Feb 1, 2025: AI on the Susquehanna River

Sep 29, 2024: The case against restarting Three Mile Island’s Unit-1


Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island

Did you catch "The Meltdown: Three Mile Island" on Netflix?
TMI remains a danger and TMIA is working hard to ensure the safety of our communities and the surrounding areas.
Learn more on this site and support our efforts. Join TMIA. To contact the TMIA office, call 717-233-7897.

    

Nuclear Regulatory Commission - News Release
No: 25-031 May 13, 2025
CONTACT: Scott Burnell, 301-415-8200

NRC Accepts for Review Construction Permit Application for Long Mott Generating Station

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has accepted for review a construction permit application from Long Mott Energy LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Company. The application requests permission to build Long Mott Generating Station, a multi- unit advanced reactor facility at Dow Chemical’s Seadrift site in Calhoun County, Texas. The companies submitted the application on March 31.
 
The Dow Chemical reactor project’s application includes a preliminary safety analysis report and environmental report for the four-unit facility using X-energy’s Xe-100 reactor design. Each Xe-100 reactor in the facility would generate approximately 80 megawatts of electricity, as well as heat to enhance the Dow Chemical plant’s efficiency. Each reactor would use helium to cool its core. The construction permit, if approved, would not authorize the operation of the units. The Dow project will have to submit a separate application for operating licenses in the future.
 
The agency’s acceptance, or “docketing” the application, starts the detailed safety and environmental review. More information about new reactor licensing is available on the NRC website.
 
Nuclear Regulatory Commission - News Release
No: III-25-014 May 19, 2025
Contact: Viktoria Mitlyng, 630-829-9662 Prema Chandrathil, 630-829-9663

NRC Begins Special Inspection at Curium

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has launched a special inspection to review the circumstances surrounding the loss of control of licensed material impacting two workers at the Curium US LLC radiopharmaceutical facility in Noblesville, Indiana.
 
The NRC inspection follows an April 8 incident involving two employees who entered an area inside the production facility to perform routine radiological work and found an unaccounted for source of radiation. The company secured the area and was able to recover and regain control of the material.
 
The facility is safe and all material was contained within the facility with no release to the environment. However, the event led to both workers receiving a higher-than-expected radiation dose, potentially causing one of them to exceed an annual occupational limit.
 
The NRC determined a special inspection was needed to develop a clear understanding of the circumstances, assess the company’s response and evaluate their abilities to track and control radioactive material while ensuring worker safety. Inspectors from the agency will conduct observations, interviews and document reviews onsite at the facility and in the office.
 
“We expect license holders to ensure workers are protected and maintain appropriate control of licensed material,” said Region III Administrator Jack Giessner. “Our inspectors will look closely at the company’s radiation safety program to assess their compliance with NRC requirements.”
 
The team will document their findings and conclusions in an inspection report, which will be publicly available on the NRC website.

25-014-iii.pdf


US nuclear sector goes on spending spree to fight subsidy cuts 

Sam Altman-backed Oklo increased lobbying budget by 500 per cent year-on-year 

 
 The US nuclear industry is intensifying its lobbying blitz to save the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits it says are vital for meeting artificial intelligence-fuelled energy demand. 
 
On Monday lawmakers from the House ways and means committee, which is responsible for writing tax law, released draft legislation that would phase out nuclear energy subsidies starting in 2029, in a move that caught the sector by surprise. 
 
 Lobbyists are now racing to persuade lawmakers to rescind or moderate cuts to nuclear industry subsidies, which until recently had more bipartisan support than other low-carbon energy technologies such as wind and solar. 
 
 “You’re going to see an aggressive push,” said Frank Maisano, a partner in the policy and resolution group of Bracewell, a law and lobbying firm. 
 
 In the first quarter of 2025 nuclear companies and industry bodies have upped their spending on lobbying. Oklo, the nuclear technology company backed by OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman spent $424,000 an increase of more than 500 per cent year-on-year. 
 
 Oklo chief executive officer Jacob DeWitte said that the ways and means proposal “undermines the momentum” in the US nuclear sector. 
 
 “It’s hard to overstate the value of the tax credits on helping to de-risk early-stage capital and project developments . . . if the idea is to lead and dominate in this space, we need to use all the tools in the tool belt.” 
 
 NuScale Power and TerraPower, nuclear reactor developers, as well as the Nuclear Energy Institute, also increased their spending. Constellation Energy, which has partnered with Microsoft to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, spent over $1.7mn in the first quarter on lobbying across its portfolio, a 16 per cent increase. 
 
 Industry advocates said they aim to appeal to moderates such as Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska, and Henry McMaster, governor of South Carolina, who already host nuclear facilities in their states. They also hope to spur intervention from President Donald Trump, who has praised nuclear development. 
 
 Next week the administration is expected to release an executive order to speed up the construction of nuclear power plants by amending federal safety regulations.
 
 “What came out of ways and means is concerning and disappointing,” said Heather Reams, president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a centre-right energy lobby group. “It isn’t hitting the marks on what the president’s nuclear goals are . . . when he [weighs in] that will have a lot of sway.” 
 
 Lobbyists are also expected to object to the timeframes suggested in the draft, which they say threaten the development of nascent technologies like small modular reactors (SMRs) that are critical for meeting the AI fuelled energy demand. 
 
 “We want to encourage the nuclear industry,” said Eric Levine, a Republican lobbyist. “If we’re not bringing energy to grid, all the AI technology in the world is useless if we can’t power it.” 
 
 However some nuclear companies see the cuts as an opportunity to bring private capital to the sector. 
 
 “Industries that rely on federal subsidies tend to get stuck in ruts and less favourable towards innovation,” said Isaiah Taylor, CEO of Valar Atomics. “I like the direction that the administration is taking on this, in allowing it to be private and faster.”
Nuclear Regulatory Commission - News Release
No: IV-25-002 May 13, 2025
Contact: Victor Dricks, 630-829-9662 Tressa Smith, 817-200-1172

NRC to Hold a Regulatory Conference with Entergy Operations May 21 to Discuss a Proposed Violation

 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a regulatory conference on May 21 with officials from Entergy Operations to discuss the safety significance of a proposed violation. The proposed violation, identified in an inspection report, involves the company’s failure to properly maintain an emergency diesel generator, used to supply power to safety-related systems in the event of a loss of offsite power at the Waterford nuclear power plant in Killona, Louisiana.
 
The enforcement conference will be held at the NRC’s Region IV Office at 1600 East Lamar Blvd., Arlington, Texas, beginning at 9 a.m. Central time.
 
Company representatives will have the opportunity to provide their perspective or additional information, including any actions planned or completed to prevent recurrence of the issues, before the agency makes its final enforcement decision.
 
The meeting notice has information detailing how the public can participate in the meeting by phone or online. Members of the public will have an opportunity to ask questions of the NRC staff or provide comments about the issues discussed following the business portion of the meeting; however, the NRC staff is not soliciting comments pertaining to regulatory decisions.
 
No decisions on the final safety significance or any potential NRC actions regarding the proposed violations will be made at the meeting.
 
 

Anti-nuke activist opposes changing TMI's name, calling it 'cultural vandalism'

Portrait of Mike ArgentoMike Argento  York Daily Record



Three Mile Island's undamaged Unit 1 reactor, formerly slated for decommissioning, has been renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center.
The renaming honors Christopher Crane, former CEO of Constellation's parent company, Exelon, a prominent figure in the nuclear industry.
Constellation defends the decision, citing Crane's contributions to nuclear safety and his role in the industry's recovery after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.

This provocative independent essay was just posted for free download at ai-electricity.stanford.edu. That URL takes you to a header. Clicking on the URL in the header then takes you to the paper. Apologies for the extra step, which lets us count visitors (anonymously).
 
Please enjoy, spread, and react. Thank you! And thanks again to my many thoughtful referees, informants, and Stanford colleagues who kindly gave this essay a nice home. 
 

For more flavor, here’s the two-page press release that Hastings is disseminating 16 May:


 

Cordially — Amory
 
Amory B. Lovins        盧安武      एमोरी लिवन्स
Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (2020–24), Lecturer (2025–  ), and Precourt Scholar, Precourt Institute for Energy, Stanford University
Cofounder and Chairman Emeritus, RMI (founded as Rocky Mountain Institute), amory@rmi.org
President, Aspen Fly Right, aspenflyright.org
Member, Lovins Associates LLC
Subject: Acceptance of Request to Use Provisions of a Later Edition of the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code, Section XI (EPID L-2025-LLR-0040)
ADAMS Accession No.: ML25128A052
Using Web-based ADAMS, select “Advanced Search”
Under “Property,” select “Accession Number”
Under “Value,” enter the Accession Number
Click Search.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission - News Release
No: III-25-013 May 12, 2025
Contact: Viktoria Mitlyng, 630-829-9662 Prema Chandrathil, 630-829-9663

NRC Begins Special Inspection at Quad Cities Nuclear Power Plant

 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has launched a special inspection at the Quad Cities Generating Station to review the inoperability of safety-related vacuum breakers. The two-unit plant, in Marseilles, Illinois, is operated by Constellation Energy.
 
Plant operators discovered that vacuum breakers designed to ensure structural integrity of the containment during significant plant events were inoperable because certain valves were not reopened after testing during a recent refueling outage.
 
The NRC determined a special inspection was warranted because the event resulted in the system’s inability to regulate containment pressure. The system has been restored.
 
“While this did not affect safe plant operation, an independent review of the issue by the regulator is warranted given questions related to the performance of plant personnel that compromised the ability of a safety system to fulfill its function,” said Region III Administrator Jack Giessner. “Our inspectors will evaluate Constellation’s response, its understanding of the event and the scope of its assessment actions; they will independently review the adequacy and implementation of processes and procedures related to the event; and evaluate the system’s design.”
 
Once the inspection is completed, NRC inspectors will document their findings in a publicly available inspection report, which will be distributed electronically to listserv subscribers and available on the NRC website.
 

 Molly Taft, Apr 29, 2025, 10:59 AM

States and Startups Are Suing the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Critics of the NRC say its red tape and lengthy authorization timelines stifle innovation, but handing some of its responsibilities to states could undermine public trust and the industry’s safety record.

Image may contain Emblem Symbol Animal Bird Logo American Flag and Flag

Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images

American nuclear is in 25-year-old Isaiah Taylor’s blood: his great-grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project. In 2023, Taylor, who dropped out of high school to work in tech, started his own nuclear company, Valar Atomics. It’s currently developing a small test reactor, named after Taylor’s great-grandfather. But the company says that overly onerous regulations imposed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the country’s main regulatory body for nuclear reactors, has forced Valar Atomics to develop its test reactor overseas.

In early April, Valar Atomics, in addition to another nuclear startup, Deep Fission, as well as the states of Florida, Louisiana, and Arizona’s state legislature, signed onto a lawsuit against the NRC. The lawsuit, originally filed in December by Texas, Utah, and nuclear company Last Energy, blames the NRC for “so restrictively regulat[ing] new nuclear reactor construction that it rarely happens at all.”

Science Newsletter

Your weekly roundup of the best stories on health care, the climate crisis, new scientific discoveries, and more. Delivered on Wednesdays.

By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.

The US has historically been the global powerhouse of nuclear energy, yet only three reactors have come online over the past 25 years, all behind schedule and with ballooning budgets. Meanwhile, other countries, like China and South Korea, have raced ahead with construction of reactors of all sizes. Some nuclear advocates say that the US’s regulation system, which imposes cumbersome requirements and ultra-long timelines on projects, is largely to blame for this delay—especially when it comes to developing new designs for smaller reactors—and that some reactors should be taken from the NRC’s purview altogether. But others have concerns about potential attempts to bypass the country’s nuclear regulations for specific designs.

The NRC has long been criticized for its ultra-slow permitting times, inefficient processes, and contentious back-and-forth with nuclear companies. “The regulatory relationship in the US has been described as legalistic and adversarial for nuclear,” says Nick Touran, a licensed nuclear engineer who runs the website What Is Nuclear. “That is kind of uniquely American. In other countries, like France and China, the regulators are more cooperative.”

The lawsuit takes these criticisms one step further, claiming that by regulating smaller reactors, the NRC is misreading a crucial piece of nuclear legislation. In 1954, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act, which created modern nuclear regulation in the US. That law mandated regulations for nuclear facilities that used nuclear material “in such quantity as to be of significance to the common defense and security” or that use it “in such manner as to affect the health and safety of the public.”

“We would love the NRC to respect the law that was written,” says Taylor, who believes the reactor his company is working on sits outside of that mandate. “What it would do for us is to allow innovation to happen again. Innovation is what drives the American economy.”

“The NRC will address the litigation, as necessary, in its court filings,” agency spokesperson Scott Burnell told WIRED in an email.

While we generally think of nuclear reactors as huge power plants, reactors can be made much smaller: Models known as small modular reactors, or SMRs, usually produce a third of the energy of a larger reactor, while even smaller reactorsknown as microreactors are designed small enough to be hauled by semitruck. Because of their size, these reactors are inherently less dangerous than their large counterparts. There’s simply not enough power in an SMR for a Three Mile Island–style meltdown.

The lawsuit argues that by mandating a cumbersome licensing process for all types of reactors—including those that are safer because of their size—the NRC is both violating the Atomic Energy Act and stifling progress. A company called NuScale, the only SMR company to get NRC approval for its model, spent $500 million and 2 million hours of labor over several years just to get its design approved. In late 2023 it pulled the plug on a planned power plant in Idaho after customers balked at the projected high price tag for power, which soared from an estimated $58 per megawatt-hour in 2021 to $89 per megawatt-hour in 2023.

The lawsuit comes at a unique time for nuclear power. Public sentiment around nuclear energy is the highest it’s been in 15 years. Dozens of new nuclear startups have cropped up in recent years, each promising to revolutionize the American nuclear industry—and serve power-hungry industries like data centers and oil and gas. Private equity and venture capital invested more than $783 million in nuclear startups in 2024, doing twice the number of deals in the sector as they did in 2023.

The lawsuit “is about getting steel in the ground. This is about getting nuclear on the grid,” says Chris Koopman, the CEO of the Abundance Institute, a nonprofit focused on encouraging the development and deployment of new technology. The Institute, which was founded last year, has no standing in the lawsuit and does not represent any plaintiffs but has served as a “thought partner,” per Koopman, who coauthored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in January announcing the lawsuit.

Deep Fission, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, seeks to generate electricity using small modular reactors placed a mile underground—a model its CEO, Liz Muller, says is both safer and cheaper than traditional construction. Even though Deep Fission is a party in the lawsuit, the company has also begun pre-licensing its design with the NRC. Muller sees the lawsuit as bringing a new approach to the agency regarding SMRs: helping it to develop “a regulatory sandbox, where we’re allowed to explore approaches to regulations while we’re moving forward at the same time.”

The lawsuit posits that individual states “are more than capable of regulating” smaller reactors. Thirty-nine states are already licensed by the NRC to handle and inspect nuclear material, while Koopman points out that the states involved in the lawsuit have recently passed legislation to speed the construction of nuclear projects in-state. “All of the states involved in the case have already entered into agreement with the NRC, in which the NRC has recognized that they know their stuff,” he says.

Taylor believes allowing states to compete on regulation would help boost safety within the field of small modular reactors. “Innovation is what drives the safety ball down the field, and the only way to do that is to have different regulators with different ideas,” he says. “That’s federalism 101.”

Adam Stein, the director of the Nuclear Energy Innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute, an eco-modernist policy center, sees some serious flaws with this approach. He says that while some states, like Texas, may have the resources and the knowledge to create their own effective regulatory body, other states may struggle. Stein likens a patchwork of different regulations as being akin to car seat laws, where the age of the child required to be in a car seat varies across states, making it tough for a parent to plan a road trip.

“Some states are less consistent in applying safety standards than others,” he says. “Some states would prefer their standards to be stricter than national standards. Some states have reduced safety standards from nationally recommended standards.”

Muller says she understands these concerns. “There is a risk if we get wildly different regulatory processes, that would not be a great result,” she says. “But I think there’s also an opportunity for states to move forward and then for other states to piggyback on what has been developed by the earlier adopter.”

Stein also foresees a possibility for continued red tape, as even with state-level regulation, the NRC would still be forced to review individual reactor designs to see if they were safe enough to pass off for state review. “A developer couldn’t just assert that their design is so safe, that it’s below the line,” he says. “It’s still going to have to go through a review to

determine whether the NRC should review it.”

Just because a nuclear reactor can’t cause massive damage to big populations doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fail-safe. The only deadly nuclear accident on US soil occurred at a tiny reactor in Idaho, which killed its three operators in the early 1960s. Designs for small reactors have made leaps and bounds in safety since then—a development Touran says is thanks in part to regulations from the federal government.

“I believe a well-designed small reactor, subject to reasonable nuclear design standards based on years of lessons learned, would be very safe,” says Touran. “I do not believe that this means anyone should be able to go out and build a small reactor with minimal oversight.”

There have been efforts in recent years to speed up the NRC’s permitting process. In 2019, during his first term, President Donald Trump signed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act; among its many reforms, it mandated that the NRC shift around key licensing processes and create a new process for licensing smaller, more technologically varied reactors. Last year, President Joe Biden signed the ADVANCE Act, which made even more changes to the NRC process; both of these pieces of legislation passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

“At this point, the NRC says pretty willingly that they’re working hard to be more efficient, that they understand they need to be more efficient, that they have been more efficient with recent licensing applications,” says Klein.

For developers like Taylor, this progress is too little, too late. “Do we really want China and Russia to be the global nuclear developers for the world?” he says. “I don’t. I would like the United States to be the nuclear developer of the world.”

Permitting reform alone, especially in the SMR space, may not solve the issue of competing with other world powers. Nuclear energy might be overregulated, but it is also expensive to build, even for smaller reactors, requiring big up-front investments and a large amount of labor. NuScale did lose valuable time and money on a cumbersome regulatory process—but its energy was also competing in price against gas and renewables, which are, on average, cheaper than nuclear power from plants that have been running for decades.

After decades of battling public fear of nuclear plants, nuclear acceptance has reached a pivotal moment. When compared to the massive health toll from fossil fuels, which research shows are responsible for 1 in 5 deaths around the world, nuclear power is exorbitantly safe. But there’s a sense from some advocates that some of the hard-won trust nuclear energy now has from the public—supported by decades of careful regulation—is in danger if the movement becomes too cavalier about safety.

When Valar announced it would join the lawsuit, Taylor published a blog post on the company’s website that claimed that the company’s reactor was so safe that someone could hold the spent fuel in their hands for five minutes and get as much radiation exposure as a CAT scan. Touran questioned this claim, leading Taylor to post the numbers behind the company’s analysis on X. Another nuclear engineer ran his own calculation using these inputs, finding that holding fuel under the conditions provided by Valar would give a “lethal dose” of radiation in 85 milliseconds. (Taylor told WIRED that Valar is working on a “thorough analysis” in response that will be public in a few weeks and that the initial claims around the spent fuel were simply “a thought experiment we did for our own internal illustration purposes” and not part of the lawsuit materials.)

“We’ve operated reactors so well for so long that a whole new breed of advocates and even founders mistakenly believe that they’re fail-safe by default,” says Touran. “The reality is they’re made fail-safe by very careful and well-regulated engineering and quality assurance.”

Pages