Comment on FR Doc # 2026-10729

Submitted to: Docket No. DOE-HQ-2025-0603, RIN 1990-AA54 Re: “Zero-Based Regulation Review,” Direct Final Rule (91 FR 31869, May 29, 2026) Submitted by: Lynda Williams, Nuclear Free Hawaii I submit this as a significant adverse comment and request that the Department of Energy withdraw this direct final rule. This rule inserts conditional sunset dates into twenty-eight DOE regulations and provides that each will automatically expire and be removed from the Code of Federal Regulations unless the Secretary affirmatively extends it. Allowing a regulation to lapse automatically produces the same legal result as repealing it: the regulation disappears from the Code of Federal Regulations and no longer has legal effect. Repeal requires notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act, and DOE cannot evade that obligation by relabeling repeal as expiration. Direct final rulemaking is reserved for routine, noncontroversial actions where the agency reasonably expects no significant adverse comment. Eliminating regulations governing nuclear waste, uranium cleanup, worker protections, and nuclear accident compensation is plainly not such a case. The rule is also arbitrary and capricious. DOE offers no rule-specific justification for sunsetting any individual regulation and instead applies one generic rationale across rules with entirely different purposes and statutory foundations. A decision to place worker whistleblower protections, repository siting criteria, and cleanup funding on a one-year path to extinction cannot rest on a blanket statement that periodic review is good policy. Several of the covered regulations implement statutory duties imposed by Congress that DOE cannot nullify through automatic expiration. Parts 960 and 963 implement the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Part 766 governs congressionally mandated uranium enrichment cleanup obligations, including major legacy liabilities at Paducah and Portsmouth. Letting these regulations expire abandons obligations Congress wrote into law. The scope of this action, reaching cleanup, worker safety, victim compensation, and waste disposal at once, presents a question of major economic and political significance requiring clear congressional authorization, which Executive Order 14270 does not supply. The pattern of what DOE chose to protect confirms the problem. The rules governing classified information, the Human Reliability Program, physical security, and the armed protective force receive a five-year sunset date. The nuclear safety rules underpinning contractor indemnification under Price-Anderson—Parts 820, 830, and 835—are excluded entirely because, in DOE’s own words, sunsetting them could have a chilling effect on the agency’s ability to secure contractors. DOE therefore recognizes that imposing expiration dates changes behavior and deters the parties it seeks to protect. It extended that protection to contractor liability and security infrastructure while placing whistleblower protections under Part 708, the Domestic Uranium Program under Part 760, and the extraordinary nuclear occurrence definition under Part 840—which governs the definition used for public compensation following a nuclear accident—on a one-year clock. The communities and workers who carry the radioactive legacy of weapons production, uranium mining, and nuclear contamination are the ones whose protections DOE made the most disposable. For these reasons, DOE should withdraw this rule and, if it wishes to review any regulation, do so through individual notice-and-comment rulemaking supported by rule-specific justification and a genuine opportunity for public participation. Lynda Williams Nuclear Free Hawaii nuclearfreehawaii.org