WASHINGTON — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a morale problem and needs to do something about it, a senator representing the state where agency headquarters is located said in a hearing Wednesday.
“It needs to be first acknowledged that you have a problem,” Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) told Christopher Hanson, the NRC chair. “You then need to work with the workforce to find out the reason for what is happening here.”
During a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Cardin dinged Hanson about how commission employees have lately rated the civilian nuclear regulator much lower in surveys about good government workplaces.
NRC was rated 21 out of 27 in a recent best-places-in-the-federal-government-to-work survey, Cardin said. In 2022, commission employees rated the NRC 66.5 in the Office of Personnel Management’s latest employee viewpoints survey, down nearly 20 points from 81.8 in 2010, Cardin said.
“I acknowledge those,” Hanson said. “Ten years ago or so we were number one in feds, the best place to work in government. We were also growing a lot, there was a lot of promotion potential, we were looking at the nuclear renaissance, we were 25%, 30% bigger than we are now, and we’ve shrunk a lot.”
Then, Hanson said, just as nuclear energy was attracting federal interest as a means of mitigating climate change while also shoring up a mostly domestic energy supply, “the pandemic hit.”
NRC is headquartered in Rockville, Md., just outside of Washington.
