Drama at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Biden wants to give Democrat Jeff Baran another five years. Nuclear advocates say the U.S. doesn't have any more time for an "obstructionist."
The Senate left Washington for a two-week break last Friday, all but guaranteeing the ouster of Democrat Jeff Baran from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, at least temporarily.
Former President Barack Obama named Baran to the five-member federal board in charge of the world’s largest fleet of nuclear reactors in 2014 as part of a wave of anti-nuclear nominees, including former NRC Chairman Gregory Jazcko, who went on to become a leading activist against atomic energy. But the more moderate Baran was re-nominated by former President Donald Trump and re-confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate in 2018.
Biden’s plan to give Baran a third term, however, has hit the rocks. Baran’s current term ends this Friday. To be reinstated, the Senate will need to vote in July (or sometime after) to place him back in the job he’s held for the last nine years.
Does he deserve another five years at the NRC?
Ted Nordhaus, the head of the pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute, pointed to Baran’s recent record of voting for regulations that he said would make it harder to keep existing nuclear power plants open and more expensive, if not impossible, to deploy next-generation atomic technologies.
“His voting record shows he’s been a consistent obstructionist, a defender of a regulatory system that has basically presided over the long-term decline of the nuclear sector in the U.S.,” Nordhaus told me. “There’s a broad view at a pretty bipartisan level that we need nuclear energy. If Democrats are serious about it, they have to stop putting a guy like Jeff Baran at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”
Jackie Toth, the deputy director of the progressive pro-nuclear Good Energy Collective, dismissed those concerns, casting Baran as a sober-minded professional with an ear to the concerns of poor and polluted communities.
“We feel it’s an asset to have someone like him at the NRC who gets the climate imperative for new reactors but also upholds the agency’s mission to be a trusted regulator that prioritizes public health and safety,” she told me.
The stakes of this debate are high as Congress passes more legislation aimed at reversing the United States’ nuclear decline and making the West competitive against Russian and Chinese fission technology.
Republicans like West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito say Baran’s instinct toward more regulation, not less, as roughly a dozen reactors closed under his tenure prove he’s unfit to deliver on what lawmakers want. Democrats including Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a climate hawk and supporter of nuclear energy, see Baran as a serious, empathetic regulator worth having around as new technologies raise questions about safety.
I reached out to West Virginia’s Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona’s newly-independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema – key swing votes in an upper congressional chamber where Democrats have a narrow majority – to see whether they plan to support Baran. Neither lawmaker’s press team responded by the time this newsletter went out to your inbox. I’ll let you know if I hear back.
You can read the full story here on HuffPost.
“I was a nice little six-year-old Republican. I had never seen a hanging. I didn’t know what hanging was like. But if the Republicans were for it, I was like my father, I was a Republican, and I was for the hanging of Grover Cleveland.” — poet Carl Sandburg on politics in 1884:
Some interesting stuff:
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The West is breaking all its promises to developing countries. So why should they trust that help with climate change, to which most countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America have contributed relatively little? While he doesn’t mention it here, this piece from the Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott goes a long way toward explaining why so many nations outside the West failed to see the urgency of rallying behind Ukraine.
“Akio Toyoda was crying. Again.” That’s the lede of this deep WSJ dive into how Prius-pioneer Toyota missed the boat on all-electric cars and the growing pressure on the automaker to catch up.
U.S. firms are paying Russia’s nuclear company $1 billion a year. Readers of this newsletter won’t be surprised to learn that an atrophied atomic energy industry at home has made the U.S. and its allies completely dependent on the Kremlin for nuclear fuel. But this New York Times feature by reporter Max Bearak on the new enrichment facility underway in Ohio puts a tri-comma dollar figure to it.
Suriname is caught between the U.S. and China. The South American nation is struggling with inflation, COVID-19, climate change and the legacy of poverty colonialism left behind, but relief is being held up by competing superpowers. This dispatch from New York Times reporter Peter S. Goodman gives a clear accounting of the human toll this kind of financial jockeying exacts.
New York’s third-largest city may kick out its investor-owned utility. Rochester’s push to bring its power and gas company under government control is a fascinating local example of the ongoing fights over ownership models and decarbonization. If you aren’t following reporter Colin Kinniburgh’s work at New York Focus, you are missing how this stuff is panning out in a powerful state whose policies are widely mimicked.
Thank you for your time and attention. I hope it felt earned. Either way, here’s a song you might like.
Sending you love from cloudy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where my wife’s Nathan’s hot dog shirt was a huge hit at the polling place on Shore Road where we just voted.