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Coalition Rips Trump Plan to 'Rubber-Stamp' Nuclear Reactors as Dangerous and Illegal
"In its eagerness to short-circuit reactor safeguards, the Trump administration is once again doing what it does best—demonstrating a complete disregard for the law," said the head of Beyond Nuclear.
May 11, 2026
A coalition of advocacy groups on Monday took aim at President Donald Trump's nuclear power plans, including a recently proposed rule that would allow developers using federally approved reactor designs to bypass required safety reviews, which the organizations called "ill-advised and contrary to law."
"In its eagerness to short-circuit reactor safeguards, the Trump administration is once again doing what it does best—demonstrating a complete disregard for the law," said Linda Pentz Gunter, executive director of Beyond Nuclear, in a statement.
"But nuclear technology is too inherently dangerous to operate as an outlaw," she stressed. "Ignoring those dangers will put millions of Americans at risk of another catastrophic nuclear accident."
Beyond Nuclear and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) have submitted multiple formal comments to the administration, on behalf of overlapping coalitions, blasting its ongoing nuclear policymaking, which has been guided by a series of executive orders signed by the president last May.
The first coalition comments focus on the US Department of Energy allowing firms that build experimental nuclear reactors to seek exemptions from legally required environmental reviews. That filing was submitted in early March, a month after DOE announced the "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."
Then, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last month unveiled a proposed rule to expedite NRC reviews of commercial nuclear power plant applications involving reactor designs already approved by DOE or the Department of Defense (DOD)—which Trump has dubbed the Department of War. That prompted more comments from Beyond Nuclear, NIRS, and allied groups last week.
"Along with the DOE's environmental 'free pass' policy, the whole 'expedited licensing' regime the administration is attempting to set up appears to be illegal," NIRS executive director Tim Judson, who co-authored the recent comments to the NRC, said Monday.
"The White House is trying to create a 'regulatory tunnel' around NRC's safety regulations," he warned. "That would mean DOE's biases and obviously false assumptions about the safety of nuclear power plants become the new normal, exposing the public to unacceptable dangers to our health and safety."
"And while the law allows the DOD to build its own nuclear reactors," Judson added, "it does not allow the NRC to skip safety reviews for civilian nuclear plants just because they use the same designs. The military routinely exposes its personnel to dangers that civilians are supposed to be protected from."
The coalition's latest filing details how the administration's actions are "inconsistent" with the Administrative Procedure Act, Atomic Energy Act, Energy Reorganization Act, and NEPA, "as well as the constitutional requirement for due process in a democratic society." It also emphasizes that nothing in Trump's orders "can excuse" the alleged legal violations.
"Fifty years ago, the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished because they became too much of a promoter and lost the confidence of Congress and the public over safety," Paul Gunter, director of the reactor oversight project at Beyond Nuclear, explained Monday.
"The NRC was established to provide a regulator that prioritizes safety and is obligated not to take shortcuts for a production agenda," he continued. "Instead, half a century later, we are on the same dangerous collision course, casting aside the NRC in favor of the DOE, which doesn't have the experience or the staff to get the industry in line with safety and security. This capitulation to the Trump agenda could lead to the NRC being abolished altogether, because nobody will have confidence in them."
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Coalition Sues Trump Admin Over 'Unlawful' Approval of LNG Export Project
A lawyer for the plaintiffs argues that the Department of Energy "is using an untested loophole to avoid considering the impacts of this project on Americans’ health and on the environment."
Feb 17, 2026
A coalition of green groups filed a lawsuit Tuesday contesting the Trump administration's approval of what would be one of the world's largest liquefied natural gas facilities—permission granted despite the project's threats to frontline communities, the environment, and climate.
The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Earthjustice are representing the Sierra Club, which is suing the US Department of Energy (DOE) for approving Venture Global’s application to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, terminal, which is now under construction in Cameron Parish, Louisiana.
“We’re suing over DOE’s unlawful approval of this facility that will increase climate-warming pollution and do nothing to lower energy costs for Americans,” NRDC senior attorney Caroline Reiser said. “DOE is using an untested loophole to avoid considering the impacts of this project on Americans’ health and on the environment. The agency also failed to consider how LNG exports could increase US energy prices.”
As Earthjustice explained:
CP2’s pollution, traffic, sprawl, and visual impact would add to the harms the nine overburdened local Gulf Coast communities located near the facility already experience from nearby existing LNG terminals. These communities already bear the burden of other heavy industry and are on the frontlines of the bigger hurricanes and storms fueled by the worsening climate crisis. Approving CP2’s exports will add to environmental injustice, fuel additional climate change, and increase prices for domestic consumers.
CP2 is one of the key projects in what climate campaigners called a "staggering" LNG expansion under former President Joe Biden. In January 2024, his administration announced a temporary pause on DOE approvals of pending and future LNG export applications to nations with which the US did not have free trade agreements. A federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump later ruled the pause illegal.
The United States is the world’s leading natural gas producer and LNG exporter. While the fossil fuel industry often calls LNG a “bridge fuel”—a cleaner alternative to coal that will ease the transition to sustainable energy sources—critics have warned that the fossil gas actually hampers the transition to a green economy. LNG is mostly composed of methane, which has more than 80 times the planetary heating power of carbon dioxide during its first two decades in the atmosphere.
Trump's DOE—headed by former fracking CEO Chris Wright—granted preliminary approval to CP2 last March, with the final green light coming in October. If built as planned, it would export around 20 million metric tons per year of LNG.
"The estimated lifecycle greenhouse gas from this methane gas would be more than the annual emissions of 47 million gas-powered cars, or 54 coal-fired power plants," said NRDC.
CP2 construction has already harmed local communities in Cameron Parish—especially local fishers. Last summer, dredging despoiled hundreds of acres of marshland, burying crab traps and oyster beds, and killing wildlife including the crabs, fish, and shrimp upon which fishers depend for their livelihood.
“We’re routinely seeing less and less catch. LNG has polluted our waters and disrupted the wildlife," one local fisher and dock manager said last year. "The shrimp just do not want to come in because of the LNG projects.”
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'Making America Unsafe Again': Alarm Over Environmental Review Exemption for Nuclear Reactors
"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.
Feb 03, 2026
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."
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."
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