When President Barack Obama first named Jeff Baran to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2014, the Democratic majority in the Senate confirmed the former congressional staffer in a 52-40 vote. When President Donald Trump renominated the Democrat for another five-year term in 2018, the GOP-led Senate approved Baran by a simple voice tally.
But President Joe Biden’s plan to give Baran a third stint on the federal body responsible for the world’s largest fleet of commercial reactors has already hit the rocks, as Republicans move to block a commissioner critics paint as an “obstructionist” with a record of voting for policies nuclear advocates say make it harder to keep existing plants open and more expensive, if not impossible, to deploy advanced next-generation atomic technologies.
Last Friday, the Senate went on break for the next two weeks, all but guaranteeing that Baran’s current term ends on June 30 without a decision on whether he will rejoin the five-member board, creating a vacancy that could cause gridlock on some decisions and mark a return to the partisan feuds of a decade ago.
“His votes and positions simply do not align with enabling the safe use of nuclear technologies that the NRC is expected to undertake in the coming years,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said in a June 14 statement announcing her plan to vote against Baran. “Throughout his past nomination processes, he has a history of telling the Committee he supports advanced nuclear, and then not doing so once in office.”
The White House and the Democrats who control the Senate hope to reinstate Baran in a vote next month, casting the regulator as a sober-minded professional with an ear to the woes of those living in polluted or impoverished communities. The battle highlights growing tensions over nuclear energy in the United States, the country that built the world’s first full-scale fission power plant nearly seven decades ago but all but ceased expanding atomic energy in the 30 years since the Cold War ended.
Stopping the emissions heating the planet means using electricity for automobiles, home appliances and heavy industry. That, in turn, requires not only shoring up an aging electrical grid so incapable of handling today’s demand that average blackouts have increased 12% since 2013, but delivering steady electricity without greenhouse gas pollution.
The only major economies to pull that off so far have either benefited from vast hydroelectric resources, like Brazil or Québec, or built a bunch of nuclear reactors, like France or Slovakia. While cheap and fast-growing, renewables such as solar and wind depend on huge amounts of land and minerals, and frequently need a fossil fuel like natural gas to shore up the grid’s supply when the sky is dark or the air is still.
Even as rivals like China and Russia invested heavily in new nuclear plants and technologies, the United States shuttered more than a dozen reactors in just the past decade, replacing that lost generation almost entirely with fossil fuels.
The only new reactor licensed and built from the ground up in the U.S. since the NRC succeeded the Atomic Energy Commission as the country’s primary nuclear authority in 1975 came online this year at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in eastern Georgia. The reactor was supposed to debut the latest American-made technology to the world. But China not only beat the U.S. to deploy the new model of reactor first, it built four before the lone American project could finish one — and plans to construct two more.
Meanwhile, U.S. companies are paying billions to Russia’s state-owned nuclear company, which is the world’s only commercial supplier of key types of uranium fuel — in particular the variety needed for some of the “small modular reactors” that the American industry hopes will trigger a renaissance of reactor construction. But the U.S. is behind on more than just fuel for SMRs. The NRC only certified its first SMR design in January — more than three years after Russia actually hooked its first completed SMR up to the grid.
Those signs of U.S. atomic decline are symptoms of the regulatory priorities critics say Baran represents.
“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.,” said Ted Nordhaus, executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based environmental think tank that advocates for nuclear energy. “There’s a broad view at a pretty…
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