Up & Atom

President Donald Trump recently established the National Energy Dominance Council through an executive order aimed at increasing the United States’ energy production and achieving energy dominance. The executive order seeks to promote the use of US natural resources, including uranium, and the Council has been tasked with providing recommendations to the president within 100 days, including actions that can be taken to bring small modular nuclear reactors online. 

As fiscal year 2024 approaches, a partial government shutdown looms on the horizon once more. This would be the first partial government shutdown since the 36-day shutdown that began in late December 2018 and ended on January 25, 2019. While the NRC was unaffected by that shutdown because its FY 2019 budget had been enacted, at this time Congress has not passed any of the annual appropriation bills for FY 2024, including that for the NRC.

President Joe Biden has elevated Democratic Commissioner Christopher T. Hanson to serve as Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).  Mr. Hanson succeeds former Republican Chairman Christine Svinicki—the longest-serving Commissioner in the history of the agency—who stepped-down on January 20, 2021.  Although timing is uncertain, President Biden also is expected to nominate a fifth Commissioner to fill the former Chair’s vacant seat.  If that pick shares Chairman Hanson’s views, the agency’s longstanding threshold for intervenor challenges to license applications could be overturned.

In a recent lawflash, our colleagues in the litigation and environmental practice analyze the implications of the recent DC Circuit ruling in favor of the EPA’s national priorities listing (NPL) decisions. Meritor, Inc. challenged the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) listing of one of their facilities on the NPL under recent regulatory revisions that allowed the agency to consider “subsurface intrusion.” The DC Circuit rejected Meritor’s arguments, concluding that EPA’s decision was reasonable and consistent with the governing regulatory provisions. This decision will likely have a significant effect on the evaluation and remediation of contamination beneath manufacturing, chemical, and other industrial facilities around the country.