‘Making America Unsafe Again’: Alarm Over Environmental Review Exemption for Nuclear Reactors
Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“I think the DOE’s attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment,” said one expert.
Less than a week after NPR revealed that “the Trump administration has overhauled a set of nuclear safety directives and shared them with the companies it is charged with regulating, without making the new rules available to the public,” the US Department of Energy announced Monday that it is allowing firms building experimental nuclear reactors to seek exemptions from legally required environmental reviews.
Citing executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in May, a notice published in the Federal Register states that the DOE “is establishing a categorical exclusion for authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors for inclusion in its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing procedures.”
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NEPA has long been a target of energy industries and Republican elected officials, including Trump. The exemption policy has been expected since Trump’s May orders—which also launched a DOE pilot program to rapidly build the experimental reactors—and the department said in a statement that even the exempted reactors will face some reviews.
“The US Department of Energy is establishing the potential option to obtain a streamlined approach for advanced nuclear reactors as part of the environmental review performed under NEPA,” the DOE said. “The analysis on each reactor being considered will be informed by previously completed environmental reviews for similar advanced nuclear technologies.”
“The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents.”
However, the DOE announcement alarmed various experts, including Daniel P. Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University, who wrote on social media: “Making America unsafe again: Trump created an exclusion for new experimental reactors from disclosing how their construction and operation might harm the environment, and from a written, public assessment of the possible consequences of a nuclear accident.”
Foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen described the policy as “terrifying,” while Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group and a scholar at the University of Sussex’s Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration, called it “truly crazy.”
As NPR reported Monday:
Until now, the test reactor designs currently under construction have primarily existed on paper, according to Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. He believes the lack of real-world experience with the reactors means that they should be subject to more rigorous safety and environmental reviews before they’re built.
“The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents,” Lyman said.
“I think the DOE’s attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment here in the United States,” he added.
Lyman was also among the experts who criticized changes that NPR exposed last week, after senior editor and correspondent Geoff Brumfiel obtained documents detailing updates to “departmental orders, which dictate requirements for almost every aspect of the reactors’ operations—including safety systems, environmental protections, site security, and accident investigations.”
While the DOE said that it shared early versions of the rules with companies, “the reduction of unnecessary regulations will increase innovation in the industry without jeopardizing safety,” and “the department anticipates publicly posting the directives later this year,” Brumfiel noted that the orders he saw weren’t labeled as drafts and had the word “approved” on their cover pages.
In a lengthy statement about last week’s reporting, Lyman said on the Union of Concerned Scientists website that “this deeply troubling development confirms my worst fears about the dire state of nuclear power safety and security oversight under the Trump administration. Such a brazen rewriting of hundreds of crucial safeguards for the public underscores why preservation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as an independent, transparent nuclear regulator is so critical.”
“The Energy Department has not only taken a sledgehammer to the basic principles that underlie effective nuclear regulation, but it has also done so in the shadows, keeping the public in the dark,” he continued. “These long-standing principles were developed over the course of many decades and consider lessons learned from painful events such as the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. This is a massive experiment in the deregulation of novel, untested nuclear facilities that could pose grave threats to public health and safety.”
“These drastic changes may extend beyond the Reactor Pilot Program, which was created by President Trump last year to circumvent the more rigorous licensing rules employed by the NRC,” Lyman warned. “While the DOE created a legally dubious framework to designate these reactors as ‘test’ reactors to bypass the NRC’s statutory authority, these dramatic alterations may further weaken standards used in the broader DOE authorization process and propagate across the entire fleet of commercial nuclear facilities, severely degrading nuclear safety throughout the United States.”
Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Millions face shock New Year’s Day hike in energy bills
https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/millions-face-shock-new-years-day-hike-energy-bills
A household energy bill displayed on a mobile phone held next to a gas hobMILLIONS face a shock New Year’s Day hike in energy bills — to pay for nuclear expansion projects even while wholesale prices fall.
Industry “regulator” Ofgem announced today a surprise increase in gas and electricity costs from January.
Campaigners urged Chancellor Rachel Reeves to act in her Budget to help struggling families as freezing winter temperatures bite.
The government’s cap on energy prices is to go up by 0.2 per cent in the three months to March.
End Fuel Poverty Coalition co-ordinator Simon Francis said: “Energy bills remain stubbornly high as households face a fifth winter of the energy costs crisis. Today’s announcement sees standing charges rise yet again, highlighting the structural problems in how energy is paid for.
“The addition of a new levy on bills which pays for nuclear power stations is unwelcome and could have been delayed until closer to when these plants actually start to generate electricity.”
The government this summer announced that taxpayers will effectively underwrite a private investment deal worth more than £38 billion to build Britain’s biggest nuclear project in a generation at the Sizewell C site on the Suffolk coast.
Billpayers face paying £1 a month for the costs from this winter until the project is complete under a funding mechanism that shields Sizewell’s investors from the impact of any delays — even if the total cost spirals to as much as £47bn.
…
https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/millions-face-shock-new-years-day-hike-energy-bills
dizzy: Nuclear power is too expensive, we can’t afford it. There’s also the problem that it produces waste that remains dangerously radioactive essentially for ever.
Sellafield could leak until 2050s, MPs warn
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0lne622kk7o
The UK’s largest nuclear site could continue leaking radioactive water until the 2050s, MPs have warned, while its clean-up operations struggle to progress quickly enough.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) criticised the speed of decommissioning work at Sellafield in Cumbria, citing “cost overruns and continuing safety concerns” in a report published on Wednesday.
Although the committee noted there were “signs of improvement”, PAC chairman Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said Sellafield continued to present “intolerable risks”.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) acknowledged the leak at its Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS) was its “single biggest environmental issue”.
The MSSS, which the NDA described as “the most hazardous building in the UK”, has been leaking radioactive water into the ground since 2018, releasing enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool every three years.
It is likely to continue leaking until the oldest section of the building has been emptied in the 2050s, about a decade later than previously expected.
Sir Geoffrey said: “As with the fight against climate change, the sheer scale of the hundred-year timeframe of the decommissioning project makes it hard to grasp the immediacy of safety hazards and cost overruns that delays can have.
“Every day at Sellafield is a race against time to complete works before buildings reach the end of their life.
“Our report contains too many signs that this is a race that Sellafield risks losing.”
…
Article continues at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0lne622kk7o
Analysis: Attacks on Ed Miliband in UK newspaper editorials have already exceeded 2024 levels
Original article by Josh Gabbatiss republished from Carbon Brief under a CC license.
UK newspapers have already launched more editorials attacking Ed Miliband in the first four months of 2025 than they did during the whole of 2024, Carbon Brief analysis reveals.
In the year to date, predominantly right-leaning publications have published 65 editorials – articles seen as the newspaper’s formal “voice” – criticising the UK energy secretary, compared with only 61 across the full year of 2024.
Nearly four such editorials have been published every week so far in 2025, roughly three times the rate of the previous year.
This is a significant escalation from a period that had already seen an unprecedented torrent of attacks levelled at the energy secretary.
The articles, which primarily appear in the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, frequently seek to label Miliband as a “net-zero zealot” with a “messianic” devotion to climate action.
The newspapers have focused specifically on Miliband’s support for renewables.
They have also tried to blame him for the potential closure of the UK’s remaining steel plant and – most recently – misrepresented the words of former prime minister Sir Tony Blair to falsely present them as a personal rebuke to Miliband.
Many of the articles urge prime minister Keir Starmer to “sack” Miliband due to his supposedly “radical” policy ideas, referring to him as a “liability” for the Labour government.
Despite this near-obsessive stream of criticism and constant speculation about the energy secretary’s job security, the prime minister has said unequivocally that the net-zero agenda is “in my government’s DNA” and that Miliband is “doing a great job”.
Record criticism
The UK’s Labour government won an election last summer, with a large majority, on the back of a manifesto that focused heavily on climate action.
As laid out at the time, one of the government’s “five missions” was to:
“Make Britain a clean-energy superpower to cut bills, create jobs and deliver security with cheaper, zero-carbon electricity by 2030.”
Miliband, the energy security and net-zero secretary, is the minister overseeing this brief and the public face of much of the government’s net-zero strategy.
This position has resulted in a relentless stream of criticism and personal attacks from right-leaning commentators and media organisations, against a backdrop of rising political and press opposition to net-zero.
Carbon Brief analysis in January revealed the scale of the personal attacks levelled at Miliband in newspaper editorials during 2024, both in the lead up to the general election and in the months that followed.
However, the new analysis shows that the 61 critical editorials published last year have already been eclipsed in 2025 after barely four months of intense focus on Miliband.
As of 2 May, predominantly right-leaning newspapers have already published 65 editorials taking aim at the energy secretary this year. The chart below, which shows the cumulative number of such editorials, highlights this rapid escalation.
Specific events, often only vaguely related to the energy secretary, have inflated the criticism of Miliband in the media.
One example was the imminent closure of the UK’s last remaining steel blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, in early April. Right-leaning newspapers blamed Miliband, among other things, for “banning new coal mines” in the UK, which they argued could have provided coking coal to the facility.
(The Scunthorpe site’s owners prior to government control, British Steel, had said that the coal from a planned mine in Cumbria would not have been suitable for their needs.)
More recently, right-leaning newspapers have used the furore around a report published by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) as a further opportunity to criticise Miliband.
Many publications misleadingly interpreted comments by Blair as a criticism of the Starmer government’s net-zero policies and, by association, Miliband himself. They described the energy secretary as an “eco-loon” compared to the “uncontroversial” advice from Blair.
Miliband the ‘fanatic’
The majority of the criticism of Miliband in newspaper editorials in 2025 has come from the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Telegraph.
The Sun remains the most consistent critic of Miliband, with 26 editorials published in 2025 so far. There have only been 18 weeks in 2025 to date. As the chart below shows, this spate of 26 editorials from the Sun is already approaching last year’s record of 29.
The attacks levelled at Miliband by right-leaning newspapers are often both highly personal and somewhat melodramatic.
They frequently imply that his focus on net-zero policies is a sign of mental instability or quasi-religious devotion, rather than being part of his job title – or acknowledging that reaching net-zero emissions is the only way scientists say climate change can be prevented from getting worse.
The Sun has referred to Miliband’s “uncontrolled fanaticism”. The Sun on Sunday has described the “madness of Ed Miliband’s green crusade” and called him the “fanatical prophet of net-zero”.
Another editorial from the Sun stated that “Miliband is so blinded by eco-ideology that he’s lost touch with reality”, referring to his “eco insanity”.
In an editorial lamenting the state of the UK’s oil-and-gas industry, which shed 10s of 1,000s of jobs under the previous Conservative government, the Daily Mail mentioned:
“Energy secretary Ed Miliband’s messianic desire to sacrifice a multi-billion pound industry on the altar of net-zero.”
The newspapers also suggest that Miliband is unwilling to listen to any criticism. “Miliband has shown himself unprepared to countenance any suggestion that his efforts to decarbonise the grid within five years might be reckless,” the Daily Telegraph claimed.
There have also been frequent calls from newspaper editorials for Starmer to sack the energy secretary. In an article titled “Miliband’s madness”, published at the end of April, the Daily Mail asked:
“Isn’t it time Sir Keir Starmer accepted his colleague’s ideological net-zero fervour is damaging the government – and sacked him?”
Beyond the editorial pages, there has also been a constant stream of comment pieces, many by climate sceptics, which often go even further in their attacks on the energy secretary. “Miliband belongs in a padded cell,” Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn wrote at the start of May.
This has come amid much media speculation from commentators on both the left and right that Starmer is considering firing Miliband.
However, Starmer has not given any indication of doing this.
On the contrary, at the recent energy security conference the UK government hosted in London, Starmer stated that he was fully committed to his government’s net-zero ambitions. “That is in the DNA of my government,” he stated in a widely covered speech.
Original article by Josh Gabbatiss republished from Carbon Brief under a CC license.
dizzy: Miliband has been vilified by the same right-wing climate science deniers in a similar way to Just Stop Oil and others labelled zealots. I object to his and thereby the current Labour government’s policy of supporting Carbon Capture and Nuclear for different reasons. Both are false solutions needing huge government subsidies, carbon capture and storage is an unproved, false solution proposed by the fossil fuel industry to enable them to continue destroying the planet, nuclear supports producing nuclear weapons and [ed: is] hugely capital intensive producing radioactive waste that needs to be managed for thousands to millions of years. A far better response is rapid decarbonisation including conversion to renewables and to travel far less, prevent the rich from causing so much damage.