The Trump administration has overhauled a set of nuclear safety directives and shared them with the companies it is charged with regulating, without making the new rules available to the public, according to documents obtained exclusively by NPR.
The sweeping changes were made to accelerate development of a new generation of nuclear reactor designs. They occurred over the fall and winter at the Department of Energy, which is currently overseeing a program to build at least three new experimental commercial nuclear reactors by July 4 of this year.
The changes are to departmental orders, which dictate requirements for almost every aspect of the reactors' operations — including safety systems, environmental protections, site security and accident investigations.
NPR obtained copies of over a dozen of the new orders, none of which is publicly available. The orders slash hundreds of pages of requirements for security at the reactors. They also loosen protections for groundwater and the environment and eliminate at least one key safety role. The new orders cut back on requirements for keeping records, and they raise the amount of radiation a worker can be exposed to before an official accident investigation is triggered.
Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez on Thursday signed a law that will open the nation’s oil sector to privatization, reversing a tenet of the self-proclaimed socialist movement that has ruled the country for more than two decades.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani commended the protesters who took over the lobby of a Hilton hotel on Tuesday to demonstrate against ICE.
A pizzeria worker posing as an FBI agent and armed with a pie cutter is facing federal charges after he tried to bust Luigi Mangione out of jail, according to a criminal complaint obtained by USA TODAY.
Israeli forces carried out a number of raids and assaulted many Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, with at least 130 Palestinians temporarily detained since Tuesday night, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.
Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov on Wednesday announced a new leader for a nascent small air defence branch within the Air Force.
Spain's government announced Tuesday it will grant legal status to potentially hundreds of thousands of immigrants living and working in the country without authorization, the latest way the country has bucked a trend toward increasingly harsh immigration policies imposed in the United States and much of Europe.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent attempted to enter Ecuador’s consulate in Minneapolis, but was turned back by an employee, prompting an official complaint to the US embassy in Quito, the country’s foreign ministry said.
