After nearly a year of bicameral debate and dealing, the Senate on Tuesday passed a bill designed to ease exports of U.S. nuclear technology and reform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
It was an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote, opposed only by two of the voting senators. One was Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the progressive, pacifist liberal of Massachusetts who took aim at what he said was the bill’s weakening of nuclear nonproliferation standards.
The heavily amended Fire Grants and Safety Act of 2023, which includes a compromise version of the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, passed 88-2. It passed the House in May, 393-13.
It now heads to the White House. As of deadline for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, President Joe Biden (D) had not said whether he would sign the legislation.
If signed, the bill would among other things:
- 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.”
- Require the Department of Energy, within one year of the bill’s passage, to study the global civilian nuclear industry and tell Congress how U.S. allies are deploying or planning to deploy nuclear energy.
The ADVANCE Act took a long and winding road to the President’s desk.
Sponsored by Sen. Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.), the bill originated in the Senate in March 2023, got stapled to that chamber’s version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act in July 2023, removed from the defense bill by the House in December 2023, then blended with a similar House bill and crammed into a unrelated piece of legislation in May in a bid to speed its passage through Congress in a presidential election year that has already paralyzed or outright killed other legislative efforts.
While the ADVANCE Act has enjoyed bipartisan and bicameral support since it appeared in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee more than a year ago, it has since its earliest days earned Markey’s uncompromising scorn.
On Tuesday, picking up where he left off when the bill cleared the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee about a year ago, Markey gave a scalding floor speech condemning the bill.
“There are many in this institution who want to see a vast expansion of nuclear power using plutonium and uranium in the United States and they also support a vast expansion of nuclear power plants around the world using uranium and plutonium,” Markey said Tuesday. “A rapid expansion of nuclear activity should be accompanied by a rapid expansion of the resources and regulators that help protect community health and safety.”
Markey said the bill would turn the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into the “Nuclear Retail Commission,” and that it would water down, if not cripple, U.S. nuclear nonproliferation laws by requiring the Department of Energy to identity countries that might be eligible to import U.S. nuclear technology, even if they have not already agreed to the strict U.S. nonproliferation standards contained in so-called 123 Agreements.
“[I[f we get into a race with other countries, Russia, China, in the export of nuclear power plants, we should not lower the standards,” Markey said. “We should ensure that we’re in as the responsible provider of nuclear power around the world so that we reduce, dramatically, the threat of nonproliferation.”
