Nuclear Regulatory Commission

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission came into existence on the 19th of January 1975, born from a crisis of credibility. The agency it replaced, the United States Atomic Energy Commission, had been dissolved because it was seen as too close to the industry it was supposed to police. America needed a watchdog for its nuclear power plants. What it got was something more complicated. For five decades, the NRC has sat at the center of debates about safety, secrecy, and whose interests a regulator really serves. This is the story of an agency charged with protecting the public from the invisible dangers of radiation, and the persistent question of whether it ever fully embraced that mission.

• 2. A Regulator Is Born

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  The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 split the old Atomic Energy Commission into two pieces. The AEC had been trying to both promote and regulate nuclear technology, and that dual role had grown untenable. One successor agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, took over nuclear weapons and research. The NRC took on civilian oversight: reactor safety, fuel cycle facilities, radioactive materials, and waste management.

  Bill Anders was the NRC's first chairman, appointed by President Gerald Ford and serving from the 19th of January 1975. The commission was designed to have five members appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate, each serving five-year terms. One commissioner would be designated chairman and serve as the principal executive officer. That structure has remained constant across more than twenty successive chairpersons.

  The agency that ERDA became is now the Department of Energy, which absorbed ERDA in 1977. In 2000, the National Nuclear Security Administration was carved out of DOE to handle nuclear weapons specifically. The NRC's civilian mandate, by contrast, stayed intact: reactor licensing, materials safety, and the long-term management of nuclear waste.

• 3. What the NRC Actually Does

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  Ninety-four power-producing reactors and thirty-one research and test reactors operate under NRC oversight across the United States. Each power-producing reactor site has resident inspectors who monitor daily operations on the ground. Specialized inspection teams with different areas of expertise conduct additional reviews at each site on a rotating basis.

  The NRC divides its mission across three program areas. Reactors covers commercial power generation as well as research facilities. Materials covers nuclear applications in medicine, industry, and academia, plus the facilities that produce nuclear fuel. Waste covers transportation, storage, and disposal of radioactive material, and the decommissioning of facilities that have reached the end of their useful life.

  Headquarters sits in unincorporated North Bethesda, Maryland, though two of the three main buildings list Rockville, Maryland, as their mailing address. Four regional offices extend the agency's reach: Region I in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, handling the Northeast; Region II in Atlanta, covering most of the Southeast; Region III in Lisle, Illinois, for the Midwest; and Region IV in Arlington, Texas, covering the West and South Central states. A fifth regional office in Walnut Creek, California, existed until the late 1990s, when it was absorbed into Region IV and dissolved.

  The NRC's proposed budget for fiscal year 2024 was just under ten million dollars, with nearly two thousand nine hundred full-time equivalent staff. Ninety percent of that budget is recovered through fees paid by the licensees the agency regulates.

• 4. Regulatory Capture, Documented

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  Twelve years after the NRC opened its doors, a 1987 congressional report titled "NRC Coziness with Industry" concluded that the agency had not maintained an arms-length posture with the commercial nuclear power industry, and had, in some critical areas, abdicated its regulatory role altogether. That was not a fringe assessment. Between September 1989 and 1994, the NRC either waived or chose not to enforce regulations at nuclear power reactors more than three hundred forty times.

  Barack Obama, while running for president in 2007, described the five-member commission as having become "captive of the industries that it regulates." The phrase had circulated in academic literature long before Obama used it. Byrne and Hoffman, writing in 1996, argued that since the 1980s the agency had generally favored industry interests and been unduly responsive to industry concerns while failing to pursue tough regulation.

  The case of George Galatis, a worker at the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant in Connecticut, illustrated the problem in human terms. Galatis repeatedly warned his management that spent fuel rods were being placed too quickly into the spent storage pool, and that the number of rods exceeded specifications. Management ignored him. When he took his concerns directly to the NRC, the agency eventually admitted that it knew about both forbidden practices, which were occurring at many plants, and had chosen to do nothing. Galatis was fired and blacklisted.

  Frank N. von Hippel wrote in March 2011 that in the thirty-two years since Three Mile Island, interest in nuclear regulation had declined precipitously, and that regulatory capture could be countered only by vigorous public scrutiny and congressional oversight.

• 5. Fukushima and Its Fallout

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  The day before the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan on the 11th of March 2011, the NRC had approved a twenty-year license extension for Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. The Vermont state legislature had voted overwhelmingly against that extension. The plant had been found to be leaking radioactive materials through a network of underground pipes that the plant's operator, Entergy, had denied under oath even existed. At a 2009 hearing, the NRC itself did not know the pipes were there.

  When the Fukushima Daiichi plant suffered meltdowns of three reactor cores, forcing the Japanese government to evacuate approximately one hundred thousand citizens, NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko sought lessons for the United States. On the 9th of February, 2012, Jaczko cast the lone dissenting vote when the NRC voted four to one to allow Atlanta-based Southern Co to build and operate two new reactors at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. He said he could not support issuing the license "as if Fukushima never happened."

  In the disaster's aftermath, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a study in March 2011 citing fourteen near-misses at American plants in 2010 alone. A coalition of forty-five groups and individuals asked the NRC to suspend licensing activity at twenty-one proposed reactor projects in fifteen states until a thorough post-Fukushima examination was completed. The petitioners included Public Citizen, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, and San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace.

  The NRC responded by developing the Diverse and Flexible Coping Strategies program, known as FLEX, which requires licensed nuclear power plants to account for extreme external events, including seismic activity, flooding, and high winds, that could cause loss of power and loss of cooling capacity. FLEX strategies have since been implemented at all operating nuclear power plants in the country.

• 6. Hidden Flood Risk

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  After Fukushima, the NRC prepared an internal report in 2011 examining the risk that dam failures posed to the nation's nuclear reactors. When a redacted version appeared on the NRC's website on the 6th of March, a full, unredacted version was leaked to the public. The two documents told very different stories.

  The unredacted report concluded that one-third of the American nuclear fleet, thirty-four plants, may face flooding hazards greater than the ones their designs were built to withstand. NRC management had been aware of some aspects of this risk for fifteen years. Richard Perkins, a risk engineer at the NRC and the lead author of the leaked report, filed a complaint with the agency's Inspector General, asserting that staff had improperly redacted information to prevent public disclosure because it would embarrass the agency. A second NRC risk engineer, Larry Criscione, raised parallel concerns, saying that management claims that plants could currently mitigate flooding events were false.

  The Oconee Nuclear Station drew particular scrutiny. An NRC letter from 2009 stated that a failure of the nearby Jocassee Dam was a credible event. The NRC estimated the odds of a Jocassee-type dam failing at roughly one in three thousand six hundred per year. With Oconee licensed to operate for another twenty years, the odds of the dam failing during that window work out to approximately one in one hundred eighty. For the thirty-four reactors the NRC identified as sitting downstream from more than fifty dams, analysts calculated roughly a twenty-five percent chance that at least one dam would fail over the next forty years. David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists summarized the gap between the public record and the internal one bluntly: "The NRC is lying to the American public about the safety of U.S. reactors."

• 7. Licensing, Reform, and the Road Ahead

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  Between 2007 and 2009, thirteen companies applied to the NRC for licenses to build twenty-five new reactors in the United States. The wave of applications stalled when abundant natural gas supplies eroded the economic case for new nuclear construction. Four reactors were permanently closed in 2013: San Onofre units two and three in California, Crystal River 3 in Florida, and Kewaunee in Wisconsin. Vermont Yankee shut down on the 29th of December 2014. Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, New York, thirty miles from New York City, closed on the 30th of April 2021.

  In 2019 the NRC approved a second twenty-year license extension for Turkey Point units three and four, the first time any reactor had been licensed for an eighty-year total lifetime. Similar extensions for roughly twenty reactors are planned or pending.

  Critics argued that the agency's caution about innovation had allowed other countries to move faster. A May 2022 report in Reason magazine noted that Oregon's NuScale Power had signed agreements to deploy small modular reactors in Poland by 2029 and in Romania by 2028, with additional memoranda of understanding in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine. Advanced reactor technology may be operating in Europe before the first comparable American unit is complete.

  On the 23rd of May 2025, President Trump signed executive order 14300, directing the NRC to coordinate with the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Government Efficiency to plan downsizing and deregulation. The NRC launched a reorganization in February 2026 to streamline decision-making and accelerate the licensing and deployment of nuclear technology. The agency had already issued internal guidance to staff for faster approval of reactor designs tested under Department of Energy or Department of Defense programs. Ho Nieh, designated as chairman effective the 8th of January 2026, is now at the head of an agency navigating the most significant structural pressure it has faced since the one that created it.