NPR investigation reveals DOE secretly rewrote nuclear reactor safety rules, kept them hidden until forced release

NPR reported on January 28, 2026 that the Department of Energy had quietly rewritten internal safety, security, and environmental rules for a new generation of experimental "small modular" nuclear reactors, sharing the rewritten rules only with the ten companies participating in DOE's Reactor Pilot Program while keeping them from public view. The rewrite followed a June 2025 meeting at which a DOE attorney told the companies the department intended to cut red tape to help meet a Trump executive order deadline requiring at least three experimental reactors to come online by July 4, 2026. Reviewing the documents, health physicist Emily Caffrey of the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that provisions requiring groundwater "must be protected from radiological contamination" had been rewritten so only "consideration must be given to avoiding or minimizing potential contamination" -- one of many changes she said systematically loosened prohibitions into discretionary standards.

Kathryn Huff, a nuclear engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who ran DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy under the Biden administration, said she could think of no good reason to promulgate rules like these in secret. Commercial nuclear reactors have historically been regulated through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's public rulemaking process; the pilot program instead extended DOE's own internal rulemaking authority, previously limited to a small number of experimental reactors on government property, to a larger set of commercial-adjacent designs, some built outside DOE's national laboratories. In a statement to NPR, DOE said it intended to make the rules public "later this year" and that the changes removed administrative burdens while still requiring reactors to be safe and secure.

Updates

2026-02-26 — DOE released the rewritten rules after a FOIA request [4]

The Department of Energy made the rewritten "Nuclear Energy Orders" public on its Idaho Operations Office website, notifying NPR that it had done so in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. In total, the new orders cut 750 pages -- about two-thirds -- of the earlier rules' requirements, including hundreds of pages on guard training and nuclear-material security. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the release was "long overdue" and that the public has a right to understand the directives DOE uses to authorize the experimental reactors.