Over the past decade or so, the once- sleepy nuclear sector has become a hive of activity. Venture capital drove innovative reactor designs promising lower risk. The need for low-carbon energy eroded environmental opposition. Electrification and artificial intelligence boosted energy demand, and the geopolitical weaponization of energy put a premium on domestic generation. As a result, nuclear regulators suddenly face pressure to rapidly assess an unprecedented number and variety of projects.

How regulators respond to the renewed nuclear push will determine winners and losers among reactor designers, power companies and nations. It could also determine the future safety of nuclear energy and the longevity of its revived public support. Tension between economic and protective pressures is raising tough questions about the role of nuclear regulators, their posture towards the technology and industry, and how they meet their obligations to society.

Those tensions came to the boil last year in the United States. For years, Congress had pushed the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to speed up its reviews, and bipartisan legislation, passed in 2024, seemed set to boost the agency’s efficiency. Then, on his return to the White House, President Donald Trump started pushing for measures that called into question the independence of the NRC, which had been recognized internationally for decades as a model of effective nuclear oversight.

Nature Outlook: Nuclear power

Trump issued executive orders asserting unprecedented “supervision and control” over all of the country’s hitherto independent regulatory agencies, and took direct aim at the NRC. The orders empowered his Department of Government Efficiency and the White House budget office to ensure that the agency was efficiently promoting nuclear energy. Then, in contravention of federal statutes, he dismissed one of the NRC’s five commissioners without cause.

The NRC began 2026 with a new chair appointed by the President, Ho Nieh, who champions his agency as an enabler of reactor construction and US nuclear technology exports. At the NRC’s annual Regulatory Information Conference in March, Nieh endorsed nuclear expansion — a departure from the measured tone of previous commissioners, who sought to avoid seeming to promote nuclear energy. “Licences are issued. Shovels go in the ground. And we start building nuclear reactors safely and securely in the United States,” he said.

Nieh asserts that his agency remains independent, and that it can play for “Team USA” while still putting safety first. But not everyone is convinced that a regulator wearing a team jersey can maintain public confidence in its licensing decisions and the thoroughness of its safety inspections. After the executive orders, Marco Brugmans, managing director of the nuclear regulator for the Netherlands, decried what he saw as a shift in the NRC’s mission, from safety assurance to promotion, as “a cardinal sin against the international rule that radiation and nuclear safety authorities must be able to oversee safety independently”.

Even some staunchly pro-nuclear voices have sounded concerns. After Trump fired commissioner Christopher Hanson in June 2025, the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, California, which has long advocated for increased use of nuclear power, warned that the politicization of nuclear energy would “almost certainly” torpedo long-wished-for reforms at the agency. And Doug True, senior vice-president and chief nuclear officer of the Washington DC-based Nuclear Energy Institute — a trade association dominated by operators of nuclear power plants — has warned that the United States must ensure the NRC’s independence to preserve “public confidence that nuclear is safe.”

Part of the concern is that an unabashedly pro-nuclear regulator would set the industry up for a collapse in public trust in the event of a nuclear accident. Last year, 29 former NRC officials warned of that risk in a letter to Congress, writing: “One significant nuclear safety event could derail the entire effort as was seen after the Three Mile Island accident which set back the industry for years due to loss of public support.”

How to balance the need to protect the public with other national interests is a challenge facing regulators worldwide. History provides some insights. But with new technology and politics at play, there is also much groping in the dark.

Independence blossoms

Congress created the NRC in 1974 with independence in sharp focus. The US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that hitherto managed all aspects of nuclear energy had lost credibility as a fair arbiter of safety, largely through misleading statements about the effectiveness of backup systems to cool reactor cores in an emergency. Congress replaced the AEC with two organizations: the Department of Energy (DoE), to continue developing and promoting nuclear energy, and the NRC to ensure safety. To insulate the NRC from undue influence, Congress decreed that the President could only terminate the five-year term of commissioners of independent agencies “for cause”. And to ensure bipartisan support, it decreed that no more than three commissioners could be from the same political party.

The creation of the NRC didn’t end accusations of bias. The assumed sufficiency of emergency cooling systems remained an issue at the agency in 1979, when one of the cores at the Three Mile Island power station in Pennsylvania partially melted down. Nearly a decade later, the Union of Concerned Scientists, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had put forward critiques that helped to undo the AEC, complained that the NRC still “maintained a fraternal relationship with the industry it was created to regulate”. Over time, however, the NRC gained a reputation as a global leader, and its independent governance structure became a standard.

The primacy of independence was codified internationally after the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion in the Soviet Union. The final report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1992 concluded that an independent technical review would “surely” have spotted the stricken reactor’s fatal flaws. Two years later, an IAEA treaty, the Convention on Nuclear Safety, came into force, committing states with nuclear power to “ensure an effective separation between the functions of the regulatory body and those of any other body or organization concerned with the promotion or utilization of nuclear energy”. The IAEA later deemed that effective separation should include protection from undue influence by individual political actors and parties. An appearance of independence, the agency said, was necessary to earn public confidence.

The case for independent oversight solidified further with the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in 2011. Multiple investigations determined that the accident was a product of regulatory capture, in which regulatory agencies succumb to pressure from the special-interest groups they are meant to police. The accident began with a massive earthquake and tsunami, but these were known hazards, and collusion between Japan’s regulator and the plant’s operator had left the plant unprepared. “Their regulatory attitude was ‘trust the utility’ and, as it turned out, that was not such a great decision,” says Andrew Kadak, a former nuclear-plant manager and specialist in nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Japan’s pre-Fukushima regulator resided in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which aggressively advocated for nuclear power in Japan and abroad. Investigators criticized frequent movement of staff members between the agency and nuclear operators, policies that constrained the regulator’s freedom to conduct inspections, and a dearth of technical capabilities within the agency. After the accident, Japan replaced the regulatory body with an independent, five-member commission called the Nuclear Regulation Authority. But a new regulator has not translated into new beginnings for the majority of Japan’s nuclear installations: 21 of the 54 reactors that were operating in March 2011 have now permanently shut down, and fewer than half of those remaining are currently operating.

In the wake of Fukushima, the IAEA called on all countries to review their nuclear-safety programmes, including their regulators’ independence. Several other countries quickly overhauled their regulatory frameworks. The United Kingdom, for example, created the Office for Nuclear Regulation, structured to operate at arm’s length from the government. South Korea replaced a regulator that resided within a nuclear-promoting ministry; the members of its post-2011 Nuclear Safety and Security Commission report to the prime minister and cannot be dismissed without cause.

The trajectory

The international regulatory-independence trend continues to the present under prodding from IAEA-coordinated inspections. In 2022, Hungary made its Atomic Energy Authority an independent organization, and Brazil followed suit in 2024. However, there are signs that the practice and meaning of independence might be evolving. And, although there’s no smoking gun showing undue influence to approve specific designs or projects, regulators are clearly facing pressure from governments and industry to approve more reactors.

In the light of the energy crisis brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Western European Nuclear Regulators’ Association (WENRA) has issued warnings against undue political pressure being brought to bear. Its message is that regulators are heeding the imperative to work efficiently, but efficient licensing review depends above all on the quality of the applications received. Petteri Tiippana, who heads Finland’s regulator and presently chairs WENRA, says he has not seen “direct interference in individual decisions”.

Insuk Jang, director of advanced nuclear reactor safety for South Korea’s regulator, says deep public concern about accidents like the one at Fukushima Daiichi keeps regulatory oversight strong. Speaking for herself and not the regulatory body, Jang says she sees societal concern as a natural buffer that makes nuclear promoters “highly cautious” about pressuring the agency even 15 years after the accident — and even as the South Korean government banks on advanced reactors to reduce the country’s dependence on imported natural gas.

Whether independent regulators should be enablers of nuclear development remains divisive. Mike Finnerty, chief inspector for the UK regulator, told the NRC conference that his agency had a duty to adjust standards to work faster and deliver the nuclear renaissance that the current UK government wants.

Nieh took a similar stand at the conference, stating that part of the NRC’s job was to help the United States “regain its leadership in nuclear from countries like Russia and China”. Nieh said the NRC was eliminating regulations and inspections that did not target “actual risks”. He insisted that these moves do not threaten safety: “It is not a shortcut. It is not a compromise.”

Easing the path

Kadak says that he is comfortable with a nuclear-enabling NRC, because it will foster the use of innovative reactor designs that passively cool down when active systems fail. Some of those reactors will not require the level of expertise and prescriptive regulations that the NRC developed for the current fleet of pressurized-water reactors, he explains.

Judi Greenwald, chief executive of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a think tank in Washington DC, supports next-generation nuclear as a climate solution. She sees an ‘enabling’ NRC as recognition that the United States cannot wait decades to build nuclear infrastructure. Given the need for low-carbon energy and the public’s growing comfort with nuclear energy, easing the path to new reactors aligns with “what’s considered to be in the public interest”, she says.

But not everyone agrees. Brugmans says he has “less concern” about the NRC’s independence after attending the March conference, where he heard Nieh and other commissioners affirm the primacy of safety. But he still has qualms about Nieh’s “shovels in the ground” definition of success. The Dutch government also plans to add reactors, he says, but ensuring that they are built is not his agency’s role: “Our single goal is safety.”

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, sees potentially damaging assumptions built into the NRC’s new enabling mindset. One is that next-generation nuclear designs will be economically viable — if they are not, shovels should not break ground irrespective of safety, he says. Another is the expected safety benefits of next-generation reactors, many of which have limited experimental validation, let alone the kind of operating experience that can reveal unforeseen issues.

One concern for the United States in particular is the impact of Hanson’s firing. In June, the US Supreme Court ruled that such dismissals are legal, rejecting the constitutionality of statutes that purport to limit the president’s power over ‘independent’ federal agencies.

But firing commissioners without cause could have a chilling effect on the NRC. An inspector could prioritize their standing with political appointees, rather than challenge a nuclear-technology developer with strong White House connections.

“These pressures are real,” says Ashok Thadani, a former director of nuclear regulatory research at the NRC and a signatory to the July 2025 letter to Congress. “And people sometimes do things they shouldn’t do.” Thadani expects that morale will slide and that this will extend the NRC’s loss of staff members beyond the more than 400 who departed in 2025.

Rubber meets road

Given the NRC’s international profile, what’s happening in Washington DC could have an outsized impact on regulators worldwide. The good news is that Nieh’s NRC has shown some resistance to political pressure. Even Lyman, who thinks the agency’s independence is “heavily compromised”, credits it with some backbone. For example, the restart of the mothballed Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan is lagging while the NRC seeks information about safety-relevant welds throughout the plant, for which the plant operator has failed to provide historical records. And Lyman says the agency’s proposed process for licensing reactors that were tested first in DoE laboratories is not the rubber stamp that an administration official demanded last year. To Greenwald, the proposal is a sign that some officials recognize that the industry cannot succeed without a credible NRC.

The caveat to that glimmer of optimism is that the NRC now submits its rules to the White House before releasing them for comment — a protocol that seems to explicitly compromise its independence and scraps decades of effort to maximize public involvement. “The transparency and independence is a work in progress,” says Greenwald.

An IAEA-coordinated review of arrangements in the United States, of the sort that guided Hungary’s and Brazil’s recent moves towards regulatory independence, could provide clarity, Brugmans suggests. IAEA review missions are voluntary under the Convention on Nuclear Safety, but the European Union mandates that each member state get one at least every 10 years. The last such mission to the United States visited in 2014, Brugmans notes, so a new mission “seems timely”.

For decades, the international community has deferred to the NRC as a global leader. If its independence is impinged on, it would undermine the norms that built regulators around the world. As Lyman puts it: “It could be this is a contagion now where there’s going to be a race to the bottom.” In the long run, that would be a race without a winner.