NRC considering, not committed to, establishing new export branch, chair says

As part of a review of its new responsibilities under a bill passed this year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission might create a new branch focused on exports, or it might not, the agency’s head told media Tuesday.

“We may do that, but that’s a discussion that we’re still taking a look at,” Christopher Hanson, chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in an online media availability with reporters. 

The Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act gave the NRC the option of creating an International Nuclear Export and Innovation Branch within its Office of International Programs. 

Hanson said creating the branch would be a “slightly different way” of organizing the international programs office, but that the office is already doing many of the things that the new branch would do and NRC was wary of “reinvent[ing] the wheel.” 

Creating the branch is optional but reporting to Congress about the sorts of things the branch would do is mandatory. 

The first forum for that reporting will be the agency’s budget request, which according to the advance act “shall identify” the kinds of “international nuclear export and innovation activities” that Congress gave NRC the option to corral in a new branch. Like other federal agencies, the NRC nominally releases its annual budget request in February. Requests routinely appear later.

Among these are import and export licenses and international regulatory cooperation with regard to reactors and nuclear materials. 

President Joe Biden (D) signed the ADVANCE Act in July. A reassessment of NRC’s international programs were only a small part of the reforms the law requires. 

For the commission, one of the biggest changes is reforming the agency’s mission statement to require that the NRC’s licensing of nuclear power plants “does not unnecessarily limit” either “the civilian use of radioactive materials” or “the benefits of civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy technology to society.”

The law was silent as to what constitutes an unnecessary limitation, nor did it require the NRC to define the idea. Hanson on Tuesday sidestepped a pair of questions about which branch of government would be allowed to say what an unnecessary limit was, or whether federal courts could ultimately decide it.