Senate Battle Brews Over Nuclear Regulator

When President Barack Obama first named Jeff Baran to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2014, the Democratic majority in the Senate confirmed the former congressional staffer in a 52-40 vote. When President Donald Trump renominated the Democrat for another five-year term in 2018, the GOP-led Senate approved Baran by a simple voice tally.

But President Joe Biden’s plan to give Baran a third stint on the federal body responsible for the world’s largest fleet of commercial reactors has already hit the rocks, as Republicans move to block a commissioner critics paint as an “obstructionist” with a record of voting for policies nuclear advocates say make it harder to keep existing plants open and more expensive, if not impossible, to deploy advanced next-generation atomic technologies.

Last Friday, the Senate went on break for the next two weeks, all but guaranteeing that Baran’s current term ends on June 30 without a decision on whether he will rejoin the five-member board, creating a vacancy that could cause gridlock on some decisions and mark a return to the partisan feuds of a decade ago.

“His votes and positions simply do not align with enabling the safe use of nuclear technologies that the NRC is expected to undertake in the coming years,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said in a June 14 statement announcing her plan to vote against Baran. “Throughout his past nomination processes, he has a history of telling the Committee he supports advanced nuclear, and then not doing so once in office.”

The White House and the Democrats who control the Senate hope to reinstate Baran in a vote next month, casting the regulator as a sober-minded professional with an ear to the woes of those living in polluted or impoverished communities. The battle highlights growing tensions over nuclear energy in the United States, the country that built the world’s first full-scale fission power plant nearly seven decades ago but all but ceased expanding atomic energy in the 30 years since the Cold War ended.

Stopping the emissions heating the planet means using electricity for automobiles, home appliances and heavy industry. That, in turn, requires not only shoring up an aging electrical grid so incapable of handling today’s demand that average blackouts have increased 12% since 2013, but delivering steady electricity without greenhouse gas pollution.

The only major economies to pull that off so far have either benefited from vast hydroelectric resources, like Brazil or Québec, or built a bunch of nuclear reactors, like France or Slovakia. While cheap and fast-growing, renewables such as solar and wind depend on huge amounts of land and minerals, and frequently need a fossil fuel like natural gas to shore up the grid’s supply when the sky is dark or the air is still.

Even as rivals like China and Russia invested heavily in new nuclear plants and technologies, the United States shuttered more than a dozen reactors in just the past decade, replacing that lost generation almost entirely with fossil fuels.

The only new reactor licensed and built from the ground up in the U.S. since the NRC succeeded the Atomic Energy Commission as the country’s primary nuclear authority in 1975 came online this year at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in eastern Georgia. The reactor was supposed to debut the latest American-made technology to the world. But China not only beat the U.S. to deploy the new model of reactor first, it built four before the lone American project could finish one — and plans to construct two more.

Meanwhile, U.S. companies are paying billions to Russia’s state-owned nuclear company, which is the world’s only commercial supplier of key types of uranium fuel — in particular the variety needed for some of the “small modular reactors” that the American industry hopes will trigger a renaissance of reactor construction. But the U.S. is behind on more than just fuel for SMRs. The NRC only certified its first SMR design in January — more than three years after Russia actually hooked its first completed SMR up to the grid.

Those signs of U.S. atomic decline are symptoms of the regulatory priorities critics say Baran represents.

“His voting record shows he’s been a consistent obstructionist, a defender of a regulatory system that has basically presided over the long-term decline of the nuclear sector in the U.S.,” said Ted Nordhaus, executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based environmental think tank that advocates for nuclear energy. “There’s a broad view at a pretty bipartisan level that we need nuclear energy. If Democrats are serious about it, they have to stop putting a guy like Jeff Baran at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

The Breakthrough Institute was among five pro-nuclear groups that signed on to a June 12 letter urging the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to reject the White House’s nomination of Baran for a third term.

The NRC declined JS’s request to interview Baran.

“The outlook for nuclear has markedly changed and it’s an exciting time to be doing our important work,” Baran said in a March 17 speech to an agency conference.

“NRC has a key role to play in tackling the climate crisis. It’s our job to ensure the safety and security of nuclear power in the U.S. energy mix,” he continued. “That means we need to be ready. When utilities and vendors tell us we should expect numerous new designs and reactor applications, we should be ready to review them with sufficient resource and the right expertise.”

Baran came to power right as the last attempt at a “nuclear renaissance” fizzled.

At the start of this century, concern over climate-changing emissions from fossil fuels put a new premium on the reliable, zero-carbon electricity reactors produce. The federal government started work on what was supposed to be the world’s first permanent storage facility for radioactive waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Advanced new reactor designs were hitting the market. And utilities were buying them, placing orders to construct new nuclear plants at a rate unseen since the 1970s.

Then Obama took office and slashed funding to the Yucca Mountain project, a move that the Government Accountability Office, an independent federal watchdog, later concluded was entirely the result of political maneuvering on an issue that then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made a top personal priority. Two years later, the Fukushima accident in Japan triggered a new wave of reactor closures across the world. Countries like Germany and Taiwan even decided to prioritize shutting down nuclear stations over the fossil fuel plants fueling the climate crisis.

In the U.S., where control over electrical utilities is divided between state and federal governments, officials in New York and California joined the effort to close down nuclear plants, aided by the country’s gas drilling boom brought on by the popularization of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, technology. Cheap gas largely took the place of nuclear reactors with each one that shut down.

As governments scrambled to keep operating reactors from going out of business, Baran voted last July to increase the frequency of federal safety inspections on existing nuclear plants, arguing that it would allow for “more focused inspections” that would “provide the staff flexibility to take a deeper dive into different areas of high safety importance” as the reactor fleet ages.

Baran also came out against measures that supporters of new reactor designs say would have helped tailor the regulatory process to the specific needs of novel technologies.

New SMRs come in a range of designs that depart significantly from the large-scale, water-cooled reactors that make up the entire U.S. nuclear fleet. For example, some companies seeking to license SMRs propose using liquid salt or other coolants instead of water, and virtually all the designs are much smaller and produce a fraction of the total energy output of traditional reactors.

Yet Baran issued the NRC’s sole vote against three recent proposals to make it easier to build an SMR at a former coal- or gas-fired plant, to tailor the size of the emergency preparedness zone to the size of the reactor, and to update the environmental permitting requirements for new reactors to account for the dramatic difference in water use between traditional and new designs.

While outnumbered by the other four commissioners, Baran’s hard-line view against easing regulations mirrors the Fukushima era in which he came to power, when Democrats Gregory Jaczko and Allison Macfarlane chaired the NRC and delivered on Reid’s efforts to block key nuclear projects. Nordhaus described Baran as a holdover from that period.

“My hope is that, in rejecting this confirmation, Congress in a fairly bipartisan way with some Democratic votes, sends a message to the NRC that this business-as-usual regulatory that we’ve had for almost 50 years is not the regulator we need,” he said. “There would be symbolic value in Congress saying, ‘We’re not playing these games anymore with the NRC.’”

Baran is not without his defenders among atomic energy advocates.

“It’s not as though he’s anti-nuclear,” said Jackie Toth, the Washington-based deputy director of the Good Energy Collective, a progressive pro-nuclear group headquartered in California. She noted that Baran’s critics often paint him as having the same views as Jaczko and Macfarlane. “To pool them together without looking at the full breadth of his record and what he’s done is unfair.”

Baran “has never voted against or worked to stop” construction of new facilities or certification of new designs, she said. He voted to allow novel reactors to combine licenses, streamlining a process that can help push the total cost of permitting a new project into the $1 billion range. He also approved permits for new facilities to produce radioactive isotopes for medical use.

“He prioritizes safety and not simply taking industry at its word,” Toth said. “It’s critical to have on the commission someone who understands both the need for increased nuclear capacity on our grid for climate, communities and energy security, but still wants to make sure the industry is putting its best foot forward.”

In particular, she said, Baran has been a crucial supporter of efforts to make it easier for poor and polluted communities — which, thanks to the U.S. history of racist legal and cultural norms, tend to be populated by Black, Latino or Native Americans — to participate in the public regulatory process. While she said she “did not have concerns regarding” the other commissioners’ dedication to environmental justice, Baran’s focus on the issue served to “complement” the other four regulators.

“We feel it’s an asset to have someone like him at the NRC who gets the climate imperative for new reactors but also upholds the agency’s mission to be a trusted regulator that prioritizes public health and safety,” Toth said.

But as Congress presses ahead with legislation to boost nuclear power, Baran’s opponents see him as a potential hurdle to implementing the laws.

In 2018, Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which directed the NRC to establish a novel regulatory framework for new technologies that takes into account the differences between advanced reactors and traditional ones. Baran consistently voted against adjusting the size of a new nuclear plant’s emergency planning zone to align with the size of the reactor, or insisted that the Federal Emergency Management Agency should decide even though the NRC is the regulator with the technical expertise to make the final call.

Over the past two years, Congress earmarked billions of dollars for new reactors in the landmark infrastructure laws Biden signed. And the same Senate committee that narrowly voted along party lines to confirm Baran’s renomination for another term overwhelmingly passed a new bill known as the ADVANCE Act to speed up deployment of new reactor technologies earlier this month.

Unlike that bill, authored by Capito and co-sponsored by more Democrats than Republicans, it’s unclear whether Baran’s confirmation will garner enough bipartisan votes to pass. Capito issued a statement vowing to vote against Baran. Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), conservatives who caucus with the Democrats but often vote alongside Republicans, have not yet said publicly whether they will support Baran. Neither responded to requests for comment on Monday.

But taking Baran at his word that he will support steps to make it easier to build new reactors would be “rolling the dice” that such statements were not just “political opportunism” as public support for nuclear energy grows, said a Republican Senate staffer who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the nomination.

“Are we going to take our chances that what he’s been saying over the past couple of months is what he actually believes now over what he’s voted for the previous nine years?” the staffer said.