Matthew Marzano Is Exactly Who I Said He Was

After my last post, criticizing the Democrats nominee for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Matthew Marzano, a lot of folks in the nuclear tribe insisted that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Marzano’s five year gig as a reactor operator, they said, made him uniquely qualified to join the commission: it would be a boon to have a commissioner with deep knowledge of reactor operations and the regulatory rules that governed them. But Marzano’s confirmation hearing earlier this week should make clear that if he is seated on the NRC, he will be a defender of the status quo, not an advocate for regulatory modernization.

When asked directly by Senator Shelley Moore Capito, the ranking Republican on the committee, what regulations he would change based on his training and experience operating reactors, Marzano couldn’t name a single one. When asked how he would have voted on recent decisions by the commission, he claimed to be insufficiently familiar with the details of those decisions to offer an opinion, despite having worked on the NRC’s oversight committee in the Senate for almost three years. When asked when he expected TerraPower’s Natrium reactor to begin operation, he told Capito that it already had a construction license, only to be corrected by the Senator and forced to acknowledge that it does not. And when asked how long he thought it would take for the NRC to revamp its subsequent license renewal process to assure that renewals can be completed within 18 months, Marzano said he couldn’t say, despite the fact that NRC Chairman Chris Hanson, under pressure from the committee that Marzano has staffed for the last three years, has already directed the NRC staff to have a revamped process in place within 9 months.

More broadly, at every critical juncture at which Marzano had the opportunity to demonstrate that he was serious about regulatory modernization, he chose not to. Asked by Senator Edward Markey if he supported the NRC’s current mission statement, which he read verbatim during his questioning, Marzano reaffirmed his support, despite the fact that Congress overwhelmingly voted to change it earlier this year. This answer should put to rest any doubt that Marzano was a determined opponent of mission modernization as the ADVANCE Act wended its way through Congress.

Asked whether he supported Congressional action to amend the Atomic Energy Act to eliminate the requirement that the Commission hold mandatory hearings on all license determinations, even when they are uncontested, an action that the Commission itself has repeatedly asked Congress to take, Marzano refused to do so. Asked whether he would have supported the Commission’s decision to reverse its approval of subsequent license renewal for two power plants, one in Florida and one in Pennsylvania, a decision that has cast substantial doubt upon license renewals for much of the current nuclear fleet, Marzano said he too would have voted to reverse those approvals - this, ironically, being one of the few policy decisions he clearly stated his position on.

When asked, repeatedly, about improving the efficiency of NRC regulation, Marzano made the usual gestures toward regulatory efficiency. But nothing he said would have been out of place in former Commissioner Jeff Baran’s June 2023 memo to the commission on regulatory efficiency, undertaken after ten years as a commissioner and only as it became clear that his confirmation was in trouble. Neither Baran in his testimony and memo last year, nor Marzano in his testimony this week, suggested or endorsed any change in current regulation to improve efficiency. Both suggested, rather, that better process within the existing regulations is the path to efficiency. Which perhaps has some merit. But it is also a classic tactic by defenders of bureaucracy to ward off serious reforms.

Marzano, tellingly in his opening statement, made no mention of regulatory modernization, promising only to be “forward looking.” He offered familiar blandishments about the importance of nuclear energy, advanced reactors, and regulatory efficiency. But at every turn, he made clear that he will be a defender of the status quo at the commission, essentially arguing that early engagement with licensees and applicants and improved communication with the public was all that was necessary to reduce the burdens that the agency’s extreme regulatory conservatism, costly rules, and baroque procedures impose upon nuclear development, operations, and innovation.

In response to Senator Capito’s challenge to name any regulation he would change based on his experience as a reactor operator, Marzano made vague reference to the application of “risk insights” to regulatory oversight. When pressed to provide a specific example, he cited a change that the NRC has already made that gives operators more flexibility with regard to maintenance schedules. This change has no doubt benefited the industry. But it is not the sort of thing that should give anyone any confidence that Marzano has any idea how a modernized agency might preside over the commercialization and licensing of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of next generation reactors over the next several decades, as the Administration, and his Democratic sponsors in the Senate insist that it must.

And why would he? The entirety of his technical training and relatively brief industry experience has involved the operation of large conventional reactors. That training makes Marzano unusual among the general public but not within the nuclear industry. At present there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 3600 licensed nuclear operators in the United States—and many more if you count those who once held a license but no longer do because they have moved on to other jobs.

Marzano, in short, understands the rules that govern the operations of conventional reactors and knows how to follow them. That’s the sort of background that might be useful for an agency that expects to keep an aging reactor fleet safely operating and perhaps license a few new ones. But it is not remotely what this moment, when the agency needs to remake itself to license a new generation of advanced reactors to double or triple present US nuclear capacity, demands.

That matters because while there is a lot of loose talk from both the Administration and the nuclear industry these days about a renewed push to deploy more large AP1000 reactors like the two in Georgia that recently began operations, there are only a handful of sites where there is both appropriate infrastructure to deploy multiple new AP1000s (a necessary condition for cost-effective deployment) and a vertically integrated regulated monopoly utility in cost of service electricity systems where the cost of building these reactors might be rate-based. Beyond that, most promising sites for new nuclear reactors are either too small to support large 1 GW reactors or are located in liberalized electricity markets where it remains unlikely that anyone will ever build a large light water reactor like the ones that Marzano spent his 20’s learning to operate.

My point here is not to dunk on large reactors. They have an important role to play globally but also require institutional arrangements that are absent in most US electricity markets. For this reason, absent sweeping changes to the structure and regulation of those markets, there is simply no path to a major build out of new nuclear capacity in the United States if it depends upon large regulated utilities building large reactors in the few cost of service electricity systems that remain in the United States. And that, unfortunately, is all that Marzano knows.

This is why regulatory modernization looms so large for the future of nuclear energy in the United States. Modernization would be helpful for efforts to build more AP1000s where that is feasible. But it is essential for smaller, advanced, and non-light water reactors, which will be necessary for any nuclear future in which we deploy new nuclear at scale, much of it at either sites that presently host existing nuclear plants or those that once hosted retired coal plants and nuclear succeeds in the liberalized electricity markets that account for the lion’s share of America’s electricity system. Neither the nuclear industry, nor the nuclear advocacy community, in my view, have fully come to terms with this basic reality. America is not France or China. New nuclear energy will not play a significant role in America’s energy future if it is predicated on the technological, institutional, and regulatory arrangements of the past.

Unfortunately, neither Matthew Marzano’s short career in the nuclear industry, his training, nor his even shorter time on the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, where his primary role appears to have been to hold the line on statutory changes that would require the NRC to transform itself more rapidly, suggest that Marzano is likely to be an ally, much less a leader, in the necessary effort to significantly modernize the NRC.