https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/04/22/a-guide-to-commenting-on-rules-removing-public-oversight-of-nuclear-reactor-safety/ Special thanks to Lynda Williams for alerting us to Fred Schofer's awesome comments! Below are our comments regarding the proposed rule that would effectively destroy the NRC, the country, and the world.
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Office of the Secretary
ATTN: Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff
Washington, DC 20555
Docket ID NRC-2025-1503 To the NRC: President Donald John Trump (DJT) has removed federal regulatory authority throughout numerous industries and environments: Oil and gas exploitation, copper mining, uranium mining, fossil fuel use. Drug regulation, medical procedures, food safety... all gutted by DJT Executive Orders (EOs). Prior to DJT, America was trying to protect its people and the environment. Without those two things, we are lost. Gone. Nonexistent. But of all the industries DJT is deregulating, none have the ability to harm as many people as seriously (cancer, heart attacks, deformities, miscarriages...) as the nuclear industry. Since the mid 1970s the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has stood between releases of large quantities of toxic nuclear materials and public safety. The NRC was formed when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was broken into two separate entities. The AEC was too focused on promoting nuclear power ("too cheap to meter" was their slogan, for an energy system that has always been among the most expensive available, and far too risky to properly insure, hence the anti-social "Price-Anderson Act" (PAA)). Safety concerns were handed over to the NRC, and the rest (including most of the funding) went to the new Department of Energy (DOE), which continues to promote and finance new nuclear power plants, as well as all the military uses of nuclear energy (including nuclear safety, whatever that means, at military installations). If you ask the DOE to consider "safety" they'll tell you that's not their job, that's the NRC's. If you ask the NRC to consider the idea that nuclear power plants are simply not reasonable, they'll tell you... wait for it... that's the DOE's responsibility. If someone wants to build one, the NRC's only job is to make sure it's safe. But how safe? The relatively young nuclear industry is still mostly held to what were assumed to be, when the NRC was formed, reasonable safety standards. What's wrong with the current safety standards? Plenty: First, the assumed level of safety, set by considerations such as ALARA and LNT ("As Low As Reasonably Achievable" and "Linear, No Threshold") were based on false assumptions, such as that "Reasonably Achievable" had to also mean "affordable" and that "reference man" was a good baseline to use. It should have been assumed then — and is well known now to be true — that women and children are far more vulnerable to radiation's harmful effects than grown men: As much as 100 times **or more** for a fetus or infant! Yet today the standards for radiation exposure are still based on "reference man" (who happened to also be white, young, of proper weight and in good health to begin with). Second, the NRC was quickly captured by the nuclear industry, which provides nearly all its funding (so when reactors close, funding gets tighter far more than the work load gets lighter). The NRC being solely responsible for safety simply didn't work, as evidenced by the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in 1979, an avoidable accident which resulted from improper training of the operators for the conditions experienced. The entire nuclear industry became afraid another meltdown would shut it down completely. There were protests across the nation wanting as much. (This writer took part in some of them.) In response, nuclear plant operators formed an alternative safety organization called INPO (Independent Nuclear Power Operators). The problem with INPO is the secrecy: The public is not allowed to know, and even the NRC is not privy to INPO's inner workings. And yet the public has to pay for any failures of the nuclear industry, and was promised openness for such a risky business in our midst. (A former head of INPO is now the Chairman of the NRC. Go figure.) Third, the utter failure of the NRC (and INPO) is plainly evidenced by the existence — and repeated extending — of PAA. PAA limits the price any nuclear power company has to pay out for damages it does to human life and property. PAA does this by both a hard cap on the total payout, and a sharing of the cost of damages among the entire industry. The loser is the public. While extreme accidents are supposed to be extremely rare, they have been missed many times by fractions of an inch or less — and as reactors become more and more embrittled and old, the risk of catastrophic accidents greatly increases. Fourth, none of the guidelines for the use of commercial nuclear energy (or military nuclear, for that matter) take sufficient account of the alternatives to nuclear energy that are cheaper, cleaner, sustainable, and do not risk catastrophic accidents, sabotage, or massive environmental damage lasting for eons — which are all major problems for nuclear energy, preventing it from having any reasonable role in the world's civilian energy supply. Indeed, solar and wind are out-performing (cheaper, faster, safer) nuclear energy even in China and everywhere else. For example, in a four-year period, Texas was able to install about 36 GW of renewable energy for about $36 Billion. In Georgia, the two new nuclear reactors took 15 years to install and produce only 2 GW of electricity for about the same price. Nuclear is NOT affordable! This is one reason the NRC has never been able to make commercial nuclear reactors truly "safe." Real safety is not affordable. Instead, the NRC tries to reduce the CHANCE of an accident, since they cannot make catastrophic nuclear accidents impossible. Nor have they (the NRC, the DOE, the AEC, or the whole nuclear industry) been able to solve the nuclear waste problem, as the incredibly toxic substance is piled up at EVERY commercial nuclear site, whether the reactor is operating or has permanently shut down. Nuclear waste transportation is still a hazardous endeavor every time it happens, which isn't nearly as often as planned. That may be fortunate: America's roads and rails, bridges and tunnels are old and worn out, and moving tens of thousands of canisters at least once means these hazardous places MUST be traversed over and over (perhaps first to a "temporary" storage site, then to a permanent repository, neither of which exists at this time, nor are any projected, except in the dreams of the reactor operators). Despite the severe, even crippling, problems the nuclear regulatory environment entails (unsolvable nuclear waste problems, unsolvable terrorism, sabotage and war threats, unsolvable earthquake, tornado, derecho, tsunami, asteroid threats...) the industry has persisted, feebly, even halfheartedly: Two new reactors at absurd ratepayer costs and with even more absurd government subsidies, built amidst enormous corruption scandals and at the expense of building solar and wind systems which are never vulnerable to nearly all the threats listed earlier in this paragraph (and many others particular to nuclear power, such as meltdowns due to embrittlement or any other reason). Under these conditions, America has gone from a high of about 120 reactors down to the low 90s, despite the two new ones, and the prospects for further plummeting of the industry are near 100% as reactors age: Many are past their original life expectancy of forty years already. Why? Because running an old reactor is a lot more profitable than building a new one! Just hope the inevitable shutdowns and other anomalies aren't catastrophic, or too costly to justify. Can Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) solve the cost problem? Not a chance, for many reasons (let alone all the other problems). To start with: Because spreading the problem out among hundreds of new locations, with LESS security, NO evacuation plan for the local population, NOT informing local emergency responders (or the public) about what's going on and what they might face in a catastrophic event... is a recipe for disaster. But that will be the situation if this regulatory change is made. A multitude of additional problems that the proposed change will create were outlined in a comment regarding this Docket (ID NRC 2025-1503) by retired NRC Team Lead for Regulatory Analysis and Rulemaking Project Manager Fred Schofer. These include such problems such as: Allowing Department of War (DOW, aka DOD (Department of Defense)) and Department of Energy (DOE) designs for experimental and/or military reactors to be converted to commercial use — which has utterly different requirements — without additional review or consideration of safety, applicability, efficiency, or even for cost-effectiveness, need, safer (and cheaper) alternatives, or the availability of waste disposal solutions, or uranium fuel (will there be mines? Reprocessing? Neither? Will new reactors be dependent or nuclear fuel from Russia?). A similar missing data problem is currently occurring at several reactor sites in America, where there are sudden plans to restart reactors that had been (supposedly) permanently closed. The missing data is the records that were destroyed during the period after the original closure and before the re-licensing process began. Vital records that should be available to reveal problem areas at the plant, known problems that need watching, and also: Any misbehavior that was caught, patterns of such, and undoubtedly any other records the original company ONLY kept because they HAD TO — until they didn't have to keep them anymore because the reactor had closed. Those would be the first records to be destroyed — and the most important! Many of the employees who worked at the plant (and knew its quirks) will have retired or moved on. As indicated in Mr. Schofer's comment, the DOE and DOW/DOD do not even have the records needed to properly evaluate the various reactor designs that the DOE is offering to private entities for commercial production at scale. Most of the designs have little chance of succeeding, in part because the market will never be big enough for all the planned versions of all the "new" reactors (and in large part because they have already proven to be impractical for one reason or another). And at least as important: Many won't ever smash an atom because wind, wave, solar, geothermal and so forth are all cheaper, more reliable and far, far safer -- and don't need half the careful analysis to determine they're safe enough to deploy, because the "bounding accident scenarios" are far, far smaller: If a wind turbine falls over, it might kill a cow or something. If an SMNR is compromised by a terrorist, half a state might need to be evacuated. And that SMNR would be operating without a review by ANY independent agency! The NRC was created because independent review is the ONLY way that it's the least bit possible to ensure the safety of the public. Real safety has proven (in reality) to be impossible: Catastrophic accidents over time are inevitable, whether caused by nefarious humans, clumsy ones, negligent ones, honest ones tasked with the impossible, or by Mother Nature, Bad Luck or War. All SMNRs require much higher concentrations of Uranium-235 and/or Plutonium-239 in order for them to achieve some magic level of cost-effective operation, which is expected to be achieved by both mass production (unlikely to ever happen) and by automating the processes as much as possible (including automating security using remote AI-enabled monitoring which may or may not be able to be compromised...). No evacuation plan, no evacuation zone, no information shared with local emergency responders... A recipe for disaster could not be better-written by the most devious terrorist! And then to put it right in the middle of a community! The NRC has never really done a good enough job, but handcuffing its ability to even do its current job is sheer madness. Ace Hoffman (with Sharon Hoffman), Carlsbad, California USA ###
Docket ID NRC–2025–1503 requires further analysis and documentation before it can reasonably be evaluated by the public or federal agencies. As Fred Schofer, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) employee points out in his public comment to this Docket (reference below), many provisions of the proposed legislation contradict existing legislation and NRC regulations. These discrepancies would put the NRC in an impossible position: The agency would not be able to determine if a proposed commercial reactor that relies on Department of Energy (DOE) or Department of War(DOW)/Department of Defense (DOD) certification meets NRC requirements. NRC staff would have to reject all such applications, which would put them in direct violation of this new proposed regulation. Regulations for DOE and DOW/DOD reactors are intended to allow small-scale experimental designs. The secrecy surrounding most of these projects is one of the reasons approval of a DOE/DOW/DOD design cannot be extended to commercial reactors. The NRC has a responsibility to independently verify any data submitted by the prospective licensee, yet this regulation would require the NRC to accept DOE/DOW/DOD approvals as proof of safety without verification. This puts public safety at risk. Current NRC regulations entitle the public to comment on safety issues. Allowing licensees to submit approvals based on classified data makes informed public comment impossible. Similarly, NRC regulations require site-specific risk assessment and emergency planning, and experience with small DOE or DOW/DOD reactors is unlikely to provide the data needed for proper emergency planning for a commercial nuclear plant. By relying on DOE or DOW/DOD assessments designed for small-scale, short-term experiments, this new interpretation of NRC licensing would also eliminate review of potential dangers from aging equipment and violations of security (both physical security and cybersecurity). Military assessments for experimental reactor designs assume the equipment will only need to operate for a relatively short period of time, and that military advantages outweigh safety concerns. Commercial reactors have additional levels of safety, cost-effectiveness, and life expectancy (perhaps as much as a century?) not applicable to experimental DOE/DOW/DOD reactors. Regarding security, DOE and DOW/DOD reactors are usually sited on relatively remote federal property. Commercial reactors based on the same designs could be sited near large population centers without any consideration of the greatly increased potential consequences. Previous "small-scale" experimental designs for DOE and DOW/DOD reactors have already resulted in death, disease, and environmental damage. Expanding such limited regulations to commercial nuclear reactors violates the very premise of establishing the NRC in the first place: Regulators of nuclear technology cannot be the same people as the promoters of that technology — and there must be both. NRC licensing requirements should not be abdicated, let alone given over to the self-assertions made by prospective licensees. Rather, nuclear regulations should be made more strict, and Price-Anderson should be eliminated entirely. Either reactors are safe and don't need it, or they are not safe and should not be used. We all know it's the latter, and that there are cleaner, cheaper, utterly safe alternatives such as wind, wave, solar, geothermal and many others, which can never suffer a meltdown and do not create mountains of toxic nuclear waste. Probabilistic risk assessments for U.S. nuclear power plants discount or ignore numerous "low probability" but perfectly possible events. The frequency of some of these events are truly incalculable (such as terrorism). Many such calculations have proven to be fatally flawed, as shown by major accidents (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), and numerous "near misses" such as at Davis-Besse and Browns Ferry (both more than once). The intent of this proposed regulation is clear — and consistent with other recent attempts by the current administration to bypass safety regulations, environmental impact reviews, and public comments in many areas, not just nuclear, based on executive orders. NRC–2025–1503 will weaken commercial nuclear safety even more, and should be rejected. Lastly, we wish to incorporate by reference and adopt as an addition to these comments the full comments submitted to this docket by Fred Schofer, former NRC Regulatory Analysis Team Lead which identify specific legal deficiencies including the absence of objective acceptance criteria, the unresolved conflict with the NRC’s own prototype definition, the failure to address prototype-to-commercial scaling, and the inadequate regulatory analysis. (https://www.regulations.gov/comment/NRC-2025-1503-0005) Sharon Hoffman (with Ace Hoffman) Carlsbad, California USA ###
Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
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Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
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