The Trump administration has tightened its control over the US Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRC) and is considering an executive order that could further erode its autonomy, NPR reported, citing “two US officials who declined to speak publicly because they feared retribution”.

In future, NRC must send new rules regarding reactor safety to the White House, where they will be reviewed and possibly edited. These new procedures have been in preparation for months but have now been implemented and are in full effect.

NPR has also reportedly seen a draft of an executive order “ordering the reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”. This “calls for reducing the size of the NRC’s staff, conducting a wholesale revision of its regulations in coordination with the White House and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, shortening the time to review reactor designs and possibly loosening the current, strict standards for radiation exposure”, NPR noted.

“It’s the end of the independence of the agency,” according to Allison Macfarlane, director of the School of Public Policy & Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in Canada who served as Chair of the NRC from 2012 to 2014. “If you aren’t independent of political and industry influence, then you are at risk of an accident, frankly,” she said.

NRC said in a statement that it was working with the White House “as part of our commitment to make NRC regulatory processes more efficient. We have no additional details at this time”.

A spokesperson for the White House’s Office of Management & Budget said in an email to NPR: “The President of the United States is the head of the executive branch. The President issued an independent agencies executive order which aligns with the president’s power given to him by the constitution. This idea has been talked about for nearly 40 years and should not be a surprise.”

Hitherto, NRC’s five commissioners would vote on draft rules and final rules for nuclear reactors. Their votes would be publicly recorded along with the reasoning for the decision. Now, commissioners will carry out their votes in a closed session and pass the rule to the White House Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs, which sits within the Office of Management & Budget. The White House will have up to 90 days to review the proposed and final rules, and make changes, before handing them back to NRC.

Only after the rule is finalised will the commissioners’ votes be made public. NPR noted that it was not immediately clear how the public would know whether the White House had changed a safety rule for a nuclear reactor.

“Who has the technical knowledge to actually do a substantive review?” asked Edwin Lyman, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “To have political appointees meddling in these technical decisions is just a recipe for confusion and chaos.”

According to the Energy Intelligence Group (EIG), the White House is currently drafting four executive orders, expected to be released within the coming weeks, intended to expand the ability of the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DOD) to deploy prototype and demonstration reactors with potential commercial applications, possibly without oversight by NRC.

EIG said NRC is already seen as the central impediment to a new US nuclear renaissance according to certain Silicon Valley nuclear start-ups, “and this view appears to be adopted wholesale within the Trump administration”. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the House Appropriations Committee earlier in May: “We are trying to knock things over that we can that are regulatory.”