NRC Should Streamline Adjudications, not Shift the Burden

The Breakthrough Institute is currently engaging extensively as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) implements its ongoing wholesale revision of its regulatory framework following Executive Order 14300. As the NRC publishes a series of interrelated proposed rules affecting licensing, oversight, and timelines, BTI has focused its input on helping ensure that these reforms function as a coherent, efficient, and durable regulatory system for advanced nuclear deployment. In that context, the proposed rule, Streamlining Contested Adjudications in Licensing Proceedings, is one part of a broader effort to reshape how the NRC conducts and manages licensing review.

BTI submitted a comment supporting the NRC’s goal of making contested adjudications faster and more predictable, while urging the agency to refine several features of the proposal before finalizing it. The NRC is justified in examining whether existing hearing procedures contain unnecessary formalities, outdated discovery mechanisms, or scheduling practices that no longer reflect the timeliness goals reflected in Executive Order 14300 and the ADVANCE Act.

This rule cannot be evaluated in isolation because related NRC rulemakings—Part 51, Part 53, and other licensing reforms—are moving on overlapping but nonidentical timelines. The final rule risks locking in a hearing framework before the surrounding procedural and substantive assumptions are stable. BTI therefore urges the NRC to treat cross-rule interaction as a core design issue, preserve flexibility where timing and record-development assumptions may change, and approach the broader reform effort as an integrated process rather than a series of isolated dockets.

At the same time, several features of the proposed rule may improve speed by moving burdens earlier, narrowing later access points, and tying important procedural consequences to assumed schedules. The NRC should preserve the rule’s streamlining objective while clarifying key definitions, revising proposed § 2.309(k) so full merits showings occur after admissibility, keeping the proposed attorney-only representation rule for non-individuals, and committing to revisit the framework after implementation experience accumulates. NRC’s effort to streamline the process is imperative, but the NRC should finalize a rule that is not only faster on paper but also more coherent and workable in practice.