NRC Commissioner says doesn’t know the future of NRC under Trump, ‘Does anybody?’

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Christopher Hanson, commissioner for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Monday he does not know where the future of the agency stands under the current Donald Trump administration, the executive order threatening diluting power, and the current lawsuit against the agency.

“I don’t know,” Hanson said with a laugh in answer to a question by the Exchange Monitor at a moderated panel at the 2025 Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in Washington. “Does anybody?”

Hanson continued, “​​I think there are questions that are going to get adjudicated in the courts and so on and so forth. But I think having that independent regulatory body is going to be so critical here. And I think it’s worth defending.”

In February, Trump issued an executive order that gave the Office of Management and Budget power over the regulatory process that used to fall to “independent regulatory agencies,” which include the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). 

More recently, a coalition of five states and three private nuclear companies filed a lawsuit against the nuclear regulator in a federal district court in Texas, arguing the NRC inhibited advanced reactor development. The plaintiffs claim in the lawsuit that NRC regulations make it difficult to meet increasing electricity demands, and that NRC has stifled expansion of advanced nuclear technology with a “lengthy” and “restrictive” licensing framework.

The Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, which then-President Joe Biden signed in July 2024, is meant to reform NRC’s methods of issuing nuclear licenses and to require the Department of Energy to research and find ways other than the gold-standard, civil-nuclear 1-2-3 agreement to help get special nuclear materials to aspirant nuclear-power users abroad.

“Congress had some pointers for us in [the ADVANCE Act] about not unnecessarily hindering the deployment of nuclear power,” Hanson said, before adding, “I might have argued that we’ve never unnecessarily hindered the deployment of nuclear power.”

“Everybody wants us to go faster, right?” Hanson said. “Folks want things cheaper and faster.”

Hanson said he believes in “institutions,” and that even though “they need to adapt, constantly… we’re still much better off as a society with them than without them.”

Hanson said that he looks at NRC as an “institution with this incredibly rich history and a really strong performance record, and I hope that any administration coming in will look at us and say, okay, they’re doing a good job.”