By Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON, July 8 (Reuters) – The U.S. nuclear power regulator on Wednesday proposed narrowing the scope of environmental reviews required under federal law for licenses for new and renewed reactors.
The proposal is one of several changes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is making to its rules. President Donald Trump aims to put the U.S. on a path of quadrupling U.S. nuclear power capacity by 2050 to meet power demand that has been surging due to the boom in data centers, electric vehicles and cryptocurrencies.
Other recent NRC proposals include changing a rule protecting people from radiation from power plants and security standards at reactors.
Ho Nieh, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told reporters that “for many, many, many years NRC did much more than required by law in the National Environmental Policy Act. So this really brings us back to what NEPA demands, nothing more, nothing less.”
Nieh said the NRC proposes to limit areas where it does not have authority over effects on the environment such as construction of nuclear plants.
“Dust, noise, air impacts, non-radiological water, or non-radiological effects, all of those things are examples of where we’re they’re outside of our regulatory authority, and so we won’t be doing those in the future,” he said.
The proposal also eliminates routine solicitation of public comments on draft environmental impact statements. The public would still have opportunities to comment during other parts of the approval process, the NRC said.
The proposal also expands the use of categorical exclusions for certain actions, including some new reactor projects, where the NRC has determined they normally do not result in significant environmental impacts.
Kimyata Savoy, the NRC’s chief environmental review and permitting officer, told reporters that the proposal will save applicants and the NRC about $135 million in costs for new or renewed licenses.
Trump last year approved four executive orders on nuclear power that seek to shorten approvals of new licenses for reactors from a multi-year process to 18 months.
The orders also called for an overhaul of the NRC including looking at staffing levels and directing the Energy and Defense Departments to work together to build pilot nuclear plants on federal lands.
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by David Gregorio)
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