Atomic Show #341 – Ho Nieh, Chairman U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Ho Nieh, Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, visited the Atomic Show for a wide ranging discussion about the agency, its role in enabling the safe use of nuclear energy, the importance of its mission to the energy future of the United States, the benefits of having organization led by a five person commission of decision makers and the ways in which the NRC is evolving to better serve the needs of the United States in an era of rapid technological change.

Chairman Nieh’s father worked as a nuclear qualified welder. His experiences during spring and fall outages were part of the inspiration for Nieh’s decision to pursue a career in nuclear engineering. He studied marine engineering at the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy. That major was the closest thing to a nuclear engineering program available at the sometimes overlooked 5th service academy.

Aside: (Everyone remembers the Military Academy, the Naval Academy (my personal favorite) and the Air Force Academy. Many know about the Coast Guard Academy. It’s less common to recall that the Merchant Marines play a vital role in the defense establishment and that they have their own service academy. End Aside.

Chairman Nieh told us about how he started his nuclear career as an instructor/operator at the S8G prototype at the Navy’s prototype site in West Milton, NY. He spent more than 4 years as a shift worker at the facility, likely having contact with 16 or more classes of trainees in the Navy’s Nuclear Power Program. After four plus years on rotating shifts, he was open to a suggestion from a former colleague to apply for a job as a resident inspector with the NRC. (Chairman Nieh is the first NRC Commissioner to have served as a resident inspector.)

At his service academy, Nieh was trained to seek roles of increasing responsibility where he could put his leadership training to its most effective use. His career on the NRC staff contains abundant evidence of choices made to deepen and broaden his capabilities as a leader in a complex and vital field.

Chairman Nieh described his appreciation of the skills, work ethic and depth of experience of his four fellow commissioners. It’s almost de rigueur for NRC commissioners to praise the collegiality of their Commission, but it sounded like he was describing an especially useful version of that descriptor is applicable to the current group.

We spoke about the agency’s evolving understanding of its role in enabling the safe use of nuclear energy and its growing understanding that the guiding language on that topic has always been included in Article 1 of the Atomic Energy Act. He acknowledged that there have been past leaders on the Commission and on the staff who felt that enabling was too “promotional” and wasn’t part of the NRC’s mission.

We spoke about the NRC’s very recent release of 10 CFR Part 53, the long-anticipated, new licensing framework whose creation was directed by the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act of 2019. Though analysis of the final, 701-page rule is still in progress, the early returns show that it has generally succeeded in becoming a risk-informed, performance-based, technology-inclusive framework for designing and licensing new nuclear reactors.

Though the rule is still under review and the draft has not yet been made public, the Chairman Nieh described how NRC is close to completing another assigned task, this one directed by Executive Order 14300. The Commission is reconsidering the use of the linear, no threshold (LNT) radiation protection model and the associated regulatory requirement to take action to keep radiation doses as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA), even when the doses involved are already many multiples below the regulatory limit.

Chairman Nieh emphasized that the agency is maintaining its historic independence and that there are no external forces that are going to detract it from its role in maintaining safety. He also describes how keeping reactors safe does not mean preventing them from being built and operated. The nation needs abundant, affordable, reliable, clean power. It needs nuclear plants that can be built on time and within budget and a regulator that will not inhibit the accomplishment of the goal for safe and abundant nuclear energy.

I think you will enjoy the show.

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