Eric Burlison Sounds Alarm On 'Stifling' Regulatory Process For Energy Production Innovations

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During a House Oversight Committee prior to the Congressional recess, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) questioned witnesses about regulatory processes for energy innovations.

Transcript

00:00Mr. Epstein, recently I toured a company called Radiant, met with the CEO Doug Bernauer,

00:10who is an amazing individual, who was challenged by Elon Musk to help to colonize Mars,

00:19and came to the conclusion the only way to provide electricity and get electricity to Mars was

00:25through micronuclear. I also met Isaiah Taylor with Valar Atomics, which is an amazing, very creative

00:35company that's using carbon sequestration in their process to combine it with the oxygen or hydrogen

00:46in order to create jet fuel, which is just mind-blowing. You get electricity, and the byproduct

00:52is jet fuel. With that being said, can you speak to how the regulatory process for these guys who

01:00are doing very creative, very innovative stuff might be stifling to that mindset?

01:06Yeah, I admire these guys for trying, because it's just, it's so, so difficult to do things. I mean,

01:13for all the reasons I mentioned, the licensing process, it can be difficult to test things,

01:18the whole linear no threshold in Alara, as low as reasonably achievable. So this, all these dogmas,

01:24as I said, can be changed, and it'll just radically open the frontier for innovation where

01:30companies like these can go very quickly from idea to action. Right now, there's just an enormous gap

01:35between idea to action. One other thing that needs to change, I think, is the cultural discussion of

01:40nuclear. We heard from Ranking Member Frost, and I think some others, that like Three Mile Island was the

01:45problem, but as Scott Perry pointed out, like Three Mile Island is not fundamentally a problem.

01:50Like, the fact that the worst nuclear accident we've had is something that killed nobody, that

01:56should be celebrating nuclear. So we need to stop demonizing nuclear like the Simpsons did. We need

02:00to recognize it's fundamentally safe. It's not safe primarily because of regulation. It's safe because

02:04the material cannot explode like combustion can. Thank you. One last question, Mr. Smith.

02:10When I speak to them, they refer to the 18-month period. Can you describe the dynamic of getting

02:17the permitting process done and why companies that are ready to go today are having to go through an

02:2418-month period? Which 18-month period? For review. So I think there's a lot of opportunities to reduce

02:31review times. One example is actually the mandatory hearings that Alex mentioned in his testimony as

02:36well. So those kinds of reviews don't involve input from the public, and they already cut times from

02:42six months to three months by moving from in-person oral hearings to written testimony and submissions.

02:49And there's a lot of opportunities to cut those down and see the kinds of things like Governor Cox wants

02:53to see in Utah of we can build something by July 4, 2026. We can have test reactors that we don't push

03:00companies to the Philippines or outside of the U.S. to test and experiment what used to be and started as an

03:06American technology. Thank you.

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