The unusually strong bipartisan support for the Senate’s permitting reform bill (known by the somewhat awkward acronym BAAJA) demonstrates how desperately America’s energy system needs upgrading. Most of that upgrading will involve electrification. In the next 20 years, America will need many hundreds of gigawatts of new generating capacity. Where will it come from?

Solar and wind will certainly help, but they can be subject to week-long weather-dependent interruptions. The grid needs firm baseline generation that is available and reliable on a 24/7 basis. Coal, oil, gas, and hydropower have historically supplied that reliability. But continuing to rely on fossil fuels endangers the health of the planet and its inhabitants. Clean 24/7 alternatives are available, but most are limited. Hydropower and conventional geothermal are geographically constrained. New enhanced geothermal technologies hold promise, but long-term thermal performance and economics remain unproven. Commercial fusion has not yet proven it will even work. In fact, the only 24/7 clean technology that is proven, scalable, and potentially available now is nuclear fission.

Indeed, fission has been serving us well for decades. Most Americans are unaware that for more than 30 years, almost 100 nuclear fission reactors have supplied some 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. Almost all the reactors supplying that power originated in the wave of orders placed before 1975. Early reactors typically took four to six years to build and often had an overnight cost of less than $4,000 per kilowatt in today’s dollars. Some of them have been running for almost 60 years.

Wonderful! So why don’t we just start building reactors again?

Here’s where the story gets interesting and tragic. In the late 1960s, fear of “the bomb” helped drive fear of everything nuclear, especially radiation. Many people wanted nuclear power to be much more regulated or, better still, eliminated. In 1974, Congress broke up the Atomic Energy Commission, which it had created in 1946 to oversee the development of nuclear technology. Nuclear regulation was placed in what became the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The NRC started operating in 1975 and began issuing what became a massive increase in regulated responsibilities.

The NRC’s effect on the nuclear power industry was dramatic. Rules and regulations increased exponentially. Because nuclear electricity had been so cheap and reliable, utilities had ordered or planned a vast expansion of nuclear generation that could have displaced large amounts of oil and coal. America’s pollution and emissions would have been dramatically reduced. But that expansion never happened. Slower demand growth, inflation, high interest rates, and construction problems all played a role. These problems were compounded by cascading and often byzantine regulatory requirements that nearly tripled the time and cost to build a reactor. Planned reactors were canceled, and even some partially constructed plants were abandoned.

Importantly, in the following 30 years, no new reactor orders led to completed plants. The fleet of reactors that has been supplying America’s power since that time was almost entirely ordered before the NRC’s creation. The only exception has been two new reactors recently built by Southern Company near Waynesboro, Georgia. Sadly, those reactors came in massively over time and budget. After watching Southern’s experience, no investor-owned utility has ordered another large reactor.

Clearly, if we’re going to get the new electricity we need, we’ll have to return to building reactors rapidly, safely, and economically. For that to happen, the NRC will need to make significant changes. Fortunately, the NRC is doing just that. Under the new leadership of Chairman Ho Nieh, the NRC is reviewing and proposing changes to many of the old stultifying rules and procedures, especially those that did not have a commensurately beneficial effect on safety.

One of the most important rules that needs changing is called ALARA. The ALARA rule requires that radiation exposure be reduced to levels As Low As Reasonably Achievable. It is based on the fear that all radiation exposure, regardless of how weak, carries additional risk. That means there is no generally applicable radiation level below which it is clear that no further dose reduction is required. How much additional protection is reasonable can depend on regulatory judgment. And different regulators may have different opinions.

To see the problem, consider a hypothetical room occupied by staff inside a nuclear power plant, surrounded by thick concrete and steel shielding. Such shielding can attenuate natural cosmic and terrestrial radiation sufficiently that the room’s radiation level, even very near the reactor, can be lower than the natural background outside the plant area. But is that low-dose level from the reactor acceptable, requiring no further action? The general ALARA requirement supplies no simple answer. Adding another foot of concrete could reduce the plant-related dose still further. Another foot might reduce it yet again. Are they required? Where should the pursuit of ALARA stop?

ALARA tries to answer this question with the word reasonably. Indeed, its regulatory definition explicitly incorporates economic considerations, and NRC guidance includes tools for weighing costs against dose reductions. But those tools do not establish a universally applicable stopping point. The point at which further reductions cease to be reasonable still depends on subjective judgment.

The uncertainty about that stopping point invites disputes and potential litigation. How much protection is enough? Both regulators and the nuclear industry have strong incentives to take an ultra-conservative course: More protection must be better. The resulting overcompensation can add great cost and delay without a commensurate improvement in safety.

ALARA’s lack of clarity about how much protection is enough is the kind of uncertainty that scares off investors. Before committing billions of dollars, a developer needs to know what will satisfy regulators. Sadly, that may be part of the reason no investor-owned utility is placing orders for new large reactors.

Radiation protection should be based on evidence of risk, clear limits, and proportionate protective measures. That is the direction of the NRC’s proposed reform. It would replace ALARA’s open-ended requirement for dose reductions with a graded approach linking protective measures to specified dose thresholds. The basic dose limits for workers and the public would remain, with greater flexibility to exceed certain annual limits under specified conditions. The proposal recognizes that a dose spread over time poses less risk than the same dose received all at once.

Yet despite the need for regulatory clarity, not everyone is happy with the prospect of reform. The old fears die hard. For example, an important constituency, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), has just issued a strongly worded objection to the NRC’s proposal. The IBEW argues that removing ALARA would weaken established worker protections against radiation exposure and shift long-term health risks onto workers for the financial benefit of the nuclear industry. We think the IBEW has misunderstood the problem and the NRC’s proposed fix. The IBEW is right to be concerned about the safety and welfare of its members. The NRC has already established dose limits intended to provide adequate protection, and plants are required to comply with them. ALARA merely adds uncertainty and a continuing obligation to reduce exposures further without a clear, generally applicable endpoint. The NRC’s stated objective is to preserve adequate protection while replacing open-ended requirements with clearer standards. It replaces ambiguity with clarity.

Replacing ALARA’s subjectivity with clear, proportionate requirements is good common sense and should be adopted.