Federal nuclear regulators are setting deadlines for licensing challenges that can hold up new reactors as the Trump administration seeks faster approvals.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) published a final rule in the Federal Register Tuesday that aims to wrap up most contested licensing hearings in 11 to 13.5 months, and faster for expedited cases.
Within that process, the agency’s current model schedule envisions about nine months for evidentiary hearings, and in practice that phase “has on average taken substantially longer,” according to the rule. Most proceedings will now get 3.5 to 4.5 months for that phase.
Contested hearings involve a person or group challenging part of a license application, according to the rule. An independent NRC board usually decides whether to admit the claim and, if it does, holds an evidentiary hearing on it.
“In 2024, Congress passed the ADVANCE Act which gave the NRC some timelines to get licenses out more quickly,” NRC General Counsel Matt Pociask said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Those timelines were reinforced in Executive Order 14300 by this Administration to also get licenses out more quickly.”
“To meet the commands of that statute and this Executive Order, we couldn’t allow hearings to stretch on and on and on,” Pociask added.
The final rule “maintains the public’s ability to participate and the requirements for what a member of the public needs to show in order to get into a hearing,” the agency said in a statement to the DCNF.
Under the rule, groups keep 60 days to request a hearing on most applications to build reactors that do not use an already certified design, but the window shrinks to 45 days for license renewals and some other cases.
Uranium Watch, a Moab, Utah, nonprofit that works on uranium mining and milling issues, opposed the plan and argued that faster hearings would undercut the agency’s work protecting public health and safety, according to its public comments on the plan.
“It is not the NRC’s job to accelerate the deployment of nuclear reactors, large or small,” Program Director Sarah Fields wrote for the group in April. “The NRC should support more rigorous technical and environmental reviews by the NRC staff and the public, not less.”
Contested hearings “don’t run on a fixed clock,” and one project can face several rounds of challenges, Bill Meierling, chief external affairs officer at ClearPath, a conservative clean energy group, said in a statement to the DCNF.
“That uncertainty is the core problem,” Meierling said. “Developers and investors can plan around a long process if they know how long it will take. What they can’t plan around is a process with no defined endpoint, where new challenges can reopen questions at any stage.”
Meierling cited recent challenges to X-energy and Dow’s project in Texas and to the restarts of the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa and the Crane Clean Energy Center in Pennsylvania as examples.
The new deadlines apply only to cases noticed starting Dec. 3, when the rule takes effect, according to the Federal Register notice.
“Projects tied to commercial commitments, like power agreements with data centers, depend on knowing when a decision will come,” Meierling added. “Certainty benefits every new reactor project.”
The rule is important but will not be the main factor in whether nuclear power can soon help supply data centers, Mark Mills, founder and executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, said in a statement to the DCNF.
One big hurdle is the time needed to grow nuclear’s industrial base and supply chains, which will almost certainly take far longer than data center demand allows, Mills said.
“We already see evidence of rising opposition which, if history is any lesson, leads to delays,” Mills added, pointing to “the likely re-ignition of professional opposition to nuclear energy.”
“Previous NRC contested hearings on reactor licenses often stretched for years,” Alex Stevens, manager of policy and communications at the Institute for Energy Research, told the DCNF in a statement. “A clear example is the Turkey Point Units 6 and 7 combined-license proceeding, whose contested phase ran from roughly 2010 to 2017.”
“The rule does not change safety or security standards, the agency’s independent review, or the public’s right to request a hearing with standing and admissible contentions,” Stevens noted.
The Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit think tank that supports advanced nuclear development, backed faster hearings in its own comments but said the public should still get its chance to raise concerns.
Past applications to site or build large reactors “were nearly always the subject of a hearing request,” the NRC wrote. Evidentiary hearings were held in proceedings for four of the eight combined construction and operating licenses the agency has granted for such plants.
License renewals for existing plants “are often contested,” the agency added.
In 60 percent of proceedings where someone sought a hearing over the last two decades, the agency granted the request, and it expects about 15 licensing proceedings a year to draw such requests through 2030.
Under the new rule, evidentiary hearings will start soon after a board admits a challenge, rather than generally waiting until NRC staff finish reviewing the application.
Late challenges also will not count as pending until a board finds good cause for the delay, which generally requires that they rest on new, materially different information and were filed promptly once it became available. The agency wrote that the change will “eliminate the possibility of parties delaying licensing in certain proceedings simply by filing an untimely new or amended contention.”
The agency projects that the changes will save industry, the government and the public a combined, undiscounted $67.4 million from 2026 through 2030.
Oral hearings are no longer required by default. NRC staff also no longer have to compile a hearing file, which the agency called “burdensome” and said “provides little value to the litigation.”
The agency got 33 unique comment submissions on the proposal. The final version dropped planned limits on non-attorneys representing parties and added 10 to 20 days to several deadlines for decisions, according to the rule.
President Donald Trump’s May 2025 executive order on the NRC directed the agency to set deadlines of 18 months at most for final decisions on new reactor applications and to streamline its public hearings.
The ADVANCE Act, which then-President Joe Biden signed in July 2024, also directs the agency to provide for “efficient and timely reviews and proceedings” on licenses.
Appeals to the commission fall outside the executive order’s fixed deadlines, though the agency wrote that it will use internal milestones to promote timely decisions.
Board deadlines for ruling on hearing requests and challenges can be extended only in extraordinary circumstances, according to the rule.
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