President Donald Trump’s abrupt firing Friday of Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Christopher Hanson marks another move by the White House to gain control of the independent agency as it heads into a critical review of safety regulations governing a lineup of new reactors.
Hanson was appointed to the NRC by Trump in 2020 and named chair by then-President Joe Biden in 2021. His renomination by Biden was approved by the Senate in 2024 with a large bipartisan majority. Hanson, however, was notified of his dismissal in a terse, two-sentence email from the White House that concluded, “Thank you for your service.”
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told POLITICO on Monday that “all organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction,” adding that Trump “reserves the right to remove employees within his own Executive Branch who exert his executive authority.” Hanson’s firing follows Trump’s removal of other leaders at independent agencies across the government, actions that are caught up in complex court actions.
Democrats in the House and Senate condemned Trump’s action, saying it violated the specific terms of the 1946 Atomic Energy Act that established the nation’s civilian nuclear energy program. The legislation, reaffirmed in 1954, says that a commissioner may be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Natural Resources, said Hanson’s removal was illegal. “Congress explicitly created the NRC as an independent agency, insulated from the whims of any president, knowing that was the only way to ensure the health, safety and welfare of the American people,” Pallone said in a statement.
Regulatory uncertainty is bad for business. Also, public trust is a key component of placing nuclear sites. If regulators are selected based upon their ability to be toady suck ups instead of honest brokers the public will lose faith in regulators.
I would say the hard part of democracy is accepting the laws that are on the books. After all, if you have a democracy you have a separation of powers.
Faulty SMR safety and possible core melt down disaster with destruction of the nuclear plant and the release of fission products like Chernobyl , Fukushima and Three Mile Island disasters.
I do not want the like of FOX fake news commentators telling nuclear engineers how much time they get to review and license new reactor technology. The NRC is responsible for safety of nuclear power plants.
How is it that you are equating those reactor accidents with SMRs?
As you well know, Chernobyl was a faulty design (according to text books written in the 1950s), had no containment building and were performing a test where they violated known safety procedures. It wouldn’t take 5 minutes to make sure this wasn’t repeated.
In Fukushima 20K died near instantly from the tsunami so it is reasonable to chose not to build in areas like that again. 5 more minutes to check off this safety measure.
And at TMI, no one died, and no one really got more than an x-ray worth of radiation.
The real review process has to do with all the other hundreds of possible accidents and how they are handled equally or better than current plants.
Chernobyl had another problem in that the emergency generators took like a minute or something to kick in to run the cooling pumps. So the pragmatic Russians were trying to use the angular moment in the turbine to generate emergency power while the backup power spooled up. Turns out that’s not a good idea…
The take away from TMI and Fukushima is that it was unanticipated issues that caused the problems. In hindsight, both were preventable, but hindsight is 20/20. Both those accidents caused major problems for the nuclear industry. TMI put the US industry on life support. Fukushima is what caused Angela Merkel to change her mind about nuclear power in Germany. Prior that, she was trying to extend the life of German nuclear plants.
So if you are really serious about developing nuclear power in the US, it is more prudent to rush the process? Or is it more prudent to try to anticipate the problems even if it takes longer?
Isnt this what happened when biden won the election last time. Shame as well.
Anyhow civil servant and politicians were always different in my head. Civil servants usually have good intentions, work hard, have little to gain, and arent spending thier entire career trying get elected (and then immediately campaigning to get elected again) but instead devoted to their fields and the country (as they chose this instead of a private industry job that pays better). You should never trust a politician. They only have their own interests at heart.
Getting rid of civil servants and replacing them with politicians or wanna be politicians is basically what a banana republic ends up being. Beurocratic mess where noone knows how to do the job well but is constantly angling for some political or monetary gain. Everyones a yes man and noone wants to steer the ship right even in the face of iceberg lest they risk their entire career and political aspiration. Especially dangerous in the nuclear energy space.
The new nuclear power plant unit 2 was destroyed and required extensive decontamination and safe removal of the melted reactor core, reactor vessel and other contaminated equipment inside the containment.
The accident itself progressed to the point where over 90% of the reactor core was damaged. The containment building in which the reactor is located as well as several other locations around the plant were contaminated. The subsequent cleanup and recovery effort is documented in the collection associated with this Web page.
Unique amongst the items are the over 3700 video tapes which document the extensive effort to cleanup the plant and to understand exactly what happened. The technical reports summarize both the findings as well as provide an historical account of the recovery effort.
This is the one place that Donald Rumsfeld taught me something.
There are known unknowns: “We don’t know how many missiles Iran has.” “We aren’t sure if building a nuclear plant on a fault line is a good idea.” “Can we win in Afghanistan?”
And there are unknown unknowns: “Will there be a pandemic?” “Will this turbine blade fail in flight?” “Will there be a hurricane in an area that has not had one before?”
The tsunami at Fukushima could have been anticipated - but wasn’t. The Chernobyl design was considered safe: it had been operating for 8 years before the disaster, which happened because of truly, truly bad management, not “faulty design” (although the design was wanting as well). And 3 Mile Island came close to a meltdown and to breaching even the containment building, so I take little solace in the fact that “it didn’t happen.”
Any form of energy production comes with risks: a dam can fail, a gas plant can blow up, etc. but a nuclear plant comes with special risks because it can affect hundreds, even thousands of square miles for years after.
That’s why I want to put them all in North Dakota, because: who cares? Build the transmission lines, that’s OK with me, but keep the huge risk away from most of the population, and particularly away from most of the industrial and financial core of the country. Fill up North Dakota with data centers too, I’ll applaud that, and even live with the 0.02 extra latency. Not a big deal, considering.
This is not true. When the disaster happened I went and looked at my nuclear engineering textbooks to read about their design and found only a one page description in one book that even mentioned it … in an older book from the late 1950s. There was a brief technical description and a comment that since this design is considered unsafe it isn’t worth more investigation or analysis.
I was trained and operated pressurized water reactors in the Navy, so not really an expert on every reactor type but I was able to see why no one in the west pursued this shaky design.
Here is what ChatGPT says today:
The basic design of the Chernobyl reactor—specifically the RBMK (Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalny) type—was not considered inherently safe by Western nuclear engineering standards, even before the 1986 disaster. Here’s why:
1. Positive Void Coefficient
The RBMK design had a positive void coefficient, meaning that if the coolant (water) turned to steam (a “void”), the nuclear reaction would increase rather than decrease.
This is inherently unstable, as most reactor designs aim for a negative void coefficient to naturally dampen the reaction in case of coolant loss.
2. Graphite-Tipped Control Rods
The control rods used to shut down the reactor had graphite tips, which initially increased reactivity when inserted, before reducing it.
This design flaw played a critical role in the explosion during the Chernobyl accident.
3. Lack of Containment Structure
Unlike Western reactors, RBMK reactors did not have a robust containment structure to prevent the release of radioactive material in case of an accident.
4. Complex and Unforgiving Design
The RBMK was large and complex, with many manual controls and a design that was unforgiving of operator error.
Safety systems were often disabled or bypassed during tests or maintenance.
5. Secrecy and Poor Safety Culture
The Soviet nuclear program operated under a veil of secrecy, and safety concerns were often ignored or suppressed.
Just because they had been lucky for 8 years doesn’t mean the basic design was safe.
Far from it
For perspective, consider that the “safe’ design of 3 Mile Island had been operating for just 90 days before that incident.
Also, and just for the record, the NRC shows 56 nuclear accidents which have happened in the US which have involved the loss of human life or significant property damage with our “safe” designs.
The United States Government Accountability Office reported more than 150 incidents from 2001 to 2006 of nuclear plants not performing within acceptable safety guidelines. According to a 2010 survey of energy accidents, there have been at least 56 **accidents at nuclear reactors in the United States** (defined as incidents that either resulted in the loss of human life or more than US$50,000 of property damage). The most serious of these was the [Three Mile Island accident] in 1979. [Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant] has been the source of two of the top five most dangerous nuclear incidents in the [United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States) since 1979.[[1]] Relatively few accidents have involved fatalities.[[2]]
I post this not to say “there should be no nuke plants” but to show that there are lots of unknown unknowns. So put them in North Dakota or Utah or someplace it doesn’t matter.
Power plants, of any sort, can be dangerous places. High voltage power lines are not unique to just nuclear power plants. The incidents above are not “nuclear accidents”. They are industrial accidents, that can happen, and do happen, at all sorts of industrial sites all over the world. I can speak from personal experience that the work process controls in nuclear plants are as good or better than any other industry. But, still, even with those controls, workers can still unfortunately touch the wrong wire, or be in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Note: The Surry feedwater line burst in the list above happened in the non-nuclear portion of the plant. Same for the generator incident at Arkansas Nuclear One.)
I could make a long list of incidents of people killed in falls from wind turbines. I’m not going to call for the abolition of wind turbines or rooftop solar cells, just because people occasionally fall off roofs, or fall from the wind turbine nacelles.
I’m for SMRs. In TX, and elsewhere where appropriate.
I think EU was careless to put all their trust into the Russian promises.
Japan was careless to knee jerk shutdown it’s nuclear energy plants.
We, US would be remiss to ignore the lessons the EU n Japan are (re)learning.
I think SMR, with passive cooling tech, is promising enough that we commit to building SMR at 4-5 dedicated factories, and trucking the modules to the installation site.
I also think we should have several dedicated factories for REE refining. That WE control.
Palo Verde nuclear station is located in the middle of the Arizona desert. It is also in a rather dry place. Palo Verde uses treated waste water from the Phoenix area for plant cooling. Up until Vogtle Unit 4 came on-line, Palo Verde was the largest nuclear power plant in the US. I’ve been there a couple of times.
There are a few SMR designs that plan to use air cooling of the main condenser, or will use air cooling in a Brayton cycle. These plants will require very little water.
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It looks like west Texas may get a temporary storage facility for spent nuclear fuel. The US Supreme Court recently ruled against the state of Texas and a fossil fuel company, who are trying to stop the storage facility. This ruling doesn’t completely give a green light to start construction, but it is a step in the right direction.
