Beyond Nuclear International Weekly Digest, MONDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2025

Posted: 1st January 2026

The NRC’s rush to regulate Bill Gates’s TerraPower reactor targeted for Wyoming represents a complete abandonment of the agency’s public safety mandate, argues Union of Concerned Scientist physicist Ed Lyman, in an article on Common Dreams. 

A rush to misjudgment

The experimental Natrium reactor design that has been approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has undergone a recklessly expedited safety review and is effectively a “cowboy Chernobyl” according to Ed Lyman. The 345-megawatt sodium-cooled small modular reactor represents a complete abandonment of the NRC’s “obligation to protect public health, safety, and the environment from catastrophic nuclear power plant accidents or terrorist attacks,” says Lyman. READ MORE

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