Comment on FR Doc # 2026-12989, NRC-2025-1303-0001, from Steven Singleton

The fitness-for-duty modernization in this proposal is well done. Each change to Part 26, from expanding oral-fluid testing to reducing the random-testing rate for lower-risk employees, is tied to specific operating-experience data, in several cases decades of it, and the Commission is transparent even where it denies a petition (PRM-26-7), explaining its reasoning rather than simply declining. That is the standard the rest of the rule should be held to. The comment below focuses on the Part 73 physical-security changes, where the same rigor of support is not yet visible for three specific, consequential shifts. First, the new target-set framework in proposed Sec. 73.55(f) lets a licensee determine, through its own site-specific analysis, that no achievable target sets exist and become exempt from most of Sec. 73.55's physical protection requirements. The rule's general description of how these determinations are checked (Section IV.C(d)) draws a distinction between new applicants, whose proposed measures the NRC evaluates and approves in advance, and existing licensees, for whom the NRC would "verify the adequacy of the licensee's measures through inspection" after changes are made. If that after-the-fact standard applies to a licensee's Sec. 73.55(f) exemption determination itself, a facility could operate believing itself correctly exempt from physical protection against radiological sabotage for some period before the NRC's own review catches an error, if one exists. Requested adjustment: require NRC review and written concurrence before an existing licensee may rely on a Sec. 73.55(f) self-determined exemption, matching the prior-approval standard the rule already applies to new applicants for the same determination. Second, the rule removes the current minimum of ten armed responders, permits licensees to rely solely on offsite law enforcement or other offsite armed-response personnel (subject only to prior Commission approval), and separately reduces full-scale force-on-force exercises from annually to once every three years. Any one of these changes might be defensible alone; together, a facility could reduce on-site armed response, shift to external responders, and have that combined strategy validated in a full-scale exercise only once every three years. The rule supports its Part 26 testing-rate reduction with thirty-five years of operating-experience data. The force-on-force frequency reduction, which touches the same category of risk this entire rulemaking is meant to responsibly manage, does not yet carry a comparably specific justification in the sections available for review. Requested adjustment: publish an operating-experience-based justification for the reduced exercise frequency with the same rigor applied elsewhere in this rule, and publish the response-time or capability assumptions that underlie "prior Commission approval" for sole reliance on offsite response, so the standard is reviewable rather than case-by-case and unpublished. Third, a number of previously binding requirements, isolation-zone specifications, minimum illumination levels, specific search and access-control methods, move from enforceable rule text into non-binding guidance, described in the rule itself as "voluntary considerations." That is a reasonable modernization where a general performance objective can be verified as rigorously as a specific number, but it does narrow what the public and outside reviewers can point to as an enforceable floor, shifting more of the practical protection to the harder-to-audit "reasonable assurance" standard. I do not object to performance-based regulation as a direction; but I ask that the shift be paired with a clear account of how "reasonable assurance" will be checked with the same regularity the removed specifics used to guarantee automatically. None of this disputes the legitimacy of modernizing decades-old prescriptive rules, and the Part 26 changes in particular show the Commission can do this well. The physical-security section would benefit from the same evidentiary treatment before these specific changes are finalized, given what they protect against.