This timeline is considered very short.
“It’s aggressive, but we feel like we’re really well-suited to meet it,” said Nelson Romans. “We’ve already started the siting process.”
Some in the nuclear industry are optimistic about this pilot program, though they emphasize the importance of collaboration between the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
“This program could accelerate the commercialization of small reactors,” wrote Judi Greenwald, the President and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, in an email statement. “There will need to be extensive and transparent collaboration between the [Department of Energy] and the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] to transition smoothly from DOE test reactor authorization to NRC commercial licensing.”
The Department of Energy has also been affected by staffing cuts under the Trump Administration, which could hinder the agency’s ability to get these reactors approved in a timely manner. In April, The Hill reported that the department considers 40 percent of its staff to be nonessential—totaling some 7,000 employees.
“He’s cutting the [Department of Energy] budget and encouraging long-time DOE employees to take the reduction-in-force offers to leave,” said Jennifer Gordon, director of the Atlantic Council’s Nuclear Energy Policy Initiative. “My concern is that you’re trying to do all these things, and also get rid of all the people who actually know how to do them the right way.”
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