(I)n the
Atomic Energy Act of 1954, Congress deliberately changed course to narrow the scope of reactors that the AEC was intended to regulate. The new language gave licensing authority over “utilization facilit[ies],” defined only as “any equipment or device, except an atomic weapon, determined by rule of the Commission to be capable of
making use of special nuclear material in such quantity as to be of significance to the common defense and security, or in such manner
as to affect the health and safety of the public
(emphasis mine).
The 'making use of special nuclear material' clause does not apply: Special nuclear material (SNM) is defined as material that could conceivably be used in an atomic weapon, and the minimum enrichment for fuel to qualify as SNM is much higher than what commercial enrichment facilities or reactors can produce. Very few places want to handle SNM anymore because the security overhead is massive - even if the material itself is not classified, once a facility reaches a certain mass of SNM everyone with unescorted access needs to get a clearance which is 1) expensive and 2) effectively a ban on foreign nationals.
The 'as to affect the health and safety of the public' clause appears to be broad enough to support the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)'s position. My day job involves safety and compliance, and the default position there is "we assume something is unsafe until we can prove otherwise". By that standard the NRC could set the bar so low that it may as well not exist on the grounds that it can't rule out danger to the public. By contrast the standard Valar is proposing amounts to 'nuclear facilities should be allowed to make their own determination on public impact without NRC notification or review' and that is pretty extreme.
Is it reasonable to hold a tiny prototype in the boonies to the same standard as a 4 gigawatt plant in Midtown Manhattan? Of course not. But the Atomic Energy Act (AEA) does not require that the regulatory burden be proportional to the danger, it only requires that there be a danger.
To summarize - the revised rule issued in 1956 does not change the fact that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), now the NRC, has a credible defense based on the 1954 AEA passed by Congress.
By narrowing the jurisdiction of the AEC in the 1954 AEA, Congress returned legislative authority for small reactors to the states.
This appears to be mistaken - if the NRC argues that it cannot rule out health/safety risks until it performs a review, then Valar's argument is tenuous at best. The fact that states have made few to no attempts to develop their own nuclear regulatory boards in the ~seventy years since the Atomic Energy Act was last amended would also seem to undercut this position.
Now for other parts.
This is personal. Valar Atomics’ own Ward One is a reactor named in the suit. Ward One, a 100kWt High Temperature Gas Reactor using TRISO fuel, is named after Ward Schaap, my great grandfather. Its planned operational lifetime is less than a month, and its architecture uses principles of strong negative thermal reactivity feedback and low power density, leading to completely passive decay heat removal from the core.
This does not make physical sense, gas coolant + graphite moderation make the moderator temperature coefficient of reactivity near-zero and the TRISO design tends to use higher enrichments which makes the fuel temperature coefficient of reactivity less negative (i.e. still negative but closer to zero).
ETA x2: As of 2025 TRISO manufacture in the US to date has been limited to developmental work only. With this in mind I would not be surprised in the least if scaling up to producing a whole core's worth of the stuff created even larger manufacturing issues, to say nothing of safety.
Then comes the money. Fuel is one of the largest expenses for building a new reactor and refueling is the single largest expense for an operating one, and that is for ceramic uranium rods where we have a great understanding of the metallurgy, chemistry, economics, etc. because they have been industry standard since at least the 1970s. Going to a novel, complicated system like TRISO sounds like a great way to go bankrupt when commercial nuclear plants using well understood tech are already struggling to remain cost competitive.
A recent
Wall Street Journal piece lays out the situation:
A new federal lawsuit may finally unleash nuclear energy’s potential. On Dec. 30, Texas and Utah, along with the startup company Last Energy, sued to force the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stop breaking the law and start letting small, modular nuclear reactors operate without crushing overregulation. This could be the most consequential legal challenge to America’s nuclear regulatory regime in 70 years, freeing states to expand nuclear power generation as population booms and energy demands soar.
The Wall Street Journal piece is an op-ed, i.e. it was probably only reviewed for clarity + gross errors + legal concerns vice accuracy, and it was written by a tech nonprofit vice the Journal's in-house staff. This is very close to repackaging a press release as a news article.
