Investment
October 21, 2026 · 4 min read
Nuclear’s Rulebook Is Finally Catching Up to Its Reactors
New NRC licensing pathways, built on years of bipartisan work, could do as much for new nuclear as any financing instrument.
Director of Investment and Funding Opportunities
We are in the middle of an unprecedented transformation in the nuclear industry. The reactors being built today are very different from those of our grandparents’ generation: they are more technologically advanced, safer, and more efficient. As a result, we need a regulatory regime that keeps pace with these changes.
In September, during New York Climate Week, I had the pleasure of attending Nuclear Symposium 2026, where NRC Commissioner Bradley Crowell declared, “There’s a responsibility amongst everybody who’s participating in this renaissance to make sure we do it with integrity and transparency, such that the renaissance can really flourish, and that the United States continue to be a global leader and gold standard in nuclear regulation.”
A reform with bipartisan roots
The following panel, “New Pathways for Advanced Nuclear Licensing,” explored the modernization of the NRC licensing framework. Andrew Shaw, an energy-industry legal expert at Bracewell, reminded us that despite the current administration’s push to catalyze the nuclear industry, these regulatory reforms were truly born from a bipartisan effort years ago. The ADVANCE Act (the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act) passed with overwhelming bipartisan support: only two U.S. senators voted against it. President Biden called for tripling U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050, and President Trump has furthered that goal by calling for quadrupling it.
Adam Stein, nuclear energy expert at the Breakthrough Institute, noted that the ADVANCE Act updated the NRC’s mission so that the agency does not unnecessarily limit the benefits of nuclear energy to society. Stein emphasized that those benefits extend to broader society, beyond what happens inside a plant’s fence line.
From prescriptive rules to measured risk
Part 53, finalized earlier this year, gives advanced reactors a technology-inclusive alternative to the frameworks originally built around today’s light-water reactors. Stein explained that the existing Part 50 and Part 52 frameworks take a prescriptive, deterministic approach, which essentially says that if you implement a given number of layers of defense, you will achieve adequate protection.
Part 53, by contrast, is performance-based and gives a prominent role to probabilistic risk assessment. Now that we have decades of operating data, a deep understanding of how nuclear plants work, and the technology to conduct probabilistic risk assessments in real time, our understanding of what could go wrong has evolved.
Licensing the factory, not just the reactor
The NRC is also working to finalize Part 57, which would create a fast-track licensing pathway for microreactors and other reactors that meet certain entry criteria, including a limit on accident dose at the site boundary.
Malcolm Harris of Deployable Energy, a startup whose 1-megawatt Unity reactor went critical under the DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program, framed his company’s business as making nuclear a product built in a factory rather than a giant bespoke project. Part 57 shifts the regulatory focus to the factory: it allows a single joint application for a construction permit and operating licenses covering reactors of essentially the same design, rather than requiring each reactor to go through its own separate licensing process.
Why this matters for capital
For investors, this matters as much as any new financing instrument. At the Atlantic Council’s Nuclear Energy Policy Summit the same week, I argued that the biggest barrier to financing new nuclear is upfront construction and first-of-a-kind risk, not revenue risk. Regulatory uncertainty is a large part of that upfront risk: every month of licensing delay adds interest during construction and pushes back the day a project starts earning.
A licensing regime that is risk-informed, predictable, and built for standardized, repeatable designs lets developers order reactors as fleets rather than one-offs, and lets capital price nuclear like infrastructure rather than a science experiment.
The rules are being rewritten now. Integrity and transparency, as Commissioner Crowell reminded us, are what will make them last.
This piece draws on sessions from Nuclear Symposium 2026 during New York Climate Week: the fireside chat “The View from the Commission” with NRC Commissioner Bradley Crowell (watch), and the panel “New Pathways for Advanced Nuclear Licensing” featuring Andrew Shaw (Bracewell), Adam Stein (Breakthrough Institute), and Malcolm Harris (Deployable Energy) (watch). Melinda Chow Alankar’s remarks at the Atlantic Council’s Nuclear Energy Policy Summit are available here. For background on the rules discussed, see the NRC’s pages on Part 53 and proposed Part 57.
About the Author
Melinda Chow Alankar works with other members of the Anthropocene team to identify investment and funding opportunities in climate tech. Additionally, she leads Anthropocene’s numeracy program, which aims to improve the general public’s fluency with numbers so that they can have a better grasp of the impact of issues we are facing and make better decisions.
Director of Investment and Funding Opportunities