Nuclear safety rules quietly rewritten to favor AI

The US Department of Energy (DoE) program that would see three new experimental commercial nuclear reactors launched by July 4 is the driver behind the secret rewriting of nuclear safety and security standards, says a report released Wednesday by NPR.

It said, “sweeping changes [which have not been made public] were made to accelerate development of a new generation of nuclear reactor designs” known as small modular reactors (SMRs).

The report also noted that the project is being “backed by billions in private equity, venture capital and public investments. Backers of the reactors, including tech giants Amazon, Google and Meta, have said they want the reactors to one day supply cheap, reliable power for artificial intelligence.”

NPR stated that it had obtained copies of over a dozen of the new orders, which “slash hundreds of pages of requirements for security at the reactors.”

Rules watered down

The news organization said that the revised set of rules includes:

• Loosened groundwater rules: “Protection of groundwater is no longer a ‘must.’ Rather companies must give ‘consideration’ to ‘avoiding or minimizing’ radioactive contamination. Requirements for monitoring and documentation are also softened.” The requirement to use the “best available technology” to protect water supplies was also removed, and the words “should be” or “may be” were substituted for “prohibited” and “must” in the regulations.
• Environmental protections stripped: “Rather than requiring protection of the environment, the new order suggests ‘minimizing’ environmental impacts ‘if practical.’”
  For example,  “radiological activities that have the potential to impact the environment must be conducted in a manner that protects populations of aquatic animals, terrestrial plants, and terrestrial animals in local ecosystems from adverse effects due to radiation and radioactive material released from DOE operations” became the watered-down “consideration may be given to avoiding or minimizing, if practical, potential adverse impacts to aquatic animals, terrestrial plants, and terrestrial animals in local ecosystems from radiation and releases of radioactive material, using a graded approach.”
• Security rules slashed: Hundreds of pages of security rules were trimmed from the new orders. More than 500 pages of documentation was reduced to a 23-page order, reducing several critical areas to bullet points.
• Radioactive waste management guidelines truncated: The NPR noted that a 59-page manual was condensed into a 25-page order that omitted requirements for waste packaging and monitoring.

The threshold for accident investigations has also been changed. NPR stated, “the new order raises the bar for an official accident investigation from incidents that expose workers to two times the legal dose of radioactive material, to those at four times.”

It said that the DoE’s justification for the changes was, “the reduction of unnecessary regulations will increase innovation in the industry without jeopardizing safety.”

However, NPR noted, “The new orders strip out some guiding principles of nuclear safety, notably a concept known as “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA), which requires nuclear reactor operators to keep levels of radiation exposure below the legal limit whenever they can. The ALARA standard has been in use for decades at both the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

It pointed out, “Removing the standard means that new reactors could be constructed with less concrete shielding, and workers could work longer shifts, potentially receiving higher doses of radiation.” That could lower construction and operating costs for the new plants.

Not just a regulatory decision

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said, “[the DoE’s] quiet dismantling of foundational nuclear safety protocols is not just a regulatory decision, it’s a wholesale redrafting of how enterprise infrastructure risk will be allocated in the years ahead. Historically, nuclear safety has been defined not only by engineering rigor but by layered governance, independent oversight, and traceability across systems.”

Enterprise leaders that are evaluating SMR-backed power solutions, he said, “must now accept that the reactor fueling their AI cluster may be governed by internal directives that are not published, independently audited, or publicly challengeable.”

Gogia pointed out, “this is not a risk that sits at the grid edge. It flows all the way into boardrooms, risk registers, and business continuity plans. The absence of oversight is not neutral. It functions as a debt instrument, with interest accumulating until the moment failure occurs.”

He said, “[it is] now incumbent on CIOs, infrastructure leaders, and sustainability officers to recreate that risk scaffolding contractually, procedurally, and operationally or prepare to inherit the consequences when design intent is outrun by operational ambiguity.”

Hyperscalers may have reason to be worried

Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “the only way to look at this from a tech angle is to put yourself in the shoes of the hyperscalers that are directly incentivized to find ways to power their AI data centers. So they are funding the development of these modular nuclear reactors, and now we hear that perhaps safety shortcuts are being taken to produce them more quickly.”

He pointed out, “[if] I am Google / Meta / Amazon, I’m worried about this. It’s not that we expect these data center sites to host nuclear reactors, so it’s not about the direct risk of a radioactive event. But since they are funding them, there’s reputational risk if the reactors melt down and harm people or the environment.”

Jackson said that there is already a lot of social pushback against the expansion of data centers for AI. There are environmental concerns about the use of water, the amount of power to be consumed, and the possible emissions that go along with it. Funding nuclear power sources, he said, “is supposed to be a way [for hyperscalers] to mitigate those reputational risks, since they don’t contribute to carbon emissions. But if the nuclear power plant negatively impacts worker or citizen safety, or contaminates the environment, that’s an issue.”

The process by which the regulations have been changed is also an issue. Matt Kimball, VP and principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said that he does not think that anyone likes to see rules and regulations rewritten or edited behind closed doors. “These kinds of actions make it easy for the public to be suspicious. And it is a little difficult to fully comment on the rule changes implemented, as they appear significant.” 

However, he added, “if these rule changes were made to enable an accelerated path to employing small modular reactors (SMRs), I can see where perhaps some changes were required, or a separate set of rules [needed] around deploying an SMR. When it comes to SMR technology, it is designed to be less impactful on the environment. Partly because of size (significantly less fuel) and partly because of design.”

‘Referee now plays for the home team’

Kimball pointed out that while an SMR works on the same principle as a large-scale nuclear plant, using controlled fission to generate heat which is then converted to electricity, its design reduces environmental impacts such as groundwater contamination, water use, and the impact in the event of failure. For example, he said, the integral reactor design in an SMR, with all components in a single vessel, eliminates external piping. This means that accidents would be self-contained, reducing the environmental impact.

In addition, he said, SMRs can be air-cooled, which greatly reduces the amount of water required. “These are just a couple of examples of how an SMR differs from the large industrial nuclear power plants we think of when we think of nuclear power.” 

Because of differences like this, said Kimball, “I can see where rules generated/strengthened in the post-Three Mile Island era might need to be revisited for this new nuclear era. But it is really difficult to speak to how ‘loose’ these rules have become, and whether distinctions between SMRs and large-scale nuclear plants comprise the majority of the changes reported.”

Finally, he said, “I don’t think I need to spend too many words on articulating the value of nuclear to the hyperscale or AI data center. The era of the gigawatt datacenter is upon us, and the traditional means of generating power can’t support this insatiable demand. But we have to ensure we deploy power infrastructure, such as SMRs, in a responsible, ethical, and safe manner.” 

Further to that, Gogia pointed out that for CIOs and infrastructure architects, the risks extend well beyond potential radiation leaks. “What matters more immediately is that system anomalies — mechanical, thermal, software-related — may not be documented, investigated, or escalated with the diligence one would expect from an NRC-governed facility,” he said. “This has a direct impact on uptime guarantees, incident response, and the validity of disaster recovery protocols. Power stability becomes less predictable. Maintenance windows may widen. Root cause analysis becomes speculative, particularly in the absence of rigorous operational logs, comprehensive event tracking, or independent oversight.”

The most underappreciated change in this shift, Gogia added, ”is not what was cut, but who now decides what is good enough. The move from independent NRC oversight to internal DOE authorization creates a fundamental misalignment between how enterprise risk is managed and how reactor safety is being governed. In simple terms: the referee now plays for the home team.”