Comment on FR Doc # 2026-10729

Dear DOE Radiation Free Lakeland are a nuclear safety group in Cumbria, UK, campaigns include Lakes Against Nuclear Dump (https://lakesagainstnucleardump.com). We are writing to fully endorse the significant adverse comment by Lynda Williams of Nuclear Free Hawaii below: I am submitting this as a significant adverse comment and requesting 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 produces the same legal result as repealing it. Repeal requires notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act, and DOE cannot escape that obligation by relabeling repeal as expiration. The direct final rule mechanism is reserved for noncontroversial actions, and the elimination of nuclear waste, uranium cleanup, worker protection, and accident compensation rules is the opposite of noncontroversial. 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 mandatory statutory duties that Congress imposed and that DOE has no authority to dissolve by inaction. Parts 960 and 963 implement the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Part 766 funds congressionally mandated cleanup at Paducah, Portsmouth, and Oak Ridge. Letting these expire abandons obligations Congress wrote into law. The scope of this action, reaching cleanup, worker safety, victim compensation, and waste disposal at once, is a question of major economic and political significance that requires 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 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 understood that an expiration date deters the parties it wishes 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 triggers compensation for nuclear accident victims, on the one-year clock. The communities and workers who carry the radioactive legacy of weapons production and uranium mining are the ones whose protections were 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 with a rule-specific justification and a genuine opportunity for public participation. Lynda Williams Nuclear Free Hawai’i, nuclearfreehawaii.org