NEI wants deeper NRC reporting cuts; nine state AGs want parts withdrawn

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's overhaul of its reactor licensing and oversight rules drew opposite demands as its comment period closed on November 9, 2026. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group, says that although the proposal modernizes reporting requirements, it "falls far short of the comprehensive reform required by Executive Order 14300 and the longstanding need to eliminate unnecessary reporting and recordkeeping requirements and should not be finalized in its current form," in its comments. The attorneys general of nine states urge the Commission "to withdraw the problematic portions of the Proposed Rule," among them cuts to nonemergency event reports and the end of public comment on reactor decommissioning reports.

The proposal, docket NRC-2025-1138, was published in the Federal Register on September 24, 2026, as The Duck Curve reported, and would amend 10 CFR Parts 20, 21, 50, 52, 53, 55, 70, 72 and 75. The NRC's rulemaking tracker now estimates the final rule for June 29, 2027. When the agency announced the package on September 11, the same tracker said March 31, 2027. Both dates fall after November 23, 2026, the 18-month mark Executive Order 14300 set for final rules.

Industry: cut deeper

NEI's quarrel is with scale, not direction. It "strongly support[s]" the proposed changes to backfitting and issue finality, including eliminating the compliance exception, and supports ending operator-license renewal. "Across the entire wholesale rulemaking revision, the NRC has eliminated only 3% of its 421 reporting requirements," the letter says, and it asks the agency to consider 226 reporting requirements NEI identifies in its answer to one of the NRC's questions "as opportunities for elimination, consolidation, or modification."

The sharpest example is event reporting under 10 CFR 50.72. NEI supports the proposed elimination of five nonemergency notification requirements and wants the rest gone as well: "Technical Specification required shutdowns, reactor protection system actuations, and degraded or unanalyzed conditions do not, by themselves, warrant immediate NRC notification," its comment table says.

Westinghouse says part of a package aimed at cutting duplicative requirements would add some. Its letter generally supports eliminating unnecessary duplication and reporting burdens, but says the proposed revisions to Part 21, the rule on reporting defects and noncompliance, "would impose new programmatic obligations on Part 70 licensees, including changes to procedures, software, processes, staffing, training, and component identification." It adds that "Several of the most consequential revisions revive proposals that were previously withdrawn after the NRC determined that the underlying issues were not safety significant," and recommends taking Part 70 out of Part 21's scope altogether.

States: keep the reports and the public comment

The attorneys general of Illinois, California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, Maryland and Vermont attack the reasoning behind the reporting cuts. One report slated to go is the four-hour notice a plant now owes the NRC for an event related to the health and safety of the public or onsite personnel, or the environment, when a news release is planned or another government agency has been or will be notified. Of these events, the Federal Register notice says "Agency records indicate that the NRC has never initiated an inspection or investigation in response to these events," and adds: "The NRC and the public may first become aware of issues, such as fatalities or contamination, from news and social media." In other words, the regulator could learn of an onsite fatality the way everyone else does. The states turn the efficiency argument around: "But if reports rarely require an NRC response, then the reports are in fact not burdensome, retaining them poses no real hardship, and there would not be any significant efficiency gains if they were eliminated."

On decommissioning, the proposal would end the requirement for the NRC to notice receipt of a plant's post-shutdown decommissioning activities report (PSDAR) and take public comment on it, on the grounds that "public comments have rarely resulted in changes to a licensee's PSDAR." The NRC would keep a public meeting and cut the wait before major decommissioning activities may begin from 90 days after it receives the report to 30. "The Commission's past decisions declining to make changes in response to public comments do not indicate that the comment period lacked value," the attorneys general reply. They also object to dropping the mandatory environmental impact statement for early site permits and to changing the financial-qualification standard for Part 50 and 52 applicants to whether an applicant "appears to be financially qualified."

New York, a state with operating reactors that is not among the nine, lands in between. Its comments, signed by its NRC State Liaison Officer designee, support that lower financial-qualification standard, while asking that license conditions verifying funding be made mandatory; the attorneys general say the change "could expose the public and States to financial liability resulting from the failure of insufficiently capitalized entities." New York also supports keeping the core nonemergency reports the proposal retains, among them shutdowns required by technical specifications and reactor protection system actuations, which NEI wants eliminated. New York opposes ending public comment on PSDARs and shortening the wait to 30 days, along with two changes NEI backs: eliminating the compliance backfit exception and ending the six-year renewal cycle for operator licenses.

The coalition is growing. In comments filed October 13, 2026, five attorneys general asked the NRC to withdraw and re-propose its uranium in-situ recovery rule; all five signed this letter, joined by four more. The nine say this proposal "is only one of more than two-dozen rules proposed by the NRC in 2026," and that the Commission has "thus far summarily denied" requests for longer comment periods.